Beyond your department’s immediate needs, it is important that you keep in mind the mid- and long-term needs of your company. As your organization’s IT leader, you must ensure that you’re building a team capable of staying aligned with the technology and business trends that are most likely to emerge in the following years. That means not only promoting continuous education among your already existing team, but also looking for new talent that will bring in those skills and ways of thinking that will future-proof it. It’s often hard to identify the right candidate or profile in all the clutter, so we at Club Freelance have prepared a shortlist of experts to hire to and incorporate to strengthen an IT team if you haven’t done so yet.
The top 5 experts to hire to strengthen an IT team
A business-savvy data scientist
First of the experts to hire to strengthen an IT team: the data scientist. It’s no secret that a solid data strategy is one of the key components of any respectable CIO’s digital transformation plan. Organisations all over the globe are ramping up their efforts to leverage their data in deeper, more impactful ways, from business intelligence to predictive and prescriptive analytics.
It is no surprise, then, that the data scientist role was in the top 5 of LinkedIn’s latest emerging jobs study. According to the company, data scientist jobs have experienced a 37% hiring growth over the past three years.
The key skills you should look for when hiring a good data scientist include machine learning, data science, Python, R and Apache Spark. However, as data analysis and predictive analytics are increasingly being incorporated into the decision-making process of companies, there is a growing need for data scientists themselves to understand the business.
A business-savvy data scientist eliminates the need for a middleman to translate data insights into business advice and transformation. Furthermore, as someone who can see both sides of the story, they can use data in more efficient and business-critical ways.
If you don’t have such a profile in your team, consider adding it.
Also read our article: HR Managers: How to Assess the Technical Skills of IT Candidates
A true AI specialist
Often, data scientists are the ones taking over AI and machine learning duties within IT departments. Or at least being one of the main components of the AI team. That’s fine. A data scientist can, of course, become an expert in Ai through training and experience, but it’s not always the case. A true AI expert goes a bit further than the traditional data scientist, having mastered skills such as deep learning and natural language processing.
According to the same LinkedIn report, the AI specialist role has experienced a 74% hiring growth in the last 4 years. That is because hiring a true expert in AI can result in great benefits across several departments and processes within the organisation. AI can optimize operations, help with cybersecurity, come up with valuable customer insights and help you communicate better with your stakeholders by eliminating the lower levels of customer service. But it can do much more. If you have yet to explore this area, we recommend that you do.
A cloud cybersecurity expert
For some time, IT leaders were after all-terrain cybersecurity experts that understood the company’s whole IT ecosystem and could deal with a wide array of cyber threats and vulnerabilities. As the digital environment has grown more complex and cyber-attacks more sophisticated, that figure is no longer the ideal gatekeeper. As it happens with everything else in our economy, specialization is key.
With more and more companies moving their business-critical operations to the cloud —and with hybrid, public and private cloud models becoming more intertwined— attacks via cloud infrastructure are poised to hit a new high this year. Therefore, it is of vital importance that you look into hiring a cybersecurity expert that is exclusively dedicated to protecting your cloud real estate.
Also read ou discover our interview: Cybersecurity Career Tips From a Ballerina Turned Pentester
A DevOps engineer
A DevOps engineer is a team addition you should consider if you’re looking to optimize and speed up the software development lifecycle. With a silo-breaking mentality, DevOps engineers work to get different IT teams and processes integrated and create a workflow that’s beneficial for everybody.
They achieve so by using their deep understanding of automation tools to develop digital pipelines comprising all stages in the production cycle — From concept and testing to deployment and monitoring.
Their wholistic mindset also makes them great evangelists of DevOps philosophy across your whole team. Greater awareness of process integration and collaboration across teams can only be beneficial for everyone in the longer run.
Interested in DevOps profiles? Read about this expert’s DevOps career story.
An RPA automation engineer
Not to be confused with the kind of automation implemented by a DevOps specialist, RPA automation deals with processes internal to the IT team, like ticket generation, and to the overall company. An RPA expert can be of tremendous help anywhere where time-consuming, repetitive tasks can be automated.
Think of all the time you could save across your organization by hiring an automation engineer that would lighten your employee’s workload so that they could dedicate themselves to more productive tasks. Definitely worth it.