The Future of IT Careers: the Skills and Certifications You Need

Your IT career matters. But IT careers are evolving and it’s therefore important that you know the key skills and certifications you need to maintain and, ideally, grow your career (or even to simply stay “future relevant” in a changing IT and business landscape). There’s much to consider, but don’t worry, I’m here to help.

However, it’s challenging to write about the skills and certifications you and other IT professionals will need in the future without recognizing the wide variety of IT roles within an IT organization. Not only are we all different as individuals, but the work we undertake in our different IT roles requires different skills and certifications.

However, we can talk about the changing IT and business landscape and how it affects the IT organization and its roles in general. So please keep reading this blog to learn more about the skills and certifications you might need to advance your IT career in the future.

Here @Joe_the_IT_Guy looks at the skills and certifications you might need to advance your IT career in the future. #ITSupport #ITSM #ServiceDesk Share on X

The key IT and business trends shaping your future IT career

Many technical changes affect both the roles you’ll undertake and potentially how you’ll undertake them. For example, it’s hard these days to miss the growth in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies, with these affecting both the IT infrastructure and the ways of working employed to manage it and its associated services. However, other IT-related drivers exist, such as the shift toward multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures, the increased demand for IT security expertise, the continued growth of DevOps and Agile practices, and edge computing.

The changing business landscape will also impact your future IT career and the required skills and certifications, where technology is more important to business operations and outcomes than ever. Your business peers will likely expect more than IT “keeping the lights on.” Instead, looking to the IT organization to provide innovations that deliver competitive advantage across the business. This second dimension of drivers demands that IT professionals are far more in tune with and responsive to business needs than ever before.

The combination of AI and automation, in particular, and the increased business expectations related to business awareness mean that – in many cases – some IT roles will become less specialist and more generalist. Blending a cross-IT-discipline understanding with better business knowledge. Of course, some roles will still need to be deep technical specialists, but seeing the proverbial “bigger picture” of how technology is helping to achieve business goals will benefit you and other people in IT roles that don’t require a deep technical specialism. This role differentiation is shown in the table below:

IT Specialist vs. IT Generalist

IT Specialist	IT Generalist
An IT professional with deep expertise in a specific domain (e.g., cybersecurity or networking).	An IT professional with broad knowledge across multiple IT domains.
Highly specialized, with deep technical knowledge in one or a few areas.	Broad knowledge in various IT fields, but not deep in any one area.
Focuses on niche areas such as cloud architecture, AI, or cybersecurity.	Handles multiple IT functions such as helpdesk support or infrastructure management.
Undertakes deep technical analysis and troubleshooting within a specific field.	Undertakes general troubleshooting, often escalating complex issues to specialists.
Holds advanced technical certifications and focuses expertise development in a single field.	Aims for more managerial or cross-functional IT leadership opportunities.
Often works in teams of other specialists within a specific IT domain.	Works across multiple IT functions, often interacting with various departments.

The future will focus on specialist roles and require a smaller subset of skills (albeit with a deeper level of understanding and capability) and relevant certifications, says @Joe_the_IT_Guy #ITSM #ServiceDesk Share on X

A specialist IT role example

For ease, most of this blog focuses on IT roles without a deep technical specialism. Because the future needs of specialist roles will be very focused and require a smaller subset of skills (albeit with a deeper level of understanding and capability) and relevant certifications. For example, an IT security specialist will likely need detailed knowledge in an IT security area such as:

• Network security
• Cloud security
• Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Threat intelligence and incident response.

However, whatever the IT security role, there are relevant certifications that increase in complexity and value as you progress through a career in the domain or transfer to other IT security domains:

• Entry-level certifications such as CompTIA Security+ will provide cybersecurity principles, threat detection, and risk management knowledge.
• Mid-level certifications such as Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) will cover security architecture, risk management, and cryptography.
• Advanced certifications such as AWS Certified Security – Specialty will validate expertise (in this case, security solutions for the AWS Cloud).

These specialist certifications will not only help demonstrate your suitability for your current and future specialist roles but also make you more marketable to other organizations. But what about if you’re not in a specialist IT role (or planning to enter one)?

Non-specialist IT role future needs

Notwithstanding that the line between specialist and non-specialist IT roles can be fuzzy – for example, you might move between different IT service management (ITSM) roles with a good knowledge of ITIL (and a related certification) but never consider yourself a “role-based specialist” (but perhaps an ITSM specialist).

Instead of domain-specific skills and certifications, your future career ambitions will be best met by having broader knowledge and skills. This doesn’t mean that certifications aren’t important, though. These will help with understanding and provide a differentiator when seeking to progress (career-wise), whether internally or externally. These are returned to later.

The required skills for non-specialist IT roles can be split between soft and technical skills.

Instead of domain-specific skills and certifications, your future career ambitions will be best met by having broader knowledge and skills, says @Joe_the_IT_Guy #ITSM #ServiceDesk Share on X

Soft skill requirements

Soft skills are what employees need to be good at their jobs. These skills aren’t limited to IT roles and include:

• Interpersonal skills, including communication, persuasion, and negotiation skills
• Problem-solving skills, identifying improvements and being innovative when needed
• Team-working and collaboration skills across seniority levels and business functions
• People management and leadership skills, even if there’s currently no staff responsibility
• Adaptability, including from a personal learning perspective
• Business acumen and strategic thinking – from knowing why businesses exist to how other business functions work and the roles they play.
• Company knowledge – from business operations through products to customer and other third-party knowledge.

Ultimately, these skills make you a better option when considered alongside others for career progression (except perhaps for specialist IT roles). They show you’re a more rounded individual who understands where IT fits within the bigger business picture and has the skills to better deal with the changing business and IT landscapes as the future unfolds.

Technical skill requirements

Given the increased complexity of corporate IT infrastructures and the increasing use of AI to undertake IT management tasks, your future IT career growth (outside of specialist roles) is best fueled by roles that require “knowing a little about a lot, rather than a lot about a little.” These are often called T-shaped roles, where the letter T’s vertical bar represents depth in a single field, and its horizontal bar represents the ability to collaborate across disciplines. So, for example, you might have skills, knowledge, and expertise in ITSM but also a broader spectrum of knowledge and skills related to other technical areas such as:

• AI – for example, understanding the basics of, and IT/business use cases for, Generative AI (GenAI), Agentic AI, AIOps, and AI-powered analytics.
• Cloud – for example, understanding multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments (such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud) and the requirements for managing serverless computing, edge computing, and cloud-native architectures.
• Cybersecurity and data privacy – for example, understanding security, compliance, and risk management needs across different technologies and the use cases for multi-factor authentication (MFA), endpoint detection, and AI-driven security.
• Data analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) – for example, understanding how to leverage big data, AI-driven analytics (including predictive analytics), and monitoring tools for IT decision-making.
• DevOps and automation – for example, understanding Infrastructure as Code (IaC), using CI/CD pipelines, and managing containerized applications.

Get in tune with AI’s impact on IT roles now

AI can positively influence your IT career development, offering personal capability enhancement opportunities and new development channels. However, it’s important to understand how AI will affect the IT recruitment landscape, with winners and losers across existing and new roles.

'It’s important to understand how AI will affect the IT recruitment landscape, with winners and losers across existing and new roles.' - @Joe_the_IT_Guy #ITSM #ServiceDesk Share on X

For example, there will be potentially replaced existing IT roles (to avoid). These roles include basic IT support, manual system monitoring, routine cybersecurity analysis, and infrastructure management where AI can undertake the tasks that previously required human attention and expertise. These roles will disappear.

On the upside, though, AI will also create new roles that could become part of your IT career plan (to meet the high demand for AI specialists). Examples of such new roles include AI governance specialists, AI ethics officers, prompt engineers, AI-focused security analysts, and automation architects.

Let’s not forget about gaining relevant IT certifications

Some of the above technical skills might have been picked up through your day-to-day work. In contrast, others might result from career-focused learning and certification acquisition. Gaining such certifications, especially to help fill your knowledge gaps, will benefit your future career development. For example, if you need to know more about the opportunities and management needs of the cloud, the Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate, AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty, or Google Professional Cloud Architect certifications might help.

Be careful, though. It’s important to do your research so that any new certification is valuable to you and your organization (or perhaps your next employer), and it doesn’t dive so deep that it takes you more work than is needed to become a balanced T-shaped employee.

What would you add to my thinking about the future of IT careers? Please let me know in the comments.