QuickStart Intelligence: IT and Job Health
Posted on Thu, Feb 16, 2012
As a QuickStart Intelligence Senior Principal Instructor, I spend most of my time in direct contact with a range of struggling yet extremely talented people who are asking the same questions these days. “How can I keep competitive and get more done with fewer resources?” To be blunt, the question today sounds more like “How can I maintain my edge, in order to keep my IT job?” This question takes different forms when asked by IT workers, managers and CIOs, but it resolves to essentially the same question. I’ve notice that, over the past ten years, the waves of new technologies and innovations are shorter-lived and more challenging to “ride”.
This blog entry attempts to help you, well, to keep your eyes on the prize. While waiting for a flight to an overseas IT assignment, part of an IT academy taking three dozen participants through six months of intensive training, I’m going to offer three pieces of advice based upon some observations, which have taken shape over the last three decades in IT careers. I’ve watched Microsoft ride the industry waves quite successfully, first with interoperability, then with security, and now with virtualization, with continuing development of IT process automation at each stage.
Number one, invest in continuing education, continuously. This may sound like a no-brainer. Yet many participants in IT training have not actively participated in skills training over the past three years or more. However you do it, and I hope that QuickStart can help in some way, employers and employees share the duty to keep IT skills current. An IT staff with outdated Windows NT skills is similar to trying to make furniture with dull tools and insufficient lighting—the results with put you and your company behind and you will lose out in today’s strained economy. At QuickStart, we are continuously working with you to keep your skills sharp and well-honed. For every week-long class that I deliver at QuickStart, I must give out references to about five times that many hours of free training links, hands-on-labs and continuing education that you can and must slipstream into your IT career. Stay active, stay mobile, look beyond your daily IT routines.
Number two is a wide target. Be vigilant that your job, and your employees’ jobs, are the subjects of automation and not the objects of automation. Have you noticed that the simple application of IT skills to solve problems is simply not enough to stay employed these days? IT people need to be actively modeling automated solutions to the tasks that they and their colleagues or employees have been repeating, sometimes a bit mindlessly. While we infuse these techniques into most of our QuickStart IT courses, there are a few central automation technologies that you cannot afford to ignore. Windows Powershell is one. Windows PowerShell is not just some new scripting language: It is the platform on which Microsoft software is being built, which behooves you to be in the driver’s seat. Many people come to a PowerShell class when they realize that the applications they support, such as “little” ones like Microsoft Exchange 2010, are all becoming more and more based upon a Powershell platform. Powershell is not text, but an exposure of Windows objects that permits automation and creative control by IT people, not necessarily software developers. Do not think that PowerShell is for developers. It is for IT infrastructure job role-holders. There are many more automation tools besides Powershell, which we will visit in these columns, but for now, learn PowerShell before it becomes and emergency! PowerShell powers all of the System Center family of products, which is the umbrella term and brand for Microsoft Management products. If you can master and use one or more System Center products, you have the leverage of five to ten IT employees of a decade ago. Our QuickStart offerings are growing in the System Center arena, with the current most popular courses being System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3 and System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. Look to courses in Microsoft’s new Help Desk/Customer Service/Ticketing system, System Center Service Manager 2010 SP1. System Center Orchestrator 2012 will wrap around almost all of the server technologies, as well as non-Microsoft large data center applications. Look for our course when it’s ready. Give yourself experience with these tools and you will manage the world!
Number three, integrate and align IT services to your business outcomes. IT cannot survive well if IT geeks try to drive your business model for IT-related reasons. The industry leader of IT Service Management best practices is ITIL, with Microsoft’s current implementation, MOF 4.0 taking on a very pragmatic and operational point of view. When you practice what you learn in QuickStart’s Microsoft Operations Framework 4.0 course, you assure the entire business is helped and driven forward with Information Technology, not held back or worse, weakened by misdirected IT projects. To survive, you AND IT must both become more dynamic and better aligned with business processes. We don’t want to hold our business users hostage, but rather to build systems, applications and process models that promise success to whatever business or vertical market that we may be working in.
So for now, do good work, stay alert, keep your “IT eyes” focused on these issues and keep in touch with us at QuickStart.
What do you think?
Thanks!
Mark Wheatley, Systems Engineer, QuickStart Intelligence