Potential Career Niches to Survive the Recession
I’ve recently read a number of articles on “how business technology helps in a downturn” and “technologies that can help generate revenue” and it got me thinking “these have to be great areas to explore especially if I’m in a shaky position right now”.
So, based on my internet explorations, here are some niches you should think about getting into to survive the next year, be it starting a new division where you work or promoting how your skill set fits these niches if you are looking for a new job or the next freelance gig.
1. Business Intelligence
While you may think that it is too late to figure out your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and executive dashboards to help make intelligent decisions on what to cut and what to keep, it may only take a few weeks if not days to get key business reports in place before you make a business decision that will cut your nose off to spite your face in 2009.
Don’t you want to be the one who shows the executive team the right decision to make based on facts versus the wrong based on emotion and hypothesis?
2. Open Source
Why keep expensive maintenance contracts on vendor supported applications when numerous options may exist for certain business applications in the open source world? While no license fee is paid, companies will have a need for people who know how to implement and support these systems especially since there will not be paid support moving forward. If anything this may be a way to cut cost, maintenance, and keep talented employees by having them learn how to implement and maintain other applications.
3. Application and Storage Virtualization
Sometimes going for open source solutions for highly complex systems isn’t possible. But many vendors are now delivering their applications “in the clouds†to help companies reduce the IT burden of maintaining these applications in-house while providing an inexpensive way to access business applications based on demand. Options to store data externally may be more realistic then applications themselves.
4. SOA
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a concept on how to design architectures via a set of discrete services that can be reused and rearranged to create new value add applications and facilitate agile business processes without having to rely on IT staff to make the changes. Due to the increasing IT costs to stay on top of continued business process changes due to IT taking too long to respond, lack of integration with other systems for more accurate, real time information, and just providing the ability for an end user to make a change than IT, tools and applications that either employ SOA principles or facilitate having a SOA environment will continue to rise.
5. Unified Communications
From missing leads due to not being connected to new forms of user interaction like Facebook, or reducing redundant communication channels, unified communications provide both to help optimize business processes and enhance communication with end users so that latency is reduced and device dependency removed.
6. User Experience
The user experience has changed drastically over the last 5 years. It’s not about doing it your business way anymore, it’s about doing it how the consumer wants it, and wherever the consumer is as there are tons of “edge†devices today like smart phones and richer mobile device clients. You need to know the value RIA (Rich Internet Applications) can provide and make it available to your user base before they leave your online service and move to another RIA.
And, don’t forget about tying your internet sites and mobile clients into social networking sites – it’s where users are beginning to lurk and link to everything they do.
Learning more about these technologies will help you to stay in demand, find ways to cut costs, and keep your client base at your own company.
Related posts:
Did you enjoy this post? subscribe now to get all of the posts Comments (0)
No comments yet.