REAL Opportunities for IT Professionals

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Jeremy Schinzel

In today's IT landscape, is your collective knowledge, experience, and God given talents valuable enough - not to land your next traditional IT gig, but rather one that is freelance based within the emerging Mobile-Cloud Era?

In other words, if you lost your current job and were forced to make a living outside of another existing business hiring you and had to rely on one and one thing only: You...could you successfully make the transition in a short amount of time or does it feel too daunting of a task to even consider given the current employment model?

We've all heard it...the only constant in IT these days is change. If anyone reading this isn't familiar with the previous statement, then perhaps the opening question doesn't apply because you are fresh out college or have some how been shielded by your current and past employers. Disruption continues to be felt in every facet of business. Exhibit A: Blockbuster Video, who simply failed to recognize and counter the innovation by Netflix, who initially started out renting DVDs by mail and later created an even bigger competitive advantage with their ability to stream the same movies over a customer's high speed Internet connection. Clearly, Netflix didn't invent the Internet and nor did they offer their customers a high speed Internet connection ...but neither made their business strategy any less genius, as they were able to see the opportunity at each critical stage of their business plan, particularly as technology advanced.

Hint: Your answer to the previous questions should be based on any Mobile-Cloud Era opportunities that have been exposed by popular Digital Transformation Strategies.

REAL Opportunities

"R" for Re-invent.  Allow your passion for a particular area of IT to be expressed and thus more accurately compensated for within the Cloud Services marketplace - so that talent and experience aren't the primary reason for performing the work.

"E" for Entrepreneurship.  Allow freelancing to give you the freedom to develop a new kind of personal "brand" out of the re-invention of your IT career but also without getting bogged down in attempting to build the next Facebook.

"A" for Agility.  Be able to choose what work interests you the most, rather than sacrifice any ounce of satisfaction one could muster from having to work on legacy technology and projects that your manager simply feels is a higher priority.

"L" for Leverage.  So many great platforms out there to network and collaborate with like-minded individuals in an effort to more broadly satisfy the demands of companies large and small as they transition into the Mobile-Cloud Era.

Most IT professionals, myself included, are not very good at marketing themselves and very few individuals today have been able to identify the REAL opportunities that the new Cloud Services Economy can provide - IF one can embrace change. The consumption of cloud services is a very different experience for businesses of all sizes but the REAL revolution in Digital Transformation should be coming from the human element because as good as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning could be in the future, developing strategies around the WHY and HOW to leverage each technological advancement or new cloud service offering is where the future innovation will come from for most IT professionals - at least those that aren't already employed by a Cloud Service Provider or developing the next Software-Defined solution.

“The best way to predict the future, is to create it.” - Peter Drucker

Fundamentally changing the way in which people work in the future depends greatly on how successful we, as an IT community, are at creating and advancing a Cloud Services based Value Network to support the IT as a Service (ITaaS) model that will ultimately require IT organizations to internally embrace an agile Cloud Broker role OR leverage a Managed Cloud Services Provider. Doing so will allow IT professionals a clear path to determining how they answer my original question...and thus see where in the new Cloud Services Economy they wish to monetize their respective futures ("Uber Model for IT Professionals" if you will). I know I'm personally waiting ...but unfortunately patience isn't my strongest attribute and I'm looking for ways to speed things along and perhaps you are too.