Business trends once dictated changes in technology, but we’re starting to see a fundamental shift in that technology trends are now driving drastic changes in business.  Lisa Samson, a Director at ES Technology, a division of The Execu|Search Group, believes that “This shift is going to impact what employers expect from information technology professionals and the kinds of skills they’ll need to develop over the next few years.  Not only will expectations change, but these advances in technology also signal a rise in jobs being created in order to cover the new technology demands.”

According to The Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in the computer and information technology sectors will increase by nearly 22% over the next 5-7 years. This spike in employment is due in large part to several technology trends that are driving big changes in business:

1.The growth of cloud services – Over the next ten years, the market for public, virtual, and private clouds is expected to increase from $40.7 billion to $242 billion. The demand for virtual clouds is expected to increase due to the need for organizations to operate separate, designated clouds within a public cloud structure.

2. Security – The security sector will see some big changes in the near future as states and large corporations demand the merging of information and physical security internally.

3. Voice Recognition – The number of mobile speech recognition platforms will grow as more voice driven cloud services are introduced. Apple’s Siri and IBM’s Watson are some of the driving forces at the moment.

4. Internet Dependency – Expect the Internet to connect to more than PCs and mobile devices. Virtual connection engineers who link the Internet’s common thread to consumer devices, corporate assets, and packaged goods will be in high demand.

Along with these forecasted technology trends, the demand for the following types of professionals will be increasing in the next five years:

1. Project Integrators

2. Dual Security Developers

3. Cloud Administrators

4. Virtual Connection Engineer

5. Natural Language Speech Scientist

The reversal of cause and effect when it comes to the tech and business worlds means that in-house techies are not only expected to set technology trends, but also keep up to date and make smart choices about the ever-growing pool of available technology.  For this reason, professionals who wish to stay relevant and desirable in the next five years must be flexible and willing to pioneer the integration of new tech and media methods.