4 high-growth career moves to aim for in 2022
As a career social media service, we see the rising and falling trends from businesses around the world. With new technologies creating exciting career paths or allowing generalists to specialize in an exciting new area, see what jobs will be in demand in 2022 and beyond, and see if any take your fancy.
Site reliability engineer
Google invented the site reliability engineer (SRE) role to ensure efficiency among the company’s growing armada of back-end services. Now many firms are adding their own SRE roles to ensure that web applications and services deliver in terms of reliability, speed, security and scale as companies grow.
As such, an SRE is a role with many responsibilities, working between the operations community and the developers within a business to ensure that strong uptime and reliability are met through service-level indicators as a key metric.
In the rush to deliver new services and features online, developers should be trained to deliver at a regular cadence, without errors or breaking features. The SRE should ensure that they deliver consistent performance, uptime and availability. They will build or use tools to track and monitor issues while ensuring business security and redundancy are in place.
They can employ automation services to reduce hands-on management while focusing on the strategic goals of the business to ensure that growth can be met by the software and services.
Experienced engineers, DevOps and developers can look to SRE as an advanced role with sizable challenges that make a great step up in seniority and addressing wider business issues.
Internet of Things architect
Gartner defines the Internet of Things (IoT) architect as someone who “has an essential role in the successful development and operation of IoT. They are responsible for the vision, strategy and end-to-end architecture of IoT solutions.”
With IoT developments taking place in smart factories, smart cities, at airports and across supply chains, IoT technology is appearing in more businesses, often unique in its challenges. This puts pressure on the IoT architect to deliver a bespoke solution that fits in with the rest of a company’s infrastructure and data services. With the communications, data and analytics side plus hardware and networking issues to resolve, the IoT architect often has a high budget but great responsibility in delivering a solution that materially improves the company’s bottom line through efficiency and greater data visibility.
Any candidate wishing to be an IoT architect should have strong skills in leadership-level collaboration. They must be able to build a business case to justify the return on investment, build an IoT solution prototype by selecting the best vendors and deploying the final service across a business with plenty of capacity to scale up.
The cyber consultant
Every business is under attack from direct and indirect threats 24/7. The cyber consultant can step in and hopefully prevent a successful attack, or after a breach has been made they can clean up the mess after the fact. Here’s a previous example from LeaddMe’s archive.
Strong knowledge of the range of threats lined-up against businesses from phishing attacks to social engineering and botnets is essential. Along with an understanding of the many-layered defenses that a business should use from next-generation firewalls, honeypots, zero-day and no-trust services.
In the US, the national average salary for a Cyber Consultant is $81,250, and that will only rise as the impact of hackers and the fines or ransoms businesses have to pay increase. Candidates with IT, networking experience with a sideline in security can make a good living as a cyber consultant moving from firm to firm, while enterprises will need strong teams of operators to manage the constant barrage of attacks that will only get worse.
Content strategist
Writers, researchers, SEO producers, video creators, journalists and editors have been slowly moved into the “content” bracket as the articles and text they produce all become part of the nebulous content concept.
A good strategist candidate will need years of experience as a digital content manager, writer or editor, with a journalism or communications qualification along with an understanding of the latest in SEO strategies.
In charge of any modern business website and content effort, the content strategist needs to know what type of content will work best to win customers, deliver eyeballs or gain clicks. With content meaning everything from podcasts, webinars, tweets, social posts, white papers, blog posts and much more. An understanding of what to use, when to use it and how to build whole campaigns and strategies out of these parts is vital while ensuring all those parts are delivered following the overall messaging and positioning for a company or client.
These are just four of the exciting roles that you can expect to see more of in your LeaddMe job feed in the coming months. All great ways to stretch your skills and learn new ones as all our roles evolve.