Current employment opportunities in the IT industry

Technology has changed how employment industry focuses on skills required to undertake daily business activities. In order to make sure organization gets relevant employees suitable to undertake their activities, employers need to be sure there is skills match with advertised employment opportunity (Shivoro, Shalyefu & Kadhila 2018, p. 222). Analysis of current employment opportunities in the market would be main focus of this article in order to ascertain skills in demand by employers in Information Technology industry. Graduate opportunities would be analyzed in order to determine which skills fresh graduates should possess in order to be competitive in the market. This analysis would be very useful to graduates who wants to align themselves with industrial requirements when looking for jobs. The nature in skills and competency requirements by employers have been changing as firms try to structure their business operations. In order to remain relevant in the industry, organizations have been adopting new operational strategy such as technology adoption. Besides technological adoption, ability to secure business competitive advantage in the market would be analyzed in a bid to keep privacy of the business (Elmedni & Lyons 2015, p. 42). Therefore, employment opportunities for fresh graduate, required skills by employers and competencies to sustain business competitiveness would be at the center of the discussion.

In the technology sector, there are so many graduate opportunities which require diverse skills and competencies in order to secure employment. Some of the employment opportunities in technology industry are; software development, Technical customer support in various organizations, website developer, graphic designer, code validation and testing, Network setup and administration, front end and back end developer as well as system maintenance (Blickley et al. 2013, p. 26). In order to secure any job opportunity in this sector, employers are looking for skills such as; software development in core java, mobile development, skills and ability to work on SOAPs and RESTFUL applications. On the same note, skills in code debugging and validation is required in order to be able to support customers in various market sector. Employers expect graduates to demonstrate these required skills during selection process by setting some practical interview questions (Cain et al. 2012, p. 81-82). These questions can either be practical on code development environment, online code interpretation or theoretical on papers as the aim is to test for software development skills. Similarly, employers are testing these skills by requesting a presentation of any software developed in their technology of choice such as java, C# and PHP.

Once of the attractive advertised position is on Technical customer support. The responsibilities that suitable candidate would perform are; hardware and software troubleshooting in cases of issues, supporting customers on inabilities to understand minor software functionalities, network troubleshooting and maintenance as well as data analysis. The ideal candidate to fill the position should possess the following skills; data analysis, hardware and software troubleshooting skills, in-depth understanding of network and maintenance as well as database development and maintenance. This position was quite attractive to me by virtue of the fact that, it does not have so much commitment compared to software development. There are no technical skills required which might be challenging because it is just customer support which require proper communication skills and relationship management (Farkas & Nagy 2008, p. 48).

Required skills for IT industry employment

The nature of the market has been changing and it will continue to change as time advances, especially ten years to come. It has been observed that as business environment changes, business requirement changes and skills requirement in the market cannot be an exception. In future, Technology employment market would be focusing on real practical skills rather than just understanding of the concepts (Rayner & Papakonstantinou 2015, p. 109). Computer and information security has become a major challenge due to technological growth and its misuse by various experts. In order to match graduate skills with market required in the next 10-15 years, graduate would be required to equip themselves with practical skills from both market and class work. Since it is quite difficult to get all these consolidated skills, graduates would be expected to take necessary personal measures. These measures would involve looking for practical skills from experienced experts through volunteer and placements programs.

From the research, it can be observed that practical skills in the technology industry are quite demanding because they are difficult to get (Zaharim et al. 2010, p. 925). To meet the market demand, organizations are expected to absorb its prospective employees’ through graduate trainee programs (Pan & Lee 2011, p. 96). This helps organizations to train and absorb competent graduates as they transition from education based programs to market. Through graduate placement programs and setting up practical environment for both testing and training, organization would be able to develop graduates to resourceful workforce in a short period of time. Due to technological advancement and challenges that are associated with innovation, software development and information system security would be the areas of interest. To be able to feature in the market substantively, graduates would be required to possess practical skills developing code resilient to injections as well as network protection and data encryption.

Conclusion

It would be worth to advocate the nature of research done in this case has been of great importance as it has highlighted some of key areas that graduates should focus on. It has influenced my decision because it has unearthed very important issues that need to be considered in the next 10 years’ time. This understanding should be considered by all experts in the technology industry as they present a reality of industry in some years’ time. In this regard, failure to reconsider such findings as one of the important scenarios to boost academic and technical skills would render some experts unsuitable in the market. Being aware of such radical changes in the market, it would be possible to set career development goals to acquire relevant skills and experience. Therefore, getting relevant academic certifications and refresher courses would be of great importance.   

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