How to Turn Your IT Skills Into Real-World Applications

As an IT professional, it’s crucial to stay up-to-date on the latest tech trends. Moreover, you’ll need to hone your technical skills, especially in high-demand areas like cybersecurity and cloud computing, which will help you stand out from the competition. But a sharpened skillset isn’t enough—you must be able to translate those hard-earned IT skills into practical, workplace applications.

Analytical abilities are a big part of IT work, which requires finding logical solutions to problems that crop up frequently. This skill set can help you determine why a line of code isn’t producing the desired results or why a server isn’t working. It’s also helpful in troubleshooting issues that require a broader look at the system or environment.

According to IDC, the world will create 163 zettabytes of data by 2025—10 times the amount created in 2016. This massive influx is creating significant storage, security and analytics challenges for businesses. In response, organizations are dramatically increasing their efforts to capture, store and analyse data. This is why, according to the 2021 Open Source Jobs Report, cloud computing, data engineering and machine learning are some of the top IT skills in demand this year.

If you want to keep your IT career on track, it’s important to master all of these in-demand skills—and many more. Start by obtaining CompTIA certifications, which will validate your IT skills in areas like technical support and cybersecurity. Alternatively, you can take an online IT training course to acquire the fundamentals of IT, including troubleshooting and virtualization.