10/9/2002 -- The following is based on an e-mail I sent to my staff this week. While many of them are doing a great job at keeping themselves current with the latest technologies, there are too many for whom I feel I am more interested in their career than they are. Many CertCities.com readers will similarly already be actively managing their skills growth, but this column may be of benefit for those still employed in IT who don't now feel the same need to keep themselves up to date. This discusses Windows NT skills, but many of the same arguments could be made about COBOL programmers, for example.

Today is the first week of October. That means we now have only 12 weeks left this year. Many of you have talked about wanting to improve yourselves technically and complete a certification, yet from my view less than a handful of you seem serious enough about this to actually achieve anything in 2002.

I admit that I am an extreme case and am always driven to continually learn more, but I still find myself alarmed at how complacent and comfortable many of you seem to be in your career in IT. It's as if you would be happy just toiling away with NT 4.0 for the rest of your working life, even if that was another 20, 30 or 40 years away. But NT 4.0 is now six years old, and one could make a good argument that this version was merely another of the incremental upgrades to NT since the original release in 1993. That makes this technology essentially nine years old! Many of you were not even working in IT back in 1993.

Even the NT follow-on product, Win2K, is almost three years old, yet the majority of you don't have extensive skills with it. In an era where companies have been cutting education dollars we have done very well to get everyone attending Win2K education, yet I acknowledge that these classes alone can never be enough. You will always need to supplement classroom education with self-study in your own time. Completing a certification program then after attending classes is not only useful to readily demonstrate your skills, but also to retain and build on the learning from those courses.

I've alluded to forthcoming technology changes, and I'm sure that you all know that Windows .NET Server is destined for release early in 2003. But if we look at the bigger stage, there's so much more. The R&D now underway by some of the main software vendors will lead to systems that will require much less staff to actually build and manage them. Those staff still required will be those highly skilled people who configure and monitor the health of these essentially self-managing systems.

From a business viewpoint, companies in around the world are very interested in the outsourcing opportunities offered from countries such as India. In the past, this has been primarily in the area of application development, but with the rapidly growing communications capabilities available worldwide, this has increasingly led to this being used for systems management outsourcing as well. As I see it, there is no way that we can compete on price alone, so one option available is to concentrate on the more higher-level value-added services. When building and managing servers becomes a commodity, then we are going to need specialized skills and capabilities to stay ahead of the game. Otherwise, we will likely be forced into a change of career outside IT. (I'm not here to debate the merits of globalization, but I simply want to acknowledge it and outline how we might adjust to it).

Let's also look at the positive side of the future. I think most industry commentators are of the view that IT activity will start to pick up from the current levels within six to 12 months. This will mean that we will need people to take a lead role in important and exciting projects that implement these newer hot technologies. These exciting opportunities will likely present themselves to those who are most qualified for them -- to the high performers with demonstrated higher levels of skill.

In this day and age, we will never have lifetime employment, but we can work hard to ensure that we have lifetime employability. I can assist you here in your career development, but you owe it to yourself to OWN your career. Many of the changes I have talked about here are not going happen overnight -- or perhaps not even next year -- but who can say where things will be in five years time or longer? All of the above is just my personal view, and is intended only to get you actively thinking about your future. Just what are you waiting for?

Questions? Comments? Post your thoughts below!