The world of tech is changing. Over the past few years, we have seen a move towards more agile, flexible and adaptable ways of working. Teams are more likely to be able to self-organise – changing their processes to best suit their needs, skillsets, and deadlines. Many teams are also realising the benefits of removing information siloes and collaborating more with other team’s in the organisations as well as the wider tech sector.

Why is this happening? I think it’s different in each scenario, but there may be a few common factors such as:

• Improvements in team management and collaboration technologies, like Jira, Azure DevOps, and Slack which provide all team members with more power and autonomy.
• The rise of DevOps as a profession, changing team culture to promote collaboration and adaptability.
• The changing demands of tech consumers. We are all trying to react to consumer feedback quickly and efficiently, and to do this in today’s world requires use of new tools and processes.
• The growth and success of the Open Source community, demonstrating to others what can be achieved when knowledge is shared.

I think this trend is here to stay. Not only do these moves towards flexibility improve team performance in a technical and delivery sense, they also boost morale. Giving all team members more control over their work, skills, and environment ultimately leads to them having a stronger sense of belonging, team-involvement and drive towards their goals.

Because of this, I have one prediction for the near future of the tech sector: The end of specialisms is coming.

Many people working in tech are attached to their job titles because it gives them a sense of identity: being a software developer as opposed to a software tester, cloud specialist or AI engineer can bring a great sense of pride. But I believe, that because of a tech team’s need to adapt quickly, that these specialist roles and their titles may be replaced with more generalised ones: where people go from being very V shaped (having expertise in one area) to T shaped (having broader knowledge on a range of topics).

DevOps is a good place to start when looking at T shaped tech roles. Working in DevOps, you have to have a good understanding of software development, software quality, IT and infrastructure, cloud technologies, hardware.. the list goes on! My job title of DevOps specialist is actually misleading, as I consider myself a jack of all trades rather than a specialist in one particular area. My holistic knowledge base and skill set is what makes me good at my job, and I think many other roles will follow suit.

Moving towards being generalists not only improves the adaptability of a team, but helps to mitigate key risks like personnel risk and having a single point of failure in a team. It can also help balance out workloads in teams as people can step up to help others when needed.

We are seeing this already in the area of software testing. Many people do testing in their day to day work without having the word ‘tester’ or ‘quality’ in their job title. Likewise with software developers – this role is often stretched and moulded to meet the needs of the team, where developers may test, do some DevOps work, support machine learning activities.

As we transition away from being specialists into generalists, one of the main issues we will face is that people like labels! So those of us that test without being called a tester may feel like we don’t fit in to attending or speaking at events or meetings that have a target audience of testers, or applying for job roles that have a focus on testing,, even though it might be part of what you do daily and a key part of your skillset! These issues will need addressing in order to maintain growth in the tech sector.

This transition is not one that will happen overnight, but it is one that has already started. In the near future, I think people working in tech may know a bit about AI, a bit about cloud, a bit about DevOps, testing, software development etc. They may still have one area they focus on more than the others, but this will be alongside having knowledge of other topics making them a more well rounded team member, and in my opinion a better team member.