Forecasts for technology architect jobs: Increasingly sunny after a few more years of stormy skies

In the world leading up to a few years ago, the IT industry had become increasingly specialized. Specialized products and people with very specialized skillsets. Of course, a lot of that is still prevalent today. As a result of this, many employers then wanted to hire people with specialty skillsets to deploy and operate their specialty products. In the last 20 years in the IT industry, the need for an architect has certainly existed, but has gone largely unrecognized. Why? Architects tend to have a breadth of skills across many areas, and are oftentimes, no longer experts at any specific technology. If a hiring manager is implementing product X though, they want a specialist on product X, not someone with a breadth of skills across several areas. Sure, some companies have architects on staff, and some companies actually know what to do with them, but many do not. This has created a bit of a gap in my opinion, in that architects only have job opportunities with companies who actually understand their value.

Thankfully, the times they are a changin' though. With the advent of cloud computing, and the notion of delivering IT as a service, I believe that organizations who don't know what an architect is, or what their value is, will soon start to realize it. As these companies start to move some of their IT services to providers, they'll discover that a hole exists in their existing staff's skillsets. They'll discover that they need people with skills to coordinate all these disparate systems and also that they have a surplus of specialists, some of which may be able to fill this void, but many that will not. So they'll recruit new people with these skills. They may not understand that someone with these skills is often called an architect, nor is that even important, but they'll at least recognize the need for the skills. When this happens, I believe the job forecast for architects will grow at a significant rate.

Unfortunately in the meantime, architects still face the minimal roles that exist in the marketplace today because many companies have yet to recognize the need. If/when companies figure out that these skills are often possessed by someone called an architect, they may even seek someone with an architect certification (such as the IT Architect Certification (ITAC) from the International Association of Software Architects (IASA)), although it remains to be seen if certification will help in the way that it did for all the "specialist" certifications of years gone by. Regardless, if you're an aspiring architect and trying to determine what skills you might be missing to succeed in the role of an architect, I'd at least recommend checking out the IASA Architect Proficiency Matrix...you'll find you need a lot more than just technical skills!

So existing architects...continue being effective ones, and aspiring architects...start rounding out your skillsets. I believe it's a career with a bright future...provided you can continue to weather the stormy skies for the next few years :).

Update
Since I posted this I came across a couple of articles that are also worth a read and related:

• IT Careers 2020: Cloudy days ahead (from Computerworld magazine) and its tagline "When the cloud blots out the classic IT shop, only the tech-savvy business experts will weather the storm."
• The Rise of the Chief IT Architect (also from Computerworld magazine) which contains the following quote: "The most difficult set of skills to recruit are blindingly brilliant IT architects," McDermott says. "It's an almost impossible job because of the scope of process knowledge you need to possess and the scope of [technical] knowledge you need on how to enable that process architecture."