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In many professions, it’s not that easy to switch to a job in a completely different industry. Specialized knowledge and skills are often associated with various positions within specific industries that make changing fields difficult ─ at least without extensive, additional education and training.
That’s why most scientists remain in science-related professions. Most doctors remain in healthcare or related fields. Most financial professionals remain in finance. If you’re a mechanical engineer, you’re probably not going to easily transition to a job in civil engineering. It’s possible to switch to another industry or profession. It’s just not necessarily easy in many cases.
Things are different for information technology (IT) professionals. Industry-specific knowledge typically isn’t as important as IT expertise and skills. (Note: there are exceptions, but they aren’t that common.) That’s because IT is the backbone of just about every industry. While the applications, software, and infrastructure may vary, the IT needs are similar whether you’re dealing with a hospital, a manufacturing facility, or a retail company.
Consider that almost all organizations today employ computers, the internet, mobile devices and telecommunications systems. Most also view data as their most valuable assets, and count on IT to help them manage that data, manipulate it, store it, share it, and analyze it.
Not surprisingly, many companies have similar IT needs, and their IT professionals face common challenges — most of which aren’t industry-specific. For example, data security and privacy, and increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats are issues just about every organization and their IT departments deal with these days.
Regardless of industry, most IT professionals also are tied up with similar responsibilities, such as deploying new software, upgrades, and patches; regulatory compliance; keeping pace with technology changes and emerging trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI); managing business continuity and disaster recovery; maintaining, upgrading and working with disparate IT systems; dealing with IT resource shortages; accommodating an increasingly distributed, remote workforce; and more.
Many also deal with similar IT systems, which aren’t industry specific, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM). Even much of the software used is often the same, with Microsoft 365 leading the pack.
That’s not to say that specific industry expertise isn’t valuable. For example, experience dealing with the compliance requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) may not matter much to manufacturing companies. It will, however, help with IT operations in healthcare.
What does this all mean for companies that want to outsource some of their IT responsibilities or opt for assistance for specific IT projects? Do you go with an IT services provider that has demonstrated expertise in all things IT? Or do you try to find one that has experience in your specific industry? If IT issues are similar across industries, does it matter?
US Signal is somewhat unique among IT services providers in terms of both its IT-specific and industry-specific expertise. Our staff of solution architects have a depth and breadth of IT experience, along with the leading industry certifications. They’ve dealt with — and developed effective solutions for — just about every IT challenge imaginable. That includes helping companies migrate workloads to new cloud environments and architecting hybrid environments to accommodate new technologies as well as legacy systems. (Read our customer stories for specific examples.)
Just as important, they’ve worked with customers across an equally broad range of industries: healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, automotive, and many more. They understand the unique parameters, trends and challenges often associated with IT operations in various industries and market sectors. That includes compliance requirements.
If your company is in the retail industry and required to comply with PCI DSS, US Signal can help. Is your organization subject to the requirements of HIPAA, FBI CJIS, or GDPR? US Signal has the expertise in these areas too. Are you in manufacturing and interested in moving to the cloud but can’t afford to have any downtime during the transition? US Signal not only knows how to do it. We’ve done it.
There’s significant value in working with a company like US Signal that has both broad IT expertise and multi-industry experience. Among the benefits: less of a learning curve (if any) to get up to speed on industry-specific requirements, challenges and trends. There’s also a greater opportunity to leverage lessons learned from similar projects for other customers in the same or similar industries.
To learn about US Signal’s depth and breadth of IT expertise across multiple industries, download Customer Stories and read about our work with six companies in six different industries, each with their own unique needs. To learn what we can do for your company, call 866.2. SIGNAL or email [email protected].
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