How Transitioning IT Will Change Hiring Practices
Take a look at a few of the findings from the EDUCAUSE Center For Analysis and Research’s report on IT delivery in higher education.
- Nearly half of institutions have outsourced at least one non-cloud service.
- More than 80% of institutions have moved at least one service to the cloud.
- About one-third of institutions share services.
This shouldn’t come as any surprise to those who have been paying attention to the revolution going on in IT. Simply put, the way IT conducts business is changing. In fact, the numbers above have likely increased since they were published, and that trend is set to continue into the future.
Higher education institutions are realizing the potential of the cloud for less expensive services and less physical space taken up for those services. We’ve talked about this shift before—very soon there will be a stronger concentration on managing the vendors, services, and outsourced materials than there will be on managing infrastructure and technical resources.
So the distribution of IT is clearly changing, and that means that there are going to be changes in the types of skills that IT departments around the country will require. This doesn’t mean that technical skills will suddenly become obsolete, but we most likely will see a shift in the skills that make a successful IT employee.
Communication Skills
Soft skills like communication are already important, but as IT begins working less with hardware and more with vendors and contracts, these soft skills are going to become even more crucial.
Legal Proficiency
More contracts and vendors, and all the new regulatory and security requirements are going to drive a need for CIOs to have legal experts on hand.
Service Management Knowledge
Knowledge of service management frameworks and tools will be crucial to making service delivery and management more efficient.
Service Management Specialists
As this new focus on service management continues to increase, we’ll be seeing positions popping up for service management specialists and vendor management.
As you can see, these changes are all related to the new focus we’re seeing in higher education IT. Notice how many of these positions relate to the management of vendors and services. That’s because we’re seeing an increasing number of apps and services being offered to colleges and universities each year. As they move to manage these services and integrate them into their current apps and legacy systems, it will become crucial that they have the ability to do this securely and in compliance with federal regulations.
At N2N, we developed our integration platform specifically with these integration challenges in mind. Our focus on higher education allows us to tailor individual solutions for each of our partners, scaling our services to meet their needs.
The changes in IT distribution and management are only going to accelerate in coming years, so it’s important that you have a plan in place to deal with these changes. Give us a call if you’d like to hear more about our integration solutions for your campus.
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