Skills for Career Success in IT

IT professionals constantly acquire and enhance technical skills to achieve career success in information technology. How much you worth and how much you make are dependent on the value of your skills in the industry. One of proven strategies for IT career success is to develop top level skills.

IT industry is huge and skills are many. Generally speaking, IT skills may be developed in the following areas:

• Programming skills
• Database skills
• System and network skills
• Architecture Design skills
• Integration and COTS skills

Programming Skills

Programming skills are essential to IT career success. Many of us stated IT career from programming jobs. Programming skills are about coding computer programs using a computer language. Some of widely used computer languages are Java, C/C++, Visual Basic (VB), C#, and Pascal (Delphi). Newer languages like Ruby and Python are getting hotter nowadays.

Database Skills

Database skills are so important. No mater what’s your focus in IT career, you got to have some database skills in order to stand tall in IT industry. Database skills include data modeling, database design, database analysis, data warehousing, and database administration. Your database skills should be built on the leading database technologies – Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, and Sybase.

System and Network Skills

System and network skills are about designing, installing, configuring, and managing operating systems in a networking environment. The network configurations could be LAN (local area network), WAN (wide area network), or wireless. The most common operating systems are UNIX, Windows, and Linux. System and network security is a hot sub-area worth your investment of time and effort.

Architecture Design Skills

Software system architecture designs are high level skills in IT career. While programming jobs are moving to offshore, system architecture design professionals will stay in America. To make your IT career secure, you should acquire more skills in system architecture design. Currently most software system architectures are designed on two leading platforms, – J2EE and .NET.

Integration and COTS skills

Integration and COTS skills are specialized and very valuable. These skills are about mastering one of COTS (commercial off the shelf) software packages that could be ERP, CRM, PLM, or enterprise asset management system. Systems from different vendors or running on different platforms are often needed to work together, that’s where system integration skills apply.