With businesses keeping an extremely close eye on all spending, departments are being asked to demonstrate tangible benefits from all of their investment. Analysts are required to monitor and report against credit risk, marketing campaigns and customer insight and loyalty among others. With this data they extract, businesses are able to understand their customers and clients in order to match their needs with more targeted investment.

Sectors such as financial, marketing, retail and utilities invest heavily in analytics, but in our experience, almost every sector can benefit from such insight.

For people looking to change careers within the IT sector, or for those entering the workplace after university, an analytics qualification can be a very desirable skill to acquire. The sector has been extremely buoyant and shows little sign of slowing down. Furthermore, the skills are extremely transferable and can allow for easy transition to working in many other sectors.

Those coming from a numerical background in particular, will find the transition to analytical work very natural. However, for anyone with a basic IT skill set, the addition of an analytical qualification can be a very wise investment which, in the long-term, can lead to a varied and rewarding career working within a broad range of opportunities.

As an IT professional, the skills you use for your job are your most valuable asset - most gainful employment within the sector relies on some specialist knowledge. Whether from experience or education, the things you have learned define the job you can do.

It is safe to say that any investment in your skills is worthwhile, then - expanding your knowledge of things IT related will help greatly in developing your career - cementing and diversifying your current role (with greater chances for advancement) and improving your prospects for later roles as well.



The dangers of over-specialisation

The detriments of a narrow skill set are all too obvious, then - technology is a fast moving sector to work in, so if you don't keep your skills up to date you could get stuck in a legacy support dead end, or worse - find yourself replaced with a new wave of fresh faced developers toting the latest buzzwords and paradigms.

That's not to say that a certain degree of focus can't be a bad thing - if you're amongst the few real experts in a niche area, you can certainly make a very tidy profit - but all the same it is wise to be sensitive to the evolving landscape of IT. If you're in a receding area of expertise, over-specialising can be dangerous.

Certain subcultures in tech can breed this kind of lack of adaptability - those in the almost self-contained Java and .NET worlds are more vulnerable than most. Being involved in a close community is largely a good thing, at least as far as support is concerned - but it's not hard to become isolated from other areas and miss out on some of the more up-and-coming languages, platforms and techniques.

Being a 'jack-of-all-trades' isn't much better

Keeping an open mind to new technologies can pay dividends - but it's wise to be at least slightly cautious. Overzealous chasing of the bleeding edge can lead to a lack of depth to your knowledge - which will adversely affect your skill set as a whole.

Challenge yourself. Expend at least some time broadening your knowledge into adjacent sectors. But never forget the core skills that define your role today - use them as a base, not something disposable to discard at the first sign of change in an industry.

While the life of a technology worker can be fast paced, the changes that come about are evolutionary - and with the right mindset, and with a little effort expended to keep your awareness fresh, you can do well.

As a hiring manager, I was sooo disappointed when I met promising candidates who had the same year of experience 5, 10, even 20 times. Sometimes their resumes disguised that fact, because they'd moved to several projects or to several different organizations. But, they hadn't done anything new in years.

The worst example of this was when I interviewed someone who'd finally been laid off from DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) in the early '90's sometime. (I can't remember if Compaq had bought DEC by then, and he'd been laid off by Compaq or DEC.) I phone-screened this guy for a client, and thought he had some promise, so he came in for an interview. During the interview, I discovered he'd worked in the same facility, working in the same office, working on different projects for different managers, but doing the same work day in and day out for 20 years.

I was blown away. Surely I had misunderstood. I asked more behavior-description questions, trying to discover what he'd really done, and sure enough, he had kept the same role, doing the same thing he'd done for 20 years at the same company in the same office.

I asked him why he was looking. "Because I need a job." Had he looked inside DEC? "Yes, but no one needs this type of work anymore. I was hoping to stick with it." Didn't he want to learn something new? "No, not really."

My goodness. Not the kind of person my client needed at the time. And, no, we didn't need precisely his skills, which is what he wanted to find a job doing. I don't know what happened to him; I was astonished that he'd spent 20 years doing literally the same thing every day.

It's easy to get in a rut at work. So, now that it's January, take stock of your skills. In fact, take this time to edit your resume. (I'm reviewing Andy Lester's Land the Tech Job You Love: Why Skills And Luck Aren't Enough, to be released soon, and he has excellent advice in how to organize your resume.)

Write down your achievements from last year. See if you can quantify anything about them, so they pass the "so what" test. "Led the team that reorganized accounting workflow" is interesting. Add ", saving the finance department at least 20 hours a week according to the CFO" is a huge thing. Write all of these down. You likely have somewhere between 2 and 5 for the year. That's good.

Now, take a look at your resume. Do you see areas that have gaps? Maybe you haven't led a team yet. Do you want to? If so, put that on a list. Have you explored a particular language or OS or database that intrigues you? If not, put those on your list. Make sure you have at least three things on your list.

Now, you have fodder for a conversation with your boss, about what you might want to do over the next year. If your job doesn't allow you to do those things, look for an open source project. (No, you don't have to leave your job to do other work.)

No matter how you approach getting more experience, make sure you are making each year count. No years and years of the same experience for you. That's not the way to grow a career.