When you look at the surrounding IT technologies you feel that it evolves rapidly and it sounds too challenging for IT gurus to cope with the latest updates. There is a big gap between what people study at the universities and what we see in the market.

There are more specializations available in the market contrary to what we used to see in the past, there were limited specialties taught at the universities such as computer engineering, computer science, software engineering, industrial automation, etc. Today students focus more on cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, data science, cloud computing and so on.

To keep track of cloud computing people keep on attending courses and pass exams to become certified at this field, but the cloud computing environment keeps changing almost every month if not every week. If you decide to go for passing Microsoft exams what will you prepare for will retire after some time and new release will be launched as a replacement containing all of the new changes and updates.

It is not something static, but dynamic and keeps changing, it is not accountancy where fundamentals are permanent. The technology and innovation emerge day by day and IT experts find it too difficult to keep following up the updates no matter how much you are passionate about technology after certain period of time a day will come when you will no more be able to do the same due to various reasons few of them are the age, commitment, family and personal affairs and so and so forth.

This is the situation in today’s market. The qualification obtained in the past such as computer engineering fits in different fields that it taught us low-level programming (i.e. assembly language) and high-level programming (i.e. pascal and C++), computer architecture and design, fundamentals of networking and others. Things were completely different while in today’s time the rhythm varies and looks faster. Few companies dominated the market for so many years for examples Microsoft kept controlling the end-users platform and continued to sell its operating systems with every computer selling. Today this spanned to online services where everything became centralized or hosted for you. If you used to do Microsoft Exchange administration on premise, it does not sound a good idea to do the same when Office 365 is in place providing exchange online for you without the need to have a dedicated server at work for achieving this goal. They take this headache on your behalf while you focus only on the provisioned service, no more infrastructure concern from this angle.

For you as an IT guru you should know that you are like a football player with a limited age. Footballers quit the game between the average age of 34 and 36 years old. Thus, footballers are obliged to start thinking either to begin coaching or to go for other businesses.

Likewise, IT gurus or specialists after the age of 35 should be prepared to do a balance between what they had learned during their careers and the survival plan later on. After this age the majority of people focus more on managerial stuffs by learning new skills for instance obtaining university degrees (i.e. PhD), which may become the reason of commencing a new academic career that can last for several more years ahead.

This is an avoidable part of life every person must comprehend and be prepared for, but keep in mind that nothing works out without a plan.

A plan is needed to achieve something, nothing will work out just like that. Put your plan and stay focused and do not let anybody let you down, note down your thoughts and ideas, attend courses, seminars, consult with people, and set targets or goals. Be careful of falling in a comfort zone, if you are too casual about your life you will end up a casualty.

As someone said, do not let people’s opinion about you become your reality, always work for the best and count on God.

For you to keep the momentum going on a fuel is needed. Motivation is one of the key player that can let the momentum move forward. When the going gets tough, the tough keeps going. Besides, maintaining your good health is your top priority without diving deep in this subject.

Let us learn together how can we achieve this, propose your thoughts and ideas and share your experiences.