Whatās hot in the IT world over here?
It may surprise you.
Not IT management roles.
Not Cybersecurity roles – unless theyāre really senior.
Our top 3 roles that we find hard to fill are:
IT Support Engineer – MSP
Yes you read that right. Support engineers with client facing skills and broad technical knowledge around desktop, servers, networking and M365 technologies at level 2 or 3. Rare as rocking horse droppings.
Itās not that theyāre not out there. Itās just that everyone wants them, particularly if they have MSP experience. MSP? = Managed Service Provider. An IT company supporting small to medium sized businesses with all their IT needs.
See list of IT Support Engineering jobs here.
Senior Systems Engineer – MSP
Thereās a theme here. Run of the mill every day systems and support engineer roles shouldnāt be hard to fill right? Wrong, when thereās lots of MSPās in Perth and theyāre growing thereās many roles to fill and not many systems engineers that are willing and able to do client billable work. The skills weāre searching for here involve multiple small project experience with servers, networking, virtualisation and cloud. Actually being able to implement a broad range of tech solutions at small to medium sized business level. Consulting to the client or the clientās IT department.
See list of Senior Systems Engineer jobs here.
Anything with āArchitectā in the title.
As the name suggests, architects design things. A solution architect designs software platforms, an infrastructure architect designs the IT environment (servers, storage, OSās etc) for large IT systems and a cloud architect designs the cloud environments and services used across public and private cloud providers. Think of these technical roles as the top of the tree within their field. Thereās no higher technical role than an architect. To get here requires a lot of study and usually vendor certifications. Deep product knowledge and an understanding of scale and capacity. Theyāre always highly in demand, highly valued and highly paid.
See list of Architect related jobs here.
Other areas of note
Data, Analytics and Artificial Intelligence. While this is a growing field, the rareness in the skills is at the higher end. Thereās plenty of grads around and people wanting to break into the field, not many experienced though.
So hereās my advice to progress your career. Get into an MSP role and get some solid multi-client broad technical experience. Then look to specialise in an area of your interest and go deep with it. Youāll gain skills that will always be in demand.
If you need professional career advice, meet with me here.