It never hurts to strategize about your long-term career. Where do you want to be in five or ten years? Do you want to become a manager, or drill down into your skillset as a specialist? What if you want to leap to a different role?
When doing this kind of analysis, it’s always helpful to look at which jobs may see the most growth over the next decade. Fortunately, CompTIA has conducted exactly that kind of analysis with the 2023 edition of its State of the Tech Workforce report. As you can see from this breakdown, data-related jobs such as data scientist and data analyst may grow the most during that period, followed by cybersecurity analysts and engineers, software developers and engineers, and web and UI/UX designers:
It’s always a bit risky to predict decade-long trends, given the amount that can potentially change in a relatively short time. For example, nobody in 2005 would have predicted that an Apple-manufactured phone would create a burgeoning market for mobile apps and services by 2009. In a similar vein, we have no idea how A.I.-powered chatbots such as ChatGPT could change the market for software developers and engineers by the end of the decade.
With that being said, however, it’s pretty safe to say that organizations everywhere will perpetually need tech professionals who can analyze data, secure the tech stack against internal and external threat, build software, and make all user-facing products look good.
If you’re interested in becoming a data scientist, you’ll need to learn a mix of technical and “soft” skills, in addition to staying aware of how cutting-edge technologies such as machine learning may impact how you analyze data and deliver insights to your employer. If you want to become a data analyst who focuses on more tactical, day-to-day data analysis, you’ll likely need to master a selection of the following skills:
- Data Analysis
- SQL
- Python
- Tableau
- Microsoft Power BI
- Data Science
- Data Visualization
- Business Intelligence
- Data Warehousing
- Extraction Transformation and Loading (ETL)
It’s a similar situation with cybersecurity jobs, where you need to constantly stay aware of an ever-changing threat landscape. The cybersecurity environment evolves so quickly, in fact, that we see new types of jobs constantly emerging, such as the virtual CISO (vCISO), who’s often hired by small- to midsize companies as an alternative to a full-time CISO.
Whatever your choice of roles, committing yourself to continual learning is a great way to future-proof your career. Building a community around yourself so you can stay aware of market trends is also a necessity.
