Week 8. Depiction of an IT professional in Estonia

 

 In Estonia, professional IT specialists must have a wide variety of skills and knowledge to be eligible for working in a quickly developing information technology environment. One of the main qualities that a professional specialist must have is understanding the basics of how a computer works. Throughout 20 years many improvements and changes have been made in computers and other digital devices. Some parts of PC like processors have been changing significantly, some devices like smartphones have been invented and some devices like floppy disks became obsolete. Many less significant things have changed as well and now it is almost impossible to keep up with all the inventions in the IT field, so a good specialist in Estonia must have general knowledge of how devices and their parts work. The same can be said about programming. In those 20 years, Java frameworks and libraries had become immensely big, Python and JavaScript gained more popularity, but some languages became forgotten. Therefore as in Estonia, there are a lot of IT companies a wide general experience in many programming languages is required.
In the previous paragraph, I spoke about the quickly developing IT world and that a specialist must have a good general knowledge of everything, however, this is not enough to achieve great results. The most important in my opinion are problem-solving skills. IT is logic and consistency, those basics have not changed throughout 20 years, because they are the foundation of information technology. While most of the machines still rely on binary numbers those qualities are playing the most important part. IT specialist years of working are a great value for measuring how many problem-solving skills this individual has. Because the skills are a matter of time and passion.
So the third quality is the attitude of a specialist. He must have a passion to solve problems in IT, he must have an objective to improve his skills every day because most of the IT tasks are not easy, and possibly that is the main reason why IT specialists are so valuable in our country. During the last 20 years, more people got involved in IT bringing more competition to the field. So in comparison with IT specialists 20 years ago, you should also be active online to show that you really are a specialist and to not get lost among others who may probably be less experienced. At present, IT specialists must be active in forums and platforms such as Stack Overflow or GitHub to share knowledge and learn from others as well.
And the fourth quality is a profound education in the IT field. It is important because it may give a future specialist all features described above in one place and in a relatively short time. Throughout 20 years, education in the IT field had made considerable changes. Many new programmes are now offered and subjects became more oriented on what IT specialists are doing at their work. Modern subjects in Information Technology universities put a big emphasis on practice and large enterprises try to make education easier and fun by developing programs for learning, writing books and filming videos.
In conclusion, I can say that at present in Estonia, where the IT field is expanding quickly, any of the qualities mentioned above are important to be a professional IT specialist. Any newcomer in IT should be orienting on those qualities to reach proficiency in IT.