Note – Before reading this post, this is an opinion piece.
AI, AI, AI! I write this post in the year 2025 and we can’t stop hearing about it. Almost every part of my social feeds personal and professional has some kind of news inundated with AI. For those in the IT industry most would have already begun using existing AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Depending on your level of ‘mental skill’ (yes I use the word mental), I already know most IT professionals probably haven’t used it at a level which have transcended their work to another level.
In my space of IT application support and engineering, the biggest gap it’s filled for me in my daily role is fulfilling gaps in my IT basics. For example, I’ve never studied Linux to a great extent before. All my Linux experience has come from the workforce and some research online. During this time I’ve never really challenge myself in the space of Linux. Since AI has been around I’ve manage to ask it to provide me scripts on monitoring and outputting logs into a more meaningful and readable in a more user friendly way. Other useful ways I’ve used AI is to run a scan of my system and output for me in a sequence diagram every hop and flow so I can see from a high level how each part of my system connects. I mean tell me that you’ve done something similar?
This use in AI has literally plugged a gap of 10 years+ of knowledge and development. Over the last 12 months using AI, I’ve felt astonished that level of detail AI has delivered for my learning and development. Further to add I’ve used it to generate me examination questions on certifications like CompTia and AWS. Please don’t feel this is another AI report by another user, and another depressing / overwhelming piece, but please read this as a, “ok AI is here to stay, there is nothing I can do to change it, what can I do at a very bare bones basic level to actually plug gaps. What can I achieve or do in 2-5 minutes that will allow me to use AI.”
Based what I’ve seen so far using AI, listening to all the media / stories and on my forward thinking, AI won’t replace all the jobs people are saying. I still can see high level of critical thinking being applied to everyday IT issues. The words ‘critical thinking’ will define one’s IT career.
Summary:
- Have a deep breath, your skills and knowledge is valuable to you and your organisation
- But you do need to acknowledge that you need to improve
- Have a deep think to yourself (might first involve going for a walk), and write down some gaps in your day to day running of your work
- E.g. I’m unsure how API’s work, define for me an end to end example of API’s. Can you use Uber as an example of how they use their API’s
Alt+Ctrl+Start 