I was discussing this with a colleague today how so many jobs are going to change in the next five years and already are.
IT has been for a few years roughly half support, half development. Support are people who look after 'servers' and what runs on them, keep them running 99.9% of the time. Developers or programmers are teams of people who create applications that solve problems.
The Cloud
First big change is the cloud. Servers are no longer in a company's server room or datacenter. Now they are 'virtual' machines sitting in the cloud owned by big companies like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft.
Yes, that's right. Maybe you think Amazon sells DVDs and other products. Actually, they are far and away the biggest and best IT cloud provider on the planet. They almost 'own' the internet! Average man on the street doesn't realize this.
Keep reading below:
Code In The Cloud
With platforms like AWS and Heroku and others, you can now code directly in the cloud. So now you don't need your own server, you don't even need to set up a server in the cloud. Instead, you have applications that run directly in the cloud. Now your company only needs developers. It doesn't need any support people anymore!
Coding Without Coding Skills
Why should you need to learn coding if you want to create? Years ago, people had to code in machine language, these days nobody does that anymore.
In the future, nobody will need to know how to write lines of a program. Instead, you'll construct it using drag and drop with your mouse.
Don't believe me? It's already happening. Check out bubble.is if you don't believe me.
I didn't even mention machine learning yet. Times really are a changing!