Times are tough out there in the working world. The unemployment figures aren’t looking great, in countries like the UK wage growth has stagnated since the 2008 crash, and AI is already causing many layoffs. Most people need to work to live though, which means the most fundamental element of planning your life – job security – is so important. Unfortunately, it feels harder to come by.
In fact, many people report they would prefer a lower salary if it meant they could rely on the job for years. After all, many have others depending on them, and they need to provide. As such, a pressing modern question is “how long can I expect to last in this field/company/organization?”
In this post, we’ll list some of the technical directions that can offer you the best job security:
Technical Admin & Infrastructure Management
Any job security will generally be defined by services a company absolutely cannot function without. If that’s your goal, you want to aim for roles that are considered more of the baseline infrastructure which keeps the whole business running, no matter what the economic climate is doing. This could involve (but isn’t limited to) systems administration, cloud architecture, and network engineering. In other words, technical roles that can’t function using shortcuts.
Such employees in these roles are the people who manage the servers, make sure the internet connection is stable, and keep the data accessible. If any of these functions fail, the business pretty much stops, which makes the people who maintain them irreplaceable. If you do find a role like this it’s akin to embedding yourself in the foundational structure of any organization, which generally offers a much safer bet for long-term employment.
Digital Defence
Every single day, you hear about another data breach or a new cyber attack, and companies of all kinds absolutely dread it. Because of this constant threat, the demand for people who know how to protect digital assets is only going up, and it’s not slowing down anytime soon. Every company with an online presence, which is obviously every company now, needs someone dedicated to defence and security.
This field is incredibly stable because the bad actors aren’t going anywhere, and companies are legally and ethically obligated to protect their customer data. Moreover, turning all these functions over AI without any human oversight is unlikely at best, at least anytime in the foreseeable future. If you’re happy with educating yourself into a new field, a professional qualification like a cyber security degree can open the door to this high-demand world. It’s an area where your skills are unarguably valuable because the technology and the threats are always evolving, meaning you’ll always be needed to stay ahead of them..
Healthcare Technology
Healthcare is the one thing we all need at some point in our lives. They say barbers will never be out of work, but people can live without hair. We all want to be healthy, but people always need medical attention, regardless of recessions or how technology develops. Now, with everything moving onto digital systems such as patient records to diagnostic equipment, the need for technical staff to manage and secure this technology is absolutely massive. Getting into health tech means you’re choosing a field with deep stability and extremely high earning potential.
Just to name a few examples, jobs in medical informatics, electronic health record (EHR) management, and device security are becoming essential and also play into the two examples we gave above this section. These roles are technical of course, but they also demand a knowledge of strict privacy regulations, like HIPAA in the US. The regulations alone make these jobs niche and difficult to outsource especially overseas, which adds another layer of security to your role and there’s a good deal of room for advancement because of it.
Data Compliance
Every business has to collect mountains of data as part of their digital strategy, for all kinds of purposes, sensitive or not. The roles involved in managing and analysing this data are important, but you can increase your security by focusing on the compliance and governance of it too. For the government and in big firms, there are often specific data privacy officers or roles focused on regulatory compliance like GDPR.
In roles such as this, you’re expected to ensure every piece of data is stored, processed, and destroyed according to increasingly complex global laws. Because the legal landscape around data is always tightening and requires a full-timers perspective, experts in this area are considered essential, worth hiring and most importantly worth paying for avoiding massive fines and legal trouble.
Legacy Systems
This might sound a little odd when everyone’s talking about the newest tech, but there’s a surprising amount of job security in knowing how to manage older, or ‘legacy,’ systems. Many huge, organizations like banks, government agencies, and utilities still rely on older, more commonplace technology because the cost and risk of migrating to something new can be massive. It took quite some time for businesses to upload everything to the cloud, for example, and that took highly capable professionals to achieve.
Moreover, the people who maintain these systems are becoming rarer, which makes them highly valued and very secure in their roles. If you can master a less common programming language or a decades-old platform, you somewhat make yourself indispensable to those organizations. It’s not the most glamorous path, and some also go into it as a side, reliable administration niche to fall back on, but there’s a lot of money to be made.
Remote Work Infrastructure
The slow movement to remote and hybrid work isn’t going anywhere, as it’s just how most of the modern working world operates now. This means that organizations constantly need people to manage the tools and infrastructure that make working from home secure and efficient. Think about specialists in VPNs, endpoint access, communications, and identity access management.
You may have heard that businesses want people to come back to the office, but ultimately companies depend on these professionals for the purpose of onboarding new employees and to fix any connectivity issues across the globe. Again, it’s a side focus for some, but can be quite lucrative if you do this correctly.
With this advice, we hope you can more easily find the best job security through a technical path.
