You may surely have taken a general look at the IT industry including such things as work environment and the type and size of company that you choose to work for. Armed with this information, you may now want to match your personality to a specific area of IT that interests you. By matching your personality,-we simply mean to learn and take into consideration such things as stress factors, personal attributes, and soft skills that may be specifically relevant and necessary for particular job types in IT.
The intention of this article is two fold:
- To provide a general introduction to five primary technical areas in IT.
- To discuss the various stress factors, personal attributes, and soft skills that are advantageous to particular jobs in such areas of IT.
The technical areas introduced in this article, though by no means inclusive of all areas, represent the current hotspots of the IT industry-the general areas in which several job types reside.The above-mentioned five topics focus on the actual jobs in these particular areas and describes these positions in greater detail, along with their requirements. Please keep in mind that the duties of some of these jobs overlap, as do the working conditions.
When selecting the area you think is right for you, consider how well you deal with stress, the variety of work you want to do, and other factors such as whether you crave interaction with others, and whether your skill sets are suited for that position. Of course, the only way to really know whether a job is right for you is to do it, but at least by looking at what kind of things you can expect from a certain job based on the experiences and observations of others, you can narrow the possible field in terms of what job you believe suits you best.
Why These Five Areas?
We have chosen the five preceding technical areas for good reason.They represent not only a wide range of possible job choices, but also paths into an IT career that can be obtained by those who only have a little technical knowledge. We say little technical knowledge because there is one thing you need to consider. If you have made it this far in life without expressing an interest in IT that has prompted you to buy a PC, get on the Internet, and start thinking about how things work, then a career in IT will be challenging indeed.
The five areas we have chosen to cover are all accessible to people who have no college degree or other formal training. These areas can be pursued through self-study, certification, and perseverance. If you are fortunate enough to have a university or college degree, all the better, as it will almost certainly work in your favor.
More than anything else though, we chose these career areas because they are now, and are expected to remain, the areas of strongest job demand within the IT industry. Demand equals jobs, and that is where you want to be.
As we start to talk more specifically about job roles, it is worth talking briefly about one of the confusing aspects of the IT industry, that of terminology. Many job and skill areas have a variety of descriptions or job roles that are all related to the same skills set, though the positions themselves have certain unique demands and characteristics. At this early stage of the proceedings, the subtle differences between some of these roles are not so important. As your career progresses, however, the difference between, for example, a software designer and a software tester becomes all the more significant.
A Closer Look at the Five Areas of IT
In this section, we look at our chosen areas in a little more detail. For each, we discuss such things as the likely work environment, and look at factors such as stress. Also included are personality checkpoints that can help you to decide whether a specific area is matched to your personality.
