How to gain a unique advantage in the marketplace?

by Oguz Alpoge
January 17, 2014

Today, I wish to write about competitiveness through uniqueness.

Irrespective whether you are a startup, a job seeker or even a large corporation you always have to follow and adjust to the trends in the marketplace. You will shine by implementing the latest and more practical technical solutions.

I wish to give examples from my experiences in my profession. Whenever I wanted to be recognized among the many tens of thousands of job seekers and small businesses, I had to become an early adopter. For instance, the same happened with my accepting Java and .NET as my main goals at different times of major turns in my profession.

It is extremely important to follow trends in demand by consumers and corporations. Whenever you see a new technology emerging you could easily become an early adopter by learning and experimenting with it. If you gain experience in this technology you will automatically become unique in the marketplace. This is true both as a job seeker as well as a small business.

Currently, browser client technologies are increasing in popularity. Social media and mobile technologies are evolving and being accepted worldwide. In terms of devices, it is expected that there will be 8.6 billion handheld or personal mobile-ready devices including 3 billion smartphones with advanced web browsers by 2017.

Here is the forecast by CISCO:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_c11-520862.html

"By 2017, there will be 8.6 billion handheld or personal mobile-ready devices and 1.7 billion machine-to-machine connections (e.g., GPS systems in cars, asset tracking systems in shipping and manufacturing sectors, or medical applications making patient records and health status more readily available, et al.). Regionally, North America and Western Europe are going to have the fastest growth in mobile devices and connections with 13 percent and 10 percent CAGR from 2012 to 2017 respectively."

Some publishing houses have already started concentrating their efforts in HTML5, JavaScript libraries and CSS3 alone. It will be interesting to see how many more advanced client-side libraries will be developed until 2017.

Another particular example is Sitefinity which is becoming a very popular content management system worldwide. Sitefinity is made by the Telerik Corporation which is famous for its ASP.NET components and the KendoUI JavaScript library. Even if the number of job requirements on Sitefinity is not high as other technologies like C#, ASP.NET, Java or SharePoint you will still gain recognition. This is because there are less people available with this experience.

I suggest that startups and job seekers pay attention to recent studies and reports on worldwide trends.

In terms of training, it is our mission to provide you with hands-on training which will be valuable and necessary for the growth of your professions and businesses.