Majority of industries were affected by the Covid crisis and the tech space felt the direct and immediate impact. Based on what happened in the last months, we can have an overview and can compare the roles in high demand during pandemic and in the new era of work.

I believe that COVID-19 has been the breaking point between how we used to work and how we will work from now on. Of course, the digital transformation that comes with it, and how effective it is across each organisation, will have a big impact on how companies’ will adapt to the new reality.

The IT jobs that were needed most during lockdown

In the context imposed by crisis, Cloud Architects and Engineers (across Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud and the Office 365 suite for Teams) became crucial roles on high demand not just in Romanian market, but worldwide. This is a direct consequence of remote work model implemented of most companies during pandemic.

As businesses wanted to make sure their new way of work were safe enough to deal with any new threats, cyber security industry has registered as well a high demand in terms of IT jobs – companies focused on onboarding more Cyber Security professionals.

Pivoting business models using tech during COVID-19

Once lockdowns forced the closure of high streets and shops, businesses were forced to move their retail operations online, hiring Developers to build applications and UI/UX specialists to either upgrade or build new digital e-commerce structures to sell from.

In the same time, the number of roles within MedTech and pharma companies saw huge growth, as worldwide businesses focused in understanding more about the implications of the virus and the disease, medication that can be used in treating the patients, research & development for a possible vaccine, developing COVID-tracking apps. Therefore, along with medical specialists, IT professionals are as well principal actors in this complex process.

Demand for technology jobs in the new era of work

Organisations around the world quickly adapted to the challenges of the new way of work. In order to be able to react to the changing environments, they need the help of Project Managers, Change Management and SCRUM Masters specialists, to be part of this transition. We are also observing an increasing demand of Cybersecurity roles considering the numbers of online scams and hackers from this year.

DevOps

If you ask yourself what a DevOps is or what a DevOps does and try to look for a definition, you will probably find more than one:

• „The combination of practices and tools designed to increase an organization's ability to deliver applications and services faster than traditional software development processes”
• „DevOps engineers build, test and maintain the infrastructure and tools to allow for the speedy development and release of software. DevOps practices aim to simplify the development process of software''
• In the words of AWS, “DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organisation’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity”.

Therefore, the key characteristic of a DevOps model is the function of bringing together the development and operations teams, sometimes even incorporate them in a single team.

In practice, you may find DevOps Engineers working with software production (keeping a close eye on code releases to look for areas of inefficiency in the software, monitoring and troubleshooting software, but also editing or reconfiguring it if required) or professionals with a strong background in Operations (e.g. System Administrator).

The importance of DevOps certainly won’t change in 2021. Moreover, many more organisations are building or expanding their DevOps teams so there will continue to be jobs in demand in this field, such as Platform, Build, and Reliability Engineers.-  therefore DevOps Zone predicting to have an increasing demand (almost 50% higher) in 2021-2022.

In 2021 Social Media and digital platforms will continue to develop and provide a large amount of data used by marketing departments and company management on formulating new strategies. Considering this, Business intelligence, BigData and ETL roles will remain in high demand. Moreover, comfort based on technology turned out to become in last years a priority and in this context IoT roles will probably continue to grow.

If you are an IT professional with any of the skills mentioned above, get in touch with us to find out more about the opportunities that are available to you across a multitude of exciting industries.

Author: Pavel Otilia, Team Leader IT Division of Hays Romania