One of the challenges of a tech career is the necessity to stay up-to-date on technology advancements. A key part of your ability to solve business problems with technology is understanding how to use the latest advancements to create a solution. Therefore your value as an individual contributor or manager is partially driven by the amount of knowledge that you have cultivated during your life. Technology is a Moving Target Acquiring this knowledge isn’t easy.

In the modern workplace, data integration skills can help you supercharge your career. Regardless of what kind of job you have, it’s likely you will be working with some kind of software. It might be a cloud billing system, an appointment scheduling system, warehouse software, or even just email. Most software applications are driven by data inputs and outputs. If you have even basic competency with data integration, it can open up many opportunities for you to automate tasks and leverage data to solve business problems.

The rapid advancement of technology is both a threat and an opportunity for logistics workers. Robotics, autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence could reduce the number of available jobs in certain categories. For example, one report estimated that 294,000 US trucking jobs could be eliminated over the next 25 years as a result of autonomous vehicle technology. However, the growth of cloud technologies offers an opportunity for these workers to move beyond undifferentiated roles into knowledge work that is more aligned with their organization’s goals.

Surveys show that SaaS applications provide many benefits to end-users. Typical improvements offered by a modern SaaS platform include automatic synchronization of data among multiple devices, better collaboration with peers, reduced dependency on email, improved user interfaces, better search capabilities, and a better ability to customize the user interface . A logistics worker’s career success now depends on strong expertise with popular SaaS WMSs, TMSs, ERPs, and CRMs. Today organizations often make knowledge of their SaaS tool a specific job requirement when hiring.

The percentage of jobs in the US that are considered “technology jobs” has been continually increasing. The 2020 pandemic has put this transition on warp speed. Even though we have experienced record levels of unemployment, many tech workers are thriving in this economy. In some industries there has been a massive shift away from traditional business models to technology-driven services. For example, the entertainment industry has been forced to move away from in-person experiences to at-home streaming.

What the SaaS Trend Means for Tech Careers Software as a Service (SaaS) has become the dominant model for delivering business software. With SaaS, applications are hosted by a vendor and made accessible to end customers over the Internet on a subscription basis. The popularity of SaaS is making a substantial impact on the daily activities of IT workers. When software is hosted on internally managed PCs or servers, the IT department is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure that supports these systems.

Software Engineering can be a great career path. However some engineers eventually feel they have outgrown their technical engineering role and get the itch for a new challenge. Often the standard path is for programmers to be promoted into management roles. This can be sometimes be disastrous since many of the attributes a great manager are completely different than the attributes of a great engineer. This results in unhappy managers that manage poorly resulting in unhappy employees.

Severe job losses which have been triggered by the pandemic have disproportionately affected workers in the service and retail industries. These lower-skilled jobs have traditionally served as an economic fail-safe for non college-educated workers. However the lingering effects of COVID-19 could permanently damage these industries and eliminate a large portion of these jobs. Although all industries have been affected, there is strong evidence that the technology sector will recover quickly. To adapt to the new reality, many companies are looking to digitize their businesses.

Given the pandemic’s impact on the economy, there are many Americans rethinking their career situations. One sector that has not only survived but thrived in the current business climate is technology. So many employees are now working remotely, and this is pushing faster adoption of various tech tools. Even more importantly, employers are struggling to do more with less. This is driving even stronger interest in technologies like cloud, automation and AI recently.

Eric Dietrich, author of Developer Hegemony, recently wrote about the need for software engineers to specialize in particular problem domains. In other words, if you’re going to be a great software developer, you need deep domain expertise in a particular vertical. Without that intimate understanding of your stakeholders, it becomes extremely difficult to positively impact the organization you’re working for. Many software engineers attempt to differentiate themselves in terms of their expertise in specific pieces of technology like React, TypeScript, or Python.

A not-so-surprising New York Times piece recently reported on a program to convert blue collar workers to software engineers: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia. Now They Say It Was a Fraud.. A couple years ago everyone was jumping on this bandwagon. Here’s an NPR story that was quite up-beat about a program that taught unemployed coal miners how to “ship code” instead of “shipping coal”. It sounded great in theory and I’m sure it resulted in a few successful career transformations.