Essential Skills to Land a Tech Career in 2023

The first step in thriving or reinventing your IT career is to be fully aware of your weaknesses, strengths, and passions. Soft skills play an important role in workplace success and other key traits and talents.

Here are 10 in-demand skills that IT professionals will need in 2022.

1. Self-awareness

Know your OTI (opportunity to improve) by self-evaluating and seeking feedback from your mentors, peers, or colleagues. This will enable you to embrace continuous improvement as you work on addressing your weaknesses. Self-awareness is a key to transformation; it will enable you to figure out which job role matches well with your personality and also signal to your colleagues that you are open-minded and receptive to feedback.

2. Authenticity

People often sell themselves short because they fear how their employer or colleagues will react if they bring their whole selves to work. However, employers today prefer authentic, multi-talented candidates with unique backgrounds and perspectives. So, instead of hiding a talent that you have – such as public speaking – why not highlight it? Authenticity is essential for you to build your personal brand in the workplace.

5. Attention to detail

Paying close attention to detail is necessary to align strategy with technology outcomes. For example, one simple coding error can disrupt an entire program or misconfigure a server. Firewall rules can create vulnerabilities, and gathering and documenting faults instead of facts in an IT audit report could ruin your credibility as an IS auditor. Being detail-oriented can prevent these kinds of problems.

6. Communication

If you’re an IT pro who can effectively explain what you do to a non-technical person or present a business case to management so that they understand it fully, you have the important skill of effective communication. The ability to listen and understand other people’s points of view without biased judgment is also a superpower.

7. Influence and Advocacy

In today’s IT industry, people buy people, not products. If someone knows you or your brand, they are more likely to transact business with you than if they don’t know you or have never heard of your services. Therefore, advocacy – being able to represent or sell your company’s service even if you are not part of the marketing or sales team– is another soft skill that is becoming vital.

8. Negotiation

You may not always agree with your clients or coworkers, but the ability to listen to others, negotiate, and reach common ground is a valuable soft skill for any IT professional. For example, when a draft report is issued in an IS audit, there may be findings that require you to negotiate with an audit client. The same thing applies when selling an IT solution – you must master the skill of negotiation so that your services are appropriately valued.

9. Innovation

Most companies thrive through innovation and often measure their staff KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) on the number of creative ideas presented to the innovation team. Employers prefer candidates who will bring new ideas to advance the company’s growth over those who wait to be told what to do.

10. Ability to learn new technologies

With the dynamic emerging technology landscape, IT professionals must be adaptable to change and able to learn and embrace the secure implementation of new technologies. For example, IT auditors who don’t embrace the use of emerging technologies like IoT or AI in their work will likely be replaced by those who do. That holds true for other IT disciplines as well.