The view from a leading recruitment agency like CPL is clearly current and realistic. “What employers are looking for today is roughly 50/50 between tech skills and a personality fit, including a range of soft skills,” according to Ida Renaud. “Pro-active, innovative, even creative — these are the kinds of attributes that employers are looking for because they have to work closely with non-tech people. Communications and people skills are clearly important in that context, as well as a good fit with the organisation’s culture and style.”
“But technology people tend to be very proud of their work, they take ownership of it and that helps them to become good leaders and managers. The days of the lonely developer or technician huddled away with a headset are simply gone. It’s not that brainpower and skills have gone away — maths and data analysis and all sorts of complexity are part of the modern enterprise. But that combination of specialist skills and teamwork is essential.”
Analytics growth
Data analytics of various kinds is big and getting bigger, Renaud says. “From marketing to the Internet of Things (IoT) to mobility we are just seeing masses of data being generated, which in turn has to be accessible and interpreted for the business. That generates demand for technical skills and in a sense all the strands are coming together in the smart business of the near future. We are involved in a targeted talent search project ourselves using social media — and the assistance of the Department of Foreign Affairs—to tap into the skills of the diaspora and, essentially, bring them home to contribute to Irish enterprise.”
A constant appetite to learn, adapt and keep abreast are the characteristics of successful IT professionals, she believes. “That may be a bit of a cliché but there is a generation that is completely tech-savvy and not bound by the past. That is why employers are more often creating roles with imaginative titles — cloud performance engineers, ethical hacking, guru, evangelist — that are attractive to a new generation that thinks differently. The key point is that we are seeing the growth of multiple jobs and disciplines and IT people are becoming more all-round technologists.”
Important concern
Security is a hugely important concern to all organisations in this digital age and employing experts to help ensure the protection of their own and their customers’ digital assets is high on the priority list. But the skills required to protect your cyber space are by no means all high-tech, security consultant Dr Jessica Barker believes. “The mantra is that security involves people, process and technology so it follows that our defences should draw on skills across those areas. I believe in blended teams, with expertise across the relevant IT fields but also in psychology and organisational processes. There is certainly also the need for good communications skills.”
In the past, cyber security focussed almost exclusively on the technology, she said. “In the last few years it has been great to see a widening of that to involve people with more diverse skills and experience on security teams. The industry has recognised the need to focus at least as much on the human side as on the IT. In fact, the range of skills that can be valuable is very wide and can certainly include quite old-fashioned elements like physical security, good access control procedures and so on. That often is precisely the kind of thing that can be easily overlooked by those that are more naturally focussed on the tech side.”
But Barker is happy to confirm that the principal threat vector is digital, because of the explosive growth in the data that we generate, store and deal with globally. “We talk about cybersecurity and professional experts in the field as if it were all one thing. But it is actually a hugely diverse field. Some IT skills have to be highly specialised and very deep, competitively so, while other jobs can be quite different. It is also a field in which things are moving incredibly fast, so the people involved need to have that desire to be constantly aware of developments, learning, constant curiosity and responding to challenges of problems and patterns. In many ways, I think it is based on a mind-set rather than specific skills or qualifications, most of which can be valuable but can also be learned on the job. The best people just get it.”
Mind-set
Almost by definition a large consultancy firm like Deloitte needs a wide range of business and technical skills itself and has to generally understand the competency needs of its clients. But Simon Murphy begins with that theme of mind-set: “The best people have a problem-solving mentality. Specific skills are important, and IT is changing so rapidly we and our staff have to respond. But a high proportion of the consulting services we provide are in problem-solving and that is a driver. In practical real business terms, that requires a range of soft skills.
“From potential new graduate hires to senior staff, that is what we look for. To help our clients our people need to be able to work well and easily with other people, to adapt to the different cultures of diverse client organisations and to communicate with them. That in turn involves presentation skills and literacy, the ability to write a competent report. So, when I’m doing an interview, those soft skills make up at least 50% of what I’m looking for. At more senior levels, that percentage goes up even higher, because at an advanced level the job is to be a bit of a catalyst for the client organisation.”
Changing the point of view, Murphy says Deloitte is seeing the same things developing in clients. “Think of today’s CIO as perhaps the exemplar of what we are talking about. We see that job as made up of four roles — the order will depend on the organisation and the current priorities. The CIO has to be a Catalyst for change and innovation using IT and also a primary Strategist for the organisation’s future development. In addition, the role is to be an Operator, in charge of what we usually call ‘keeping the lights on’, which is not to be dismissed as a lesser role. Finally, the CIO is the chief Technologist, with knowledge and judgment and experience.”
The top two roles are clearly the leadership ones, Murphy says, although supported by good teams and solid expertise. “To be good in those roles as catalyst and strategist you have to understand the business, deeply and thoroughly, and you have to have very good relationships with your stakeholders. In fact, IT is almost unique in the sense that the whole business is its customer base. There is also a sense in which that modern CIO role, or set of roles, is the high level epitome of what any modern IT professional should be.”
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