I was a guest on the February 22, 2022 episode of the So You Wanna Be In IT podcast.
Certifications
I chatted with hosts Pat & Dean about how my career got started. I’ve been around IT since the 90s, so my start was with Novell certification that became Microsoft certification that became Cisco certification. We talk about certs and the job opportunities I took advantage of driven by those certs.
Can You Have A Successful IT Career Without A Degree?
Along the way, we discussed whether or not someone can have a successful IT career without a college degree. Put another way, are IT certifications good enough? I think that yes, you can have a successful IT career without a degree, but that the question, “College degree. Yes or no?” deserves more analysis than a simple yes or no answer offers. Like anything, choosing not to attend university has tradeoffs. We discuss this at some length in the podcast.
What IT Roles Are In Demand In 2022?
The degree vs. certifications part of the discussion transitioned into my takes on IT careers in 2022–especially related to infrastructure. 2022 is an interesting time to be in IT. There are not nearly enough technologists available to fill roles, so there are opportunities for anyone who wants to educate themselves about…
- Cybersecurity. The need here is endless and ever-changing.
- The major public clouds (AWS, Azure, and GCP). Don’t think just IaaS, but also PaaS and SaaS.
- DevOps. Working with infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is a rapidly iterating field, with tools such as Terraform and GitHub or GitLab being adopted as industry standards. Maybe “standards” is too strong of a word, but you could think of them as givens–foregone conclusions.
Of course, there’s still room for specialists in IT disciplines such as networking, because the modern IT stack is really an evolution of what we were doing 10+ years ago. IT professionals that know their fundamentals will be positioned to succeed with the modern stack, since the modern stack is largely an abstraction of fundamental constructs like TCP/IP.
Listen For More Details
Give the podcast episode a listen for more details and nuance. If you’re working on your long-term IT career plan, I think you’ll find some data points that might make their way onto your roadmap.