Demand for experienced IT professionals will continue to be strong for the foreseeable future. But if you want an edge in today's competitive job market, sharpen your "CSI" skills: cloud, security, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. More enterprises are hosting their systems and services on cloud platforms for the greater agility and economic advantages they offer, and this trend is expected to grow. For this reason, the ability to develop software that can be easily deployed to the cloud will become increasingly critical. In 2021 and beyond, systems are increasingly expected to be intelligent: self-learning, self-managing, and requiring little to no human intervention.

One decade passes away, another decade comes – and it makes people think. For starters, we think about what to call the decade about to end: the "twenty-teens", the "twenty-tens"? Awkward to refer to, it may prove harder to classify. The 1920s were "Roaring," but how do you categorize a decade rife with such stark contrasts: Obama and Trump, globalism and nationalism, free trade and trade wars, prosperity and income inequality, recession (at the start) and long bull market, world peace (generally) and "permanent wars." The present is too much with us to gain perspective on what, if anything in particular, this decade will come to mean – other than the mishmash of counter-trends it appears to have been.