There are parallels to other shifts everywhere. What cOlDFuSiOn and zaleonardz says is true.
I read some of the responses and chatting to people, frankly, I am concerned that people are not seeing what is coming... technology has become interwoven amongst many jobs. My wife has been working in clinical research for 11 years at one company. In 11 years they haven't just automated certain things or 'cleaned up processes' or adopted new tech. The industry has gone from manual capture and queuing patients to patients wearing monitors, digitally capturing information, using more modern connected devices etc to generate massive pools of already semi-structured data without risk of transcription error. This happens at dozens of places in SA and can be rolled up on regional and global basis almost in real time. This means some doctors left at the unit that were not retrenched or subject to attrition strategy are literally working half-day. Same with nurses... Same with data capturers... etc. The IT layer supporting people, devices and infrastructure has shrunk DRAMATICALLY whilst job complexity has increased, again DRAMATICALLY.
Once the data is actually collected there is no longer a need for masses of space to store files (and worrying about loss, theft, damage etc) nor the need for storage or processing power on site. Companies that she is interviewing at take up literally a third of the space for a larger operation. Each study has a cloud-based analytics/cognitive computing engine as opposed to the SAS dev/statistician on site (split over many studies). They literally only have actual flesh-and-blood statisticians sitting somewhere in Belgium. Data scientists are the new critical link in the chain. The stuff they build directly influences reporting, decision making, regulatory and even applications for ethics etc. Consistency, accuracy, time to market - all critical in pharma and all things that are made worse when more people are involved in the chain.
This is all to illustrate that there is a massive blindspot and companies still think that everyone is finding it hard to go paperless or into the cloud or analytics or cognitive computing or the future is still far away or x, y, z. If you are in such a company, you should be terrified because adapting to a 'better job' down the line might be tough even if you get it. My wife is highly qualified and experienced in science as well as project management. They are actually speaking a different language at newer or 'more current' companies. It is as though her experience is null-and-void. I had to give her a crash course on the above before going for an interview based on the case study they sent. You are actually borderline unemployable if you've worked at a 'traditional' company (and guess what's happening to those?)... don't think even if your company is big or has too many legacy systems that it can't happen.
10 years ago, she would be smiling in a job that took minimal effort outside managing people with a large pool of people. Current reality is very different. You have to take a holistic view of the organisation. I've been blessed to have some of the best Finance people I've worked with in my career who understand this. However, the bottom lines of companies are shrinking and tech in many instances is only enabling them to survive. That 5% saving on OpEx moving to the cloud makes? It means your mate in marketing or finance or perhaps even sitting next to you still has a job as opposed to entering situations where the entire company has to shut down (or slowly dies).
Chatbots/AI call centres/Marketing automation platforms... we think that IT people are going to have jobs whilst the poor client services people will take the hit... When I speak at conferences I actually take the dev with me that has worked with us, liberty, MMI etc... there are 5 of them... That's the whole company. It is more powerful to see a real example of how SMEs can disrupt, can solve business needs and is a vivid reminder that nobody can be replaced these days whether you are technical or creative or back office or client facing... My team has gone from 28 down to 12 (we do more work now as well). My need is to automate a lot of what I used to employ 25% or 33% of a human being to do. They help me achieve this despite my lack of resource and for literally 10% of what that person would cost. IT folks with vision and talent need to be building that kind of side hustle in the analytics and sophisticated application space that actually takes the whole market and business' needs into consideration. I could not find this in-house in IT despite the 'on-paper' skill being there... Being a cert collector is one thing... when someone in your business comes to you with a problem like this, what do you do? Can you do it? I have a few similar stories as well.
Continuing briefly, we've discovered people treat the bot 'more kindly' than a flesh-and-blood human being. At Gartner I had a very brief floor session at the ITXpo and shared the deck I share with startups I work with... ended up busy speaking to people for the rest of the conference. It is amazing how many people (management and C-level) actually don't realise the mouse has already chewed off the one leg and has started on the other.
Want to be REALLY successful and move out of collecting certifications and being on the verge of redundancy on a continuous basis? Outside of your organisation, what are the challenges you've seen that can be fixed? Have certs helped the guys at IoT.nxt? Perhaps... How about Khula - another bunch of guys who saw a problem in the farming space... they won a dev contest we ran and have TRIPLED in size in the past 2 months.
Still sophisticated? How about a guy who never even set foot on a plane. Walking through joburg he sees a bunch of potholes and rubbish. He sees a street sweeper. He builds a low power, light-weight sensor pack with tx/rx (now with camera incidentally) that sends the GPS co-ordinates and alerts government so they can go do something about it. This is going to be even easier when NB IoT etc is enabled across the country... He is now able to sell thousands of these sensor packs to government, mines, reserves (and not just for brooms because the platform can be repurposed). He was covered internationally, featured at ITU, met the president... This is a dude with NOTHING... so it isn't even that hard or expensive... connectivity is everywhere. I've consumed a lot of MIT open courseware myself! The hardware: go to communica in midrand (or similar) and have fun. Back in my day, youngsters didn't even know where to go let alone have access to the kinds of sophistication on offer here at these prices. :biglol: You don't even need a CNC machine or lathe or 3D printer - you can design and rapidly prototype without big capex upfront as these services are everywhere...
You might not see the risk or think that things will be fine for the next 20 years, but if that was the case, every major ICT company in SA would not be part of the task force/think tank addressing the 60000+ jobs lost in the industry... Seems few see it happening, let alone coming... I hope people start thinking differently soon.
. So in the Business Intelligence/Analytics and Cyber Security spaces what certifications would any of you guys recommend to pursue? It's time to learn new tricks, but there's so much info out there it's hard to drill all this down to a clear and concise way forward.
