How Automation is Changing Entry Level Career Paths in IT
There is no doubt that AI and automation will transform the delivery of IT work. Today, organizations typically tackle complex problems by deploying human capital — IT workers. But soon IT work will largely be delivered through a combination of people, AI, and automation.
The changes will impact the traditional entry-level career path of many IT workers, who were likely to spend their first few years performing grunt work. IT automation is spurring CIOs to rethink the traditional IT career path, beginning with the entry-level IT jobs — some of which will be replaced by automation.
Historically, the concept of an entry-level job was around a menial, repetitive task, and the philosophy was that entry-level folks would take that work off the experienced person’s plate, and they would learn the company by doing that.
“With Millennials and Gen-Z, the expectations around an entry-level job are very different,” says Vijay Kurkal, CEO at Resolve Systems. “One of the top indicators to attract talent is around meaning, purpose, and how it impacts the bigger picture.”
He says it’s hard to structure work that is fundamentally menial and throw it at these generations. That puts a burden on CIOs who now must approach their hiring strategies in a more thoughtful manner.
“The onus is on the companies to create meaningful work, and this is where automation comes in,” Kurkal says. “As automation is introduced into systems and processes, the entry-level jobs aren’t centered around menial tasks, but around tasks that need to be automated, which become more challenging and interesting.”
Given there are now so many remote workforces, a lot of service desk requests are password resets, or performance degradations — a lot of those diagnoses and fixes are very manual and repetitive, and the more often IT workers do this, the quicker they enter burn-out phase.
“However, if you frame that into a role where the person can learn how to design and automate a process for these tickets, this is where automation can really enrich everyone’s satisfaction in their job,” Kurkal says.
Because nobody can do a process re-design without understanding the business, this leads those workers to realizing the impact and the value of their positions.
Kurkal points out one big drawback of automation is that CIOs don’t know where to get started with fitting automation into their workforce pipeline.
“They need to see the possibilities and think through what to automate, and how that affects the company’s headcount strategy,” he says. “That’s the type of dialogue a CIO needs to initiate from the top down.”
Antonio Vazquez, CIO at Bizagi, a specialist in intelligent process automation, says the democratization of automation capabilities through low-code platforms is a great example of how businesses can move IT workers farther along.
“Any IT worker should have enough technical background to facilitate access to these types of platforms,” he says. “Upskilling goes together with hands-on automation, starting from simpler isolated processes and moving along to more complex integrated processes.”
Use of low-code platforms will require new architecting and developer capabilities, starting from entry-level IT professionals. Add to that artificial intelligence (AI) technology, already present in many areas of IT.
Vazquez notes that areas with a large volume of data, like log and event management, have been deploying AI capabilities for a while.
“This means that we don’t need to hire an army of junior operators to monitor those large amounts of data but to bring in capabilities to understand the process and the logic behind the algorithms in order to optimize the decision process,” he says. “This translates into a strong shift in skills.”
Kurkal also points out the more IT resources you have in build (versus management), the more applications you can build in the business.
