The year 2020 will be remembered as the year work changed dramatically. The global pandemic influenced when we worked, where we worked, how we worked. It even made us question why we worked. Some of the employment trends for IT that were forced on us are here to stay because companies and employees found the new ways worked better in this new environment.
According to a report by research firm Gartner, some employment trends we’ll see in 2021 will continue for years, including:
Hiring Contingent Workers
Companies continued and extended the use of contingent or temporary workers to enhance workforce flexibility. Companies realized this past year that change – big change – could come without notice. To remain agile, they turned to companies like CSI to find qualified talent creatively and quickly. Employing a flexible and nimble workforce will help companies cope with new developments more quickly.
Investing in Wellness
Companies made a larger investment in employee wellness and satisfaction. Employers saw first hand how health issues affected a worker’s ability to function. Mental health issues arose when people were isolated from families and forced to curtail normal activities for weeks or months at a time. Smart companies are paying much more attention to how employees feel in addition to how they perform.
Getting More Resilient
Companies focused less on individual roles and more on an employee’s skills. They explored how to create more hybridized roles. Gartner recommends that companies shift their thinking from “designing for efficiency to designing for resilience.” Encourage workers to develop new skills that might be unrelated to their next role but will help the team thrive. Building a deeper bench through redundancy and overlap in skills will allow the company to re-channel workflow if a region, office, or team becomes impacted by the pandemic.
Working From Home
And of course, the big trend of 2020 was the move to remote work. That put technology and IT support at the heart of the operation. (From the report): Gartner analysis shows that 16% of employers are using technologies more frequently to monitor their employees through methods such as virtual clocking in and out, tracking work computer usage, and monitoring employee emails or internal communications/chat. While some companies track productivity, others monitor employee engagement and well-being to better understand employee experience.
Sixty-nine percent of boards of directors say that the effects of the pandemic crisis and the economic crisis are accelerating digital business initiatives, according to the Gartner Board of Directors Survey, conducted in May and June 2020. Traditional in-person customer interactions moved online. Companies who could not make the transition fast enough lost market share and customer confidence.
Based on these trends, the hottest jobs for 2021 in Information Technology include:
- Big data engineer
- Information systems security manager
- Artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) specialists
- Business intelligence analysts
- Cloud architects
- Cybersecurity and data privacy experts
- Data analytics and reporting professionals
The hottest skills for IT professionals include Agile and Scrum, Angular, ASP.NET, C#, cloud computing (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes and Helm), Golang, ITIL, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, Linux, PHP, Python, ReactJS and React Native, Ruby on Rails, and SQL.
Information Technology is going to be critical to every industry as companies adjust to the new norm. In conclusion, opportunities are endless for IT professionals in the year 2021.
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