Cloud career: Present for seller's market

IT professionals who are able to work across multiple it areas are now no doubt the hottest people in the market for the desperately demanding cloud skills.

David Grimes, chief technology officer at NaviSite, a management and cloud service provider based in Andover, Massachusetts, is looking for professionals to fill the company's grassroots and senior positions. But he is not looking for people who specialize in an isolated area of expertise such as application development, server management, network engineering, or data storage. Grimes wants to recruit people who have been trained in multiple it areas.

Grimes said: "If you confine your work to some traditional vertical markets, it will be difficult to adjust your career planning in cloud computing." ”

Francesco Paola, vice president of Cloud Marvell, a consulting firm, explains that emerging cloud concepts such as software definition networks (SDN) and allocation portals require IT professionals to have extensive experience with flexible, basic cloud networking infrastructures, Understand how a cloud-capable application can be properly set up to understand how server virtualization affects each link and how to ensure security throughout your work.

Paola said: "In cloud-based deployments, no technology can connect to two isolated areas of it, at least not in the past." In order to make the cloud investment more efficient, employees must be able to manage each layer of cloud computing in a cooperative way. ”

The exact names of these new posts and the responsibilities of these positions are not yet established. Such names as Cloud architects, cloud software engineers/developers, cloud system administrators, and so on, are actually just to make the cloud look more prominent.

For example, the term "development operations", which is used to describe two ancient it-isolated areas, is being given new meaning in the cloud to focus on it budgets. Other traditional positions, such as project managers, corporate systems analysts and network architects, are increasingly needed to carry out day-to-day work in the cloud.

Gemini North America, chief technology officer Joe Coyle, agrees with Grimes's view that IT staff, who have been trained across the field, have an advantage in the new cloud world. "I no longer have the opportunity to interview an application developer with application development skills," he said. I need to know how much they understand how applications are deployed to the basic cloud infrastructure, and how they will handle if basic IaaS needs to be adjusted. ”

"That is, in this market, what we want and what they can give are two different things," said John Reed, senior managing director of Robert Half Marvell, a global it headhunting company based in Menlo, Calif. ”

The market is in great demand for professionals who are proficient in cloud computing, software as well as services and virtualization, but in the current IT talent market, people with access to servers, software and network skills are the most sought-after, Reed said.

Reed advises senior IT executives looking for cloud computing talent to set their expectations to reality. "At this stage, you won't be able to find a cloud project manager who has worked five times to migrate," Mr Reed said. It is fortunate to have been able to find people who have worked more than one migration. ”

We interviewed 12 CIOs, headhunters and professional it trainers who felt that there was little time, interest and opportunity in the past year or two to receive interdisciplinary training or experienced IT professionals with on-the-job cloud experience.

Steve Caniano, vice president of cloud strategy and business development at the At&t Business Solutions division, is also in charge of the company's growing cloud services business and a support team of thousands of IT professionals. "There are not many people with cloud computing skills at the moment," he says. It will take at least five years for this talent supply to meet demand. ”

Grimes said: "At present is the seller's market." In the foreseeable future, we will have to pay extra for this kind of cross-domain cloud computing talent. He pointed out that at this stage, the best place to seek such talent is in the field of consultation.

According to salary statistics published by several agencies, the extra cost Grimes said would have to be quite generous.

Cloud skills have become one of the fastest growing needs, according to data gathered by Dice.com, the world's leading technology and engineering professionals, which grew 72% last year. More than 3,800 jobs are being recruited every day. However, the dice Web site has only grown by 4% in total over the last year.

Dice.com data also shows that US cloud computing professionals have a median income of $ $92,830 this year, while the median income level for technical personnel is $81,327 trillion.

According to Reed, a study by Robert Half Marvell shows that the average annual pay for cloud computing is growing at a rate of 8% to 10%, while it salaries are growing at an average rate of 3% to 4%. The employment environment will become more severe next year, according to the company's 2013 salary guide, which is due to be released on October 15.

The report says that as the number of qualified candidates is reduced and demand grows, there is more competition for IT professionals with mobile, large data, cloud computing and virtualization experience, and such people will receive multiple invitations and have more power of speech.

Dice.com Executive Director Alice Hill said: "Traditional IT job seekers should have some degree of interdisciplinary training in order to adapt themselves to the market." "This type of interdisciplinary training can be obtained through external training courses and accreditation programs, or through participation in the work cloud project, especially if the project is beyond its existing responsibilities," Hill said.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)