Tech Jobs Expert: Apple Mac skills increasingly
important in IT jobs

"Once viewed as a plaything, the Macintosh is now the PC of choice for many hard-core technology professionals, and Macintosh skills are now an in-demand specialty among IT pros, rather than an afterthought," Allan Hoffman, Tech Jobs Expert, reports for Monster.com.

"'The Mac will be coming soon to a company near you, if it hasn't already,' says Brian Vaughn, executive vice president of Dataprise, a network support and IT solutions provider," Hoffman reports.

The following factors have played a major role in the Mac's resurgence in the IT world:
• When Apple released OS X, an operating system with Unix underpinnings, the Macintosh "got the attention of hard-core techno-geeks and began gaining mindshare and market share among them," Vaughn says.
• The growth of the Internet and advances in networking technologies have removed some of the obstacles to combining disparate software and hardware, making hybrid computing environments more common.
• The popularity of the iPod and iTunes has generated a halo effect around Apple and Apple products, Vaughn says. With more and more people working from home, those with Macs and iPods need tools and support to connect their computers to non-Macintosh systems at the office.

Hoffman reports, "The about-face in attitude toward the Macintosh -- and what it means in terms of the skills IT professionals require -- was evident to Vaughn when one of Dataprise's clients, with about 100 computer users, made it clear that the company needed to have adequate Macintosh know-how. 'Unless you can support our Macintosh enterprise, we're not going to be able to stay with you guys,' Vaughn says Dataprise was told."

Hoffman reports, "And now, with new Macs running on Intel chips, the Mac is capable of running not only Apple's OS X and Unix, but also Windows. 'This ability to have the best of both worlds on a single machine will result in further inroads of the Macintosh platform into the mainstream business environment -- and increase the need for those who support company IT systems to be familiar with it,' Vaughn says."

Full article here.

My Take...
Hooray! I'm ready for this...! I can't wait until I can be an IT administrator managing Mac's in a non-hostile environment. I've spent the majority of my IT career loving Mac's, trying to get them implemented into my systems environment, and extolling the virtues of OS X, only to have my peers laugh and brush it all off as nonsense. So I truly look forward to the day where Apple becomes a real, viable threat to Microsoft in the enterprise. It will be oh so sweet to look people in the eye and say "I told you so"!

Read The Full Article:
http://www.my-mac.org/index.html#unique-entry-id-444

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