Don Jones provided a keynote at TechMentor this morning and I tweeted a fragment of his career advice.

“Make sure your career is lined up with upcoming changes in IT” via @concentrateddon #TechMentor #career — Steven Murawski (@StevenMurawski) August 13, 2014

Jim Kimball astutely asks

@StevenMurawski @concentrateddon hmmm. How to guess correctly? — Jim Kimball (@jimkimball) August 13, 2014

Don and Jim continue

@jimkimball @StevenMurawski observe evidence. Extrapolate. Apply experience. — Don Jones (@concentrateddon) August 13, 2014

  • DevOps - Studies are out and the results are in…  High performing IT shares some common patterns and these are associated with the DevOps movement.  
  • Development tools and methodologies..  Guess what sysadmins, you are developers.  Your scripts that run production environments are as important (if not more so) than the application code running on those boxes.  Get your heads around source control (and use it).  Learn about testing (unit, integration, and acceptance) - let’s catch problems before they cause outages.
  • Cloud - Yeah, I hate the term too, but it is real and coming for your job.  If you can’t offer internal customers the same capabilities (or better), why should your business fund you?  We exist to provide business value and if what you do doesn’t contribute, MasterCard can buy a service that will.
  • Configuration management (bet you didn’t see that one coming) -  If you are investing time in the above three concepts, CM tools are a natural fit to advance all three.
  • Cross-platform - homogeneous environments can leave you exposed.  Learn the best tools for the job.  You don’t want to be lost when a critical service moves to run on a Linux based OS.

Ok, those are my top things to watch.  What are yours?