A new weapon in the battle to attract IT talent: cloud computing?

The recent Cloud World Forum in London provided plenty of food for thought. I have already talked about some of the challenges for customer and organisations. The industry transformation being wrought by cloud computing also creates some interesting career choices for programers and other IT specialists.

One presenter was part of an industry where competitors collaborated on the basic infrastructure for their market and this was successfully running on mainframe technology. There was no obvious technical or financial case for moving to new technology but the industry was still preparing for change. Their current pool of expertise was bound to shrink as people retired but new entrants to the job market were not interested in investing in legacy skills. These organisations needed to begin moving to new technology (mostly, but not entirely, cloud computing) simply in order to be able to find people to help run and maintain their IT.

There may be similar pressures around the adoption of open source solutions or the trade-off between public and private cloud. An IT leader of a well known global internet business was migrating to open source, at least in part, because the talented people they wanted to attract and retain were already involved in open source initiatives. This new generation expected to stay involved in open source communities in parallel with their day job or, better still, as part of it.

Until the “Next Big Thing” comes along the relentless transition to cloud computing may be driven, bottom up, by the personal preferences of talented individuals rather than, top down, by the sophisticated cost-benefit calculations of giant corporations.

How do you see talent and technology weaving together over the next few years? Add a comment below or use the Twitter link to let me know what you think.