Forrester: Business Intelligence Careers Offer Hope for IT Workers

As we’ve said, time’s are still tough for IT workers despite the relatively large demand for employees with technical skills. At the core of the problem seems to be a mismatch between the skill that unemployed workers have and the skills companies desire. Earlier today we explored some ideas about how IT workers can re-invent the resume to stand-out from other applicants. But what jobs should they be applying for? Data center jobs are an option. But, as reported by Integration Developer News, Forrester believes some IT workers’ future may be in business intelligence.

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Forrester’s research indicates an explosion of interest in BI and an increasing rate of executive buy-in for BI projects.

Forrester suggests that developers, integrations professionals and database administrators are particularly well suited for careers in business intelligence. However, those workers will need to learn additional skills that can only be picked up by participating in BI projects. “Even those IT professionals who’ve worked with dashboards and databases could use an extra dose of BI-specific training,” IDN quotes Forrester vice president and principal analyst Boris Evelson saying.

Evelson gave IDN four reasons that IT professionals should learn more about BI and business analytics:

• Organizations are increasing investment in this area.
• BI is not easily outsourced and requires quite a bit of face-to-face collaboration with management.
• BI projects need to be iterated on a frequent and ongoing basis.
• BI hiring is already up dramatically.

So what should you do if you’re interested in learning some BI skills? It’s not enough to just learn tools, Evelson says. Professionals will need to leverage their existing technical and analytics skills while also boning up on the latest database and BI technologies.

That’s the rub. It’s not easy to learn these sorts of technologies without being a part of a project. And it’s hard to get involved with a project if you don’t already have the necessary experience.

Are you a BI professional? How did you get started? What advice would you offer to either IT workers looking to make a change, or to younger workers just starting a career?

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