Need Work? Learn Cloud Computing: 7 Mil Jobs by 2015

Looking for a tech job in the new year? Cloud computing could be your ticket. Cloud-related skills represent virtually all the growth opportunities in IT employment worldwide and demand for cloud-related positions is expected to grow by 26 percent annually through 2015. Yet, lack of training prevents many cloud job positions from being filled.

 Demand for “cloud -ready” IT workers will grow by 26 percent each year through 2015. So says a new Microsoft -sponsored IDC white paper. If that estimate bears out, that means there could be as many as 7 million cloud-related jobs in the world.

That said, IT hiring managers report that the biggest reason they failed to fill an existing 1.7 million open cloud-related positions in 2012 is because job seekers lack the training andcertification   needed to work in a cloud-enabled world.

The IT sector is seeing only modest growth of IT jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average growth in IT employment sits between 1.1 percent and 2.7 percent per year through 2020. But within the larger IT sector, cloud jobs are gaining major momentum — and the IDC study suggests an urgent need to retrain existing IT professionals and encourage students to pursue cloud-related IT trainings and certifications.

“Unlike IT skill shortages in the past, solving this skills gap is extremely challenging, given that cloud brings a new set of skills which haven’t been needed in the past,” said Cushing Anderson, program vice president at IDC. “There is no one-size-fits-all set of criteria for jobs in cloud computing. Therefore, training and certification is essential for preparing prospective job candidates to work in cloud-related jobs.”

Why So Cloudy?

Among the other findings, almost two-thirds of enterprises are planning, implementing or using cloud computing, and more than 50 percent of businesses agree that cloud computing is a high priority. However, more than three-quarters of businesses have apprehension about the security , access or data  control of cloud computing.

Lack of training, certification or experience are the top three reasons why cloud positions are not filled. However, cloud-related skills represent virtually all the growth opportunities in IT employment worldwide and demand for cloud-related positions will grow by 26 percent annually through 2015.

“Cloud computing is crucial to the bottom line of the company — it creates cost savings and efficiencies for companies and their customers,” Anderson said. “Therefore, a cloud-savvyworkforce  is essential to the success of the IT industry’s financial health.”

Microsoft’s Clear Response

Anderson noted Microsoft recently announced reinvented certifications specifically for the cloud, including the coming certifications in Windows 8, which have cloud computing focus areas. He called the new certifications “more important than ever for current and future technologists who want to gain the skill set needed to work in the cloud and for companies looking to benefit from the cloud.”

Microsoft launched the Microsoft Virtual Academy in an effort to make it simple for the active professional to add critical skills. The Microsoft Virtual Academy is a program for IT professionals to gain access to free, self-paced training resources using combinations of video and text. Microsoft is also helping fill the future workforce pipeline by providing training and certification through the Microsoft IT Academy.

“The opportunity that the cloud presents is significant, and we want to be certain that the workforce has the skills to share in that opportunity,” said Lutz Ziob, general manager of Microsoft Learning. “Our goal is to continue to prepare the existing workforce and students for the jobs of tomorrow and empower them to develop their skills as future IT experts, innovators, software developers and beyond.”

http://www.sci-tech-today.com/news/Cloud-Ready-IT-Jobs-Up-26–Yearly/story.xhtml?story_id=12000DEF9N60

Why a Computer Science Degree Matters

I will be the first to admit that I absolutely despise the state of higher education. The concept is fundamentally flawed, and I am not thrilled to have spent 3 years (and only 3, thankfully) working towards a piece of paper that “proves my skills”. In my opinion, it does not do that in most cases. I can learn more material, more relevant material and learn it faster on my own. Services like Treehouse, Codecademy, even Googling and stack overflow are doing great things. Everything I use on a daily basis has been essentially self-taught, with the exceptional skill having been augmented by a university course.

While programming an embedded system the past couple of weeks for a competition, I have been going back and forth with my partner iterating over different hardware and software designs. We were able to quickly code our bot to perform the prescribed activity flawlessly, and that’s when we started experimenting, trying to build robustness into our system. Could we randomly pick up the bot and have it reliable find its way back to its side of the field? Could it handle getting unstuck from a situation? Could it reliably collide with a competitor’s bot and still get back to its objectives? As our exception cases grew, so did the code base. Maintenance got harder and dependencies grew.

Late last night, it struck me- This was the perfect case for applying the concept of a Finite State Machine(FSM). There are only so many states our bot could be in over the course of play, and only certain states can lead to other states. Our code went from an organized plate of spaghetti that performed reliably (We could get a perfect run every time, barring extreme edge cases, false sensor readings, and nasty collisions with opposition), to a clean, succinct, incredibly robust system (Github for Code) that handles nearly all edge cases beautifully, even ones we haven’t thought of. We easily won the competition, only losing a single game due to a fluke, every other game was a complete blowout.

I never would have thought of utilizing states or a FSM architecture as an underlying program structure if it wasn’t for computational theory,  artificial intelligence, and programming language pragmatics courses I have taken in my CS career. Could I have learned these things on my own? Absolutely. Would I have? Most likely not. How often does that concept come up when you are tossing together a web app? Rarely if ever.

I have come to realize that my degree in terms of evaluating skill is just a flimsy piece of paper that I spent an exorbitant amount of money on, I could have shown projects I have worked on that demonstrated much better what I am capable of. However, in terms of insight and theoretical understanding, it is an invaluable experience; that piece of paper represents to me that CS isn’t just coding (although you should be good at it), it’s coding smarter with a deeper understanding of how to approach a problem at the most basic level. For the first time in three years I have actually thought that maybe it was all worth it.

by:http://blog.jaredshort.com/post/37952932982/why-a-computer-science-degree-matters