Essential Competencies for Hiring IT Professionals

Hiring IT professionals can be a struggle when we don’t know what are the important competencies in this industry. Specialists for help desk support, system administration, or any other IT discipline and level are currently high in demand. In today’s modern and increasingly digitalised workplace, however, their deep technical knowledge is not sufficient to be successful. Soft skills like analytical or communication capabilities and a team player attitude are becoming increasingly significant, as IT professionals need to work with different departments and truly understand their specific needs.

Analytical skills

Digitalisation offers huge opportunities and potential for growth and efficiency. Therefore, it is crucial that IT experts closely follow the latest technology developments and are open to new ideas. To drive company growth, IT professionals must always:

keep a clear focus on the company’s goals and needs
analyse those needs and find solutions that apply to the company’s processes
develop recommendations for action that fit into the company’s strategy

Communication skills

The second very important skill IT experts require nowadays is communication skills. Beyond speaking their internal clients’ language, they foremost need to listen well and ask the right questions: Understanding exactly where the challenge of their colleagues is will help the IT professional to assess the situation quickly and develop the right solution.

In other words: Employees in the IT department must be able to translate the needs of each department into technological solutions, making sure they fit into the company’s digital strategy and serve the long-term goals. IT experts must therefore be able to transfer their specialist knowledge and concerns from the specialist departments – and this is why they require strong soft skills.

Most Wanted IT professionals 2021:

System administrator
Software developer*
DevOps
IT security experts
Cloud experts

The highest demand for specialists in the frontend, backend, experience with Java, nodeJS, C, C++, C#, PHP, SQL, iOS, and Android

Team player

New digital tools and IT systems cannot be implemented and handed over to the users. There needs to be proper onboarding and dedicated user training, to get to make the new tool work efficiently. In addition, IT specialists benefit today from the better knowledge and understanding of digital tools by employees outside IT departments.

This has opened up new ways of collaboration and development of IT solutions within interdisciplinary teams, often referred to as scrum and agile working. As a result, IT talent needs to act as a team player instead of developing code based on pre-defined requirement specifications.

Hiring IT professionals today

Hiring managers looking for the best IT specialists need to pay attention to more than IT knowledge and degrees. Soft skills and the candidates’ personality are equally important. Make sure you take the time during the interview process to assess the candidate’s soft skills, so he can show his full potential in today’s modern and digitised workplace.

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