Despite innovations, disruptions, and rapid changes, IT is one industry that continues to survive and thrive

Contrary to popular misconceptions, the information technology sector is flourishing and will continue to employ skilled workers in large numbers. Factors like automation and new technologies only open new opportunities for your IT career path.

Technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and robotics, scientific advancements like space exploration and medical procedures, provide tremendous opportunities for IT experts.

For IT professionals in the US who are scared of outsourcing, fear not! Most of the outsourced jobs are mundane, repetitive jobs which will be automated sooner or later.

However, the innovative IT jobs are on the rise. In addition, there are numerous opportunities for someone who is a tech wizard.

If you’re interested in knowing what an IT professional’s career path looks like, keep reading….

It’s difficult but interesting

Working in the IT industry is not a cakewalk. But then, nor is it in any other industry!

If you have an affinity for technology and enjoy working on new complex challenges, the IT industry is for you.

You might have heard numerous stories of IT professionals who work day and night in their offices without even the time to go home just for a few hours.

It’s true. There are times when they have to slog and stretch. However, what most of the people ignore is the fact that a large number of people in this industry are highly passionate about their job. They enjoy their work more than anything else, which is the reason for their sustainability and growth despite the work pressure.

Working in the IT industry lets you apply your analytical mind, logic, and creativity.

If you want to become a successful IT professional, you must have passion, persistence and stamina.  If you do, success will be yours.

Career paths in the IT industry

Information technology is a vast industry with 100s of specialties. Some are discussed here:

Database Administrator

Big Data’s a revolution. Every enterprise generates massive volumes of data through its customer interactions, which is needed for analytics. This is where a DBA plays a key role.

Graphic Design

It’s where the creativity meets technology. If you’re a skilled artist, becoming a graphic designer is the right career for you.

Video Game Developer and Tester

Advancements in technology and graphic designing have made video games more sophisticated than ever. There’s tremendous scope as a games developer or tester.

Animator

Animators get to show their skills to a far greater extent now than ever. From animated movies to live action films, and advertisements and games, animation offers tremendous scope.

IT Security

The advancements in IT have also increased the threats. Viruses and malware are pretty common, and there’s always a requirement for more skilled IT security professionals to deal with the threats.

Programming and Coding

Coding shall never be out of the fashion. Most of the top entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg started out as coders. There’s immense scope in this field.

Project Manager

This comes as an advanced career path once you’ve moved up the ladder in the IT industry. As a project manager, you get to manage people and entire projects.

Conclusion

IT industry continues to offer significant scope for those who are willing to work hard and smart. Learn IT courses and programming languages online to move one step ahead towards building an exciting career in the IT industry.  If you’re looking to begin a new career, browse our course catalog and see how easy it is to get started in an IT career.

As most people know by now, the Linux operating system has been developed under the philosophy of Open Source software originally pioneered by the Free Software Foundation as “free software”. Nevertheless, many people don’t truly appreciate just what Open Source really is. In this blog post, I’ll offer my perceptions.

Quite simply, Open Source is based on the notion that software should be freely available: to use, to modify, to copy.  The idea has been around for some twenty years in the technical culture that built the Internet and the World Wide Web and in recent years has spread to the commercial world.

There are a number of misconceptions about the nature of Open Source software.  Perhaps the best way to explain what it is, is to start by talking about what it isn’t.

• Open Source is not shareware.  A precondition for the use of shareware is that you pay the copyright holder a fee.  Open source code is freely available and there is no obligation to pay for it.

• Open Source is not Public Domain.  Public domain code, by definition, is not copyrighted.  Open Source code is copyrighted by its author who has released it under the terms of an Open Source software license.  The copyright owner thus gives you the right to use the code provided you adhere to the terms of the license.

• Open Source is not necessarily free of charge.  Having said that there’s no obligation to pay for Open Source software doesn’t preclude you from charging a fee to package and distribute it.  A number of companies are in the specific business of selling packaged “distributions” of Linux.

Why would you pay someone for something you can get for free?  Presumably because everything is in one place and you can get some support from the vendor.  Of course the quality of support greatly depends on the vendor.

So “free” refers to freedom to use the code and not necessarily zero cost.  As someone said a number of years ago, “Think ‘free speech’, not ‘free beer’”.

Open Source code is:

• Subject to the terms of an Open Source license, in many cases the GNU Public License (see below).
• Subject to critical peer review.  As an Open Source programmer, your code is out there for everyone to see and the Open Source community tends to be a very critical group.  Open Source code is subject to extensive testing and peer review.  It’s a Darwinian process in which only the best code survives.  “Best” of course is a subjective term.  It may be the best technical solution but it may also be completely unreadable.
• Highly subversive.  The Open Source movement subverts the dominant paradigm, which says that intellectual property such as software must be jealously guarded so you can make a lot of money off of it.  In contrast, the Open Source philosophy is that software should be freely available to everyone for the maximum benefit of society.  Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, is particularly vocal in advocating that software should not have owners (see Appendix C).

In the early years of the Open Source movement, Microsoft and other proprietary software vendors saw it as a serious threat to their business model.  Microsoft representatives went so far as to characterize Open Source as “un-American”.  A Microsoft executive publicly stated in 2001 that “open source is an intellectual property destroyer. I can’t imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business.”

In recent years however, leading software vendors, including Microsoft, have embraced the Open Source movement. Many even give their programmers and engineers company time to contribute to the Open Source community.  And it’s not just charity, it’s good business!

So what is an Open Source license? Most End User License Agreements (EULA) for software are specifically designed to restrict what you are allowed to do with the software covered by the license.  Typical restrictions prevent you from making copies or otherwise redistributing it.  You are often admonished not to attempt to “reverse-engineer” the software.

By contrast, an Open Source license is intended to guarantee your rights to use, modify and copy the subject software as much as you’d like.  Along with the rights comes an obligation.  If you modify and subsequently distribute software covered by an Open Source license, you are obligated to make available the modified source code under the same terms.  The changes become a “derivative work” which is also subject to the terms of the license.  This allows other users to understand the software better and to make further changes if they wish.

Arguably the best-known, and most widely used, Open Source license is the GNU General Public License (GPL) first released by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in 1989.  The Linux kernel is licensed under the GPL.  But the GPL has a problem that makes it unworkable in many commercial situations.  Software that does nothing more than link to a library released under the GPL is considered a derivative work and is therefore subject to the terms of the GPL and must be made available in source code form. Software vendors who wish to maintain their applications as proprietary have a problem with that.

To get around this, and thus promote the development of Open Source libraries, the Free Software Foundation came up with the “Library GPL”.  The distinction is that a program linked to a library covered by the LGPL is not considered a derivative work and so there’s no requirement to distribute the source, although you must still make available the source to the library itself.

Subsequently, the LGPL became known as the “Lesser GPL” because it offers less freedom to the user.  So while the LGPL makes it possible to develop proprietary products using Open Source software, the FSF encourages developers to place their libraries under the GPL in the interest of maximizing openness.

At the other end of the scale is the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license, which predates the GPL by some 12 years.  It “suggests”, but does not require, that source code modifications be returned to the developer community and it specifically allows derived products to use other licenses, including proprietary ones.

Other licenses—and there are quite a few—fall somewhere between these two poles. The Mozilla Public License (MPL) for example, developed in 1998 when Netscape made its browser open-source, contains more requirements for derivative works than the BSD license, but fewer than the GPL or LGPL.  The Eclipse Public License (EPL) specifically allows “plug-ins” to remain proprietary, but still requires that modifications to Eclipse itself be Open Source. The Open Source Initiative (OSI), a non-profit group that certifies licenses meeting its definition of Open Source, currently lists 79 certified licenses on its website.

You may tempted to think that the GPL is just an academic exercise. Nobody takes it seriously, right? Wrong! There are people, the “GPL police” if you will, some of whom have way too much time on their hands, and they take the GPL very seriously. They will “out” anyone who doesn’t play by the rules and there are examples of vendors who have been taken to court as a result.

Bottom line; if you’re concerned about keeping your code proprietary, be very careful about where your models come from.  Don’t blindly copy large chunks of code that is identified as GPL Use the code as a model and write your own. If your product is going to incorporate Open Source code, you  may want to consult an attorney who specializes in intellectual property law related to Open Source.

Well, this has been a brief personal tour through the world of Open Source software. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of other resources out there on the web. Just google “open source software”.

This article by Doug Abbott is on Open Source Software.

Revenge of the nerds?!

A report ranking the best jobs in 2013 is chock full of IT roles, with database administrator, systems analyst, software developer and Web developer achieving rare air.

According to the recent U.S. News and World Report findings, reported on recently in InfoWorld, those positions took up nearly half the “top ten” spots on the list. Computer programmer, IT manager and systems administrator roles cracked the top 25.

The ranking of 100 jobs was based on the hiring demand using U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics findings and scored out through salary, job prospects, growth potential and other factors.

Though these factors don’t universally grade out at the high end for each and every IT job on the list (for example, IT manager roles rank high for stress level, but also top out on potential with a projected 18 percent employment growth rate in the next decade), the “in-your-face” presence of so many IT roles among the upper echelon of this list signals that, indeed, techies are in high demand these days.

Are you behind in newer technologies, or need a fresh career in IT? Look at GogoTraining’s curriculum offerings. Training can move your career in new directions.

Source: CompTIA IT Career Blog

Whether you’re an active job seeker in the ever-changing IT industry or an entrenched veteran in need of new challenges, your New Year’s resolutions are ready-made.

A clear takeaway from the recent article in CIO.com offering career resolutions is all IT pros need to evolve along with the industry. As organizations gear up to add staff in an IT job market expected to hit the ground running in the year to come, your organized competitors for those jobs are already doing much of the following:

• Expand your sphere of influence to understand the big-picture business side of the industry you target
• Chart out a career map which includes a skills analysis, plan to bridge skills gaps and network of peers and mentors
• Build a current, dynamic personal website to market your “brand”
• Keep on top of your social profile by searching for yourself to see what comes up, much like your prospective hiring manager would
• Proper interview follow-up can pay under-appreciated dividends
• Get out of the comfort zone with new classes, seminars and industry introductions

Check out GogoTraining’s expansive list of video based courses and try something new – shake it up!

Source: CompTIA IT Careers Blog

Hiring Linux Pro’s in 2012 is a top priority for 8 of of 10 hiring managers says the 2012 Dice/The Linux Foundation hiring manager survey.  Key highlights include:

• 8 out of 10 hiring managers need to hire Linux Pro’s
• 85% of them are having a hard time finding Linux Pro’s to hire
• Companies are doing everything they can from better salaries to bonuses and perks to keep their current Linux talent
• Mid-level Linux developers and system administrators are in most demand.

If you are considering a move into Linux or want to up your current Linux skills, here is a list of courses taught by great Linux professionals:

• Hands-On Embedded Linux – New vLearning Format!
• Linux Device Drivers: Programming at the Kernel Level
• Red Hat Linux Essentials – New vLearning Format!
• Red Hat Linux Network Administration – New vLearning Format!
• Red Hat Linux System Administration Part 1 – New vLearning Format!
• Red Hat Linux System Administration Part 2 – New vLearning Format!

If you have any questions, be sure to give me a call at 1.877.546.4446 x 102 or send me an email to marianne@gogotraining.com.

GogoTraining has released nine unique online IT training courses with live mentoring sessions designed to fast-track career advancement opportunities as part of their 2011 Mentor-Accelerated Summer IT Training Program.  The courses are scheduled in July of 2011 only, are affordable for anyone to take, and offer limited seats available.

Offered courses include popular selections from the GogoTraining online course catalog such as:

• Oracle Real Application Clusters
• Oracle Application Express (APEX)
• Introduction to Android Programming
• Programming in Java 6 w/ Swing & Servlets
• ITIL® v3 Foundations
• ITIL® Continual Service Improvement
• Programming for Non-Programmers
• Introductions to C Programming
• Red Hat Linux Essentials

Courses in GogoTraining’s Mentor-Accelerated Summer Training Program include:

• Expert instructors
• The same material taught in corporate IT training classrooms
• Engaging “classroom experience” video modules
• Hands-on labs and exercises
• Direct access to ask the instructor questions
• Weekly 2-hour live online mentoring sessions including review, discussion and previewing of coming material.

The courses involve watching assigned online video material, doing hands-on lab and exercise work, and attending live online sessions with the instructor.  The live sessions are once each week for two hours and provide for instructor-led review, discussion and previewing of the coming week’s material.

“These are for someone who wants an advanced learning opportunity for a fraction of the time and cost,” says Marianne Cherney, CEO of GogoTraining.  “Our Mentor-Accelerated training courses are perfect for those who wish to gain extra skills needed for a promotion or new position.”

There is more evidence of the IT sector being on the leading edge of emergence from the economic recession.

According to the most recent Report on Jobs by the KPMG and Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), the IT sector in the UK has risen in demand of permanent positions to levels seen five years ago before the recession entered full swing.  IT jobs have outpaced engineering and construction jobs.  REC Technology Chair Jeff Brooks indicates that to keep meeting the rise in demand with skilled workers there must be a focus on ensuring prospective workers are well trained and educated.

Also, an informal tracking of open IT jobs shows a 46% lift over April 2010 in the American market.  While almost everything has seen a strong increase, the greatest rises appear to exist in SQL, Oracle, C#, Python, Ruby, HTML5, IBM, VMWare, Linux, Android and other skill sets to do with social media and cloud computing.

…

Are you ready to be picked for one of these outstanding opportunities?  GogoTraining has the IT training you need to make your mark.

The economy has improved for graduates hitting the field with computer science degrees.  According to Dice.com, companies are planning to hire almost 20% more graduates this year.

Last year was tough for many people trying to get in, graduates and experienced workers alike.  Employers were averaging roughly 40 applicants for every open position.  That average has dropped significantly to about 21 applicants this year.  With job creation running at a generally consistent clip for some time, graduates are starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel.

Demand for skills reaches across the IT field.  Networking and storage skills are being sought by those gearing up to be a Cloud vendor.  Security skills are in demand in both corporate and government.   Application developers for web, mobile and software are finding homes in small as well as enterprise-level employers.

Computer science graduates can supplement their degrees with focused skill training in the hottest IT topics of today.  GogoTraining is a leading provider of high-quality training taught by industry experts, available online and affordable (even for graduates!).  Example areas of interest include:

• Android developer training
• Linux administration and programming training
• Microsoft server training
• Oracle database administration training
• Java programming training
• C programming training
• Business Intelligence training
• I/O and Storage training
• ITIL Foundations and Intermediate training
• IT Security training

Last week’s Linux Collaboration Summit yielded some interesting recent developments that are sure to help continue moving the platform toward even more usefulness for businesses.

One such innovation is something called the Yocto Project.  As they describe it on the website, Yocto is “an open source collaboration project that provides templates, tools and methods to help you create custom Linux-based systems for embedded products regardless of the hardware architecture.”  Sounds good enough but there’s more to it than that.

Yocto project starts with an ultra bare-bones Linux platform designed for ARM or x86 chips, allowing people to develop a Linux platform for a device with only what is needed and in a more efficient manner (starting bare and building up, versus the other way around).  Millions have been spent by other corporations developing device platforms on Linux by pulling out what is not needed from an existing Linux kernel until they’ve engineered it down to the essentials for that particular device.  Now developers can use Yocto to avoid all of that mess and expense to get to what they need for their device development project. 

This represents a considerable competitive advantage as it opens up use of the Linux platform in device development to a much larger crowd rather than only those who have the deep pockets and existing sales to weather extensive development cycles.  This is very likely to result in the emergence of more device development shops meeting various markets using Linux.

To get involved with Linux development, GogoTraining has the following expert courses:

• Linux Essentials
• Introduction to Embedded Linux
• Linux Device Drivers: Programming at the Kernel Level
• Red Hat Linux System Administration Part 1
• Red Hat Linux System Administration Part 2
• Red Hat Linux Network Administration

AMD, the multinational semiconductor producer, is hiring over 1,000 IT professionals across their global operations in anticipation of the enterprise movement toward Cloud Computing.

The highest portion of new hires will be focused on design and verification and will be recruited at all AMD facilities including Boston, Orlando, California, Texas and in Canada.

Given AMD’s support of open-source software, engineers with Linux, C/C++, Ruby, and Java are going to be a focus of hiring on the software side.  In hardware, analog design engineers with backgrounds in electrical engineering, CISI and ASIC design abilities will be hired.

AMD plans to meet the new cloud market with software and hardware products and expects to leverage the same entrepreneurial ethos that has served them well in the past. Lance Phillips, Global Talent Acquisition Leader for AMD, defines this as, “candidates and employees who are good fit are those who like to work beyond typical boundaries and beyond a job description.”

GogoTraining has introductory and advanced courses in the majority of technologies being sought after by AMD and other large employers gearing up for the cloud (or just gearing up to compete in the emerging economy).  Check out the online IT training course catalog for more details.