As anyone who works in Information Technology knows, change is a constant in this industry. When it comes to new understanding and applying new products and technologies, it takes a concerted effort to keep up.
This year I had the opportunity to further my professional development in several ways. At the DevNet Zone hackathon at Cisco Live, my teammates and I saw firsthand how to use Cisco Shipped, the company’s DevOps platform. A few weeks ago at AWS re:invent, our team learned how to pair Amazon Web Services components with a Natural Language Query interface and Geo heat maps to improve data visualization. I also learned how to code this year – something that the evolving nature of my job is making a necessity.
There’s another aspect to the ever-evolving nature of IT that I’ve been thinking about lately – the people component. No matter who you are or what you do, we all must learn to adapt to the cultural changes that permeate our industry. And to do that, we must learn from each other.
I tackle this topic in my latest article for Network Computing, “IT Jobs and Harnessing the Power of Change.” It’s a quick read and a good time to think about these things as we reflect on the past year and look forward to new challenges in 2017. Let me know what you think.
Michael Edwards is a Principal Architect in Professional Services at GTRI.
