The conversation around AI and job displacement has dominated tech circles lately, painting an increasingly anxious picture of an industry on the brink of total transformation. As someone who made the leap from industrial design to IT years ago, I’ve been watching these narratives with a mix of curiosity and skepticism. But what strikes me most isn’t the doomsday predictions; it’s what’s happening on the ground, in the real experiences of people navigating their careers right now.
Over the past few months, I decided to take the pulse of professional reconversions in IT. I reached out to friends, colleagues, and connections across the industry, expecting to find a climate of caution, perhaps even retreat. Instead, I discovered something unexpected: interest in transitioning to IT, particularly into roles like Business Analyst, Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Product Manager, seems to have increased. People are still drawn to this field, not despite the changes, but perhaps because of the opportunities those changes continue to create.
This shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did. Even with all the disruption, IT remains one of the few sectors offering genuine flexibility, remote work possibilities, and multiple trajectories for professional development. But more than that, I think people are beginning to understand something fundamental: the roles that center on human judgment, facilitation, and strategic thinking aren’t going anywhere. They’re just evolving.
The AI Question That Misses the Point
About the AI threat everyone seems fixated on, I don’t believe these roles will disappear, but, for sure, they will transform.
Take the Product Owner role, for instance. Could AI analyze data, generate reports, compile metrics, maybe even draft user stories? Absolutely. In fact, it should. That’s the routine work that consumes time better spent elsewhere. But here’s what AI can’t do: it can’t make business decisions. It can’t understand the organizational context: the unwritten rules, the stakeholder dynamics, the strategic priorities that shift based on conversations in hallways and Slack channels. You can’t feed an LLM your entire organizational reality and expect it to give you the customized solution your specific situation demands.
Take the stakeholder management role. That’s where the real work happens. Navigating those relationships requires empathy, organizational culture awareness, and the ability to read between the lines of what people are actually asking for, versus what they say they need. No prompt is sophisticated enough to replace that human intuition.
The Scrum Master role makes this even clearer. Yes, AI can handle velocity metrics, calculate story points, generate beautiful graphs showing team progress. The metrics are routine; let the machines handle them. But the defining responsibility of a Scrum Master is facilitation – real, human facilitation. It’s about protecting the team from blockers, coaching them through challenges, bringing them into the organizational culture, teaching them to self-organize and collaborate more effectively. These are deep human skills that require presence, emotional intelligence, and the kind of contextual understanding that only comes from being in the trenches with your team.
Every development team needs at least one person in these roles- someone who understands not just the process, but the people navigating it.
The Gap That Professional Training Leaves Behind
My own transition into IT taught me something crucial: knowing the skills isn’t the same as knowing the role. I took professional retraining courses, attended workshops, consumed content. But when I started working as a Business Analyst, and later as a Product Owner, and Scrum Master, I felt the gap between what I’d learned and what I needed to do.
The courses taught me frameworks and methodologies. They didn’t teach me how to integrate into a team, how to understand what the market expected from someone in my position, or how to navigate the subtle dynamics of organizational work. I felt that lack of support acutely, and it stayed with me.
That experience has shaped how I think about career transitions now. It’s not enough to teach people tools and terminology. They need to understand the mindset of each role, how it translates within different organizational frameworks, whether it’s SCRUM, AGILE, or WATERFALL. They need to know who they’ll communicate with, what responsibilities they have versus what falls outside their scope, and how their involvement shifts across each stage of the product development cycle.
Most importantly, they need practical examples. When you’re writing your first user story, what makes it clear and actionable? How do you ask the right questions to set correct requirements? What does good reporting actually look like? These are the details that separate someone who knows about a role from someone who can perform it.
SkillsToRise Hub: Structure, Clarity, and Support
This gap between learning and doing is what led me to start a passion project named SkillsToRise Hub. It’s an educational and community focused initiative set to help people transition into one of these four roles: Business Analyst, Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Product Manager.
I’m not trying to replace formal training or compete with established programs. What I want to offer is something different: structure, clarity, and support throughout the transition process. The kind of guidance I wish I’d had when I was starting out.
The core of SkillsToRise Hub is a series of digital guides, with comprehensive resources that break down each role from multiple angles:
- What does the role actually entail?
- What mindset do you need to adopt?
- What tools you’ll use and how to assess whether the role genuinely fits you?
- How does your position function within the team and who you’ll interact with day-to-day?
- What responsibilities do you have?
- Just as importantly, what responsibilities you don’t have?
Beyond the guides, I want to build a community. Because career transitions are about finding support, asking questions, and learning from others navigating the same path. I share stories from my own experience, not as definitive answers but as conversation starters. They’re meant to spark curiosity and establish trust – to show that I’ve been there, in those moments of uncertainty and doubt.
I’m also planning face-to-face workshops and exploring video content, from short AI-assisted explainer videos for social media to longer webinars on streaming platforms. The format will evolve based on what the community needs, but the goal remains constant: to offer people the resources and support that will make their transition smoother and more sustainable.
What the Response Has Shown Me
When I started sharing content about SkillsToRise Hub on LinkedIn, I wasn’t sure what to expect. At first, my posts reached mostly colleagues and friends. But with each post, the audience expanded. I began receiving connection requests, and many of them from people already working in these roles who were curious about what I was building.
More significantly, I heard from people at different stages of this journey. Some were considering a career change and wanted to understand more about what these roles involved. Others were already in one of the roles but felt they were struggling, questioning whether they’d made the right choice, looking for guidance to fill in the gaps their training had left.
Those responses confirmed what I’d suspected: there’s real demand for this kind of support. Professional reconversion to IT is still happening, and people need more than just courses and certifications. They need community, mentorship, and practical guidance rooted in real experience.
Looking Ahead
Right now, SkillsToRise Hub is a passion project. I’m not focused on monetization, though I’m not ruling it out for the future. I can imagine offering tiered guides – keeping beginner-level resources free while providing more advanced, detailed guides with applied examples for a fee, or a series of paid webinars on YouTube. But for now, the priority is building something genuinely useful and establishing a community where people can support each other through this transition.
The narrative around IT jobs and AI often feels apocalyptic, as if we’re all standing on the edge of obsolescence. But what I see in my work, in my conversations, in the messages I receive, is different. I see people recognizing that the most valuable skills in tech aren’t the ones that can be automated, but the ones that require human judgment, empathy, and collaboration.
These roles aren’t going away. They’re becoming more important. And for those willing to make the transition, willing to learn not just the skills but the role itself, there’s still enormous opportunity in IT. What they need is the same thing we all needed when we started: the right support to bridge that gap between knowing and doing.
About My Story
I have a formal education in industrial design, but many years ago I decided to make a switch to the IT industry, working my way up from customer service representative to test engineer, business analyst and scrum master.
Currently, I am Product Owner of the Office Timeline R&D Team at RomSoft, collaborating closely with the Product Manager, UX/UI, and engineering teams to explore concepts, validate ideas, and shape early product directions through rapid prototyping and iterative experimentation.
In May 2020 I became PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)®, and by October 2020 I took my Scrum Master and Scrum Product Owner Certifications granted by the International Scrum Institute™ (Scrum Institute). In January 2026 I obtained the Enterprise Product Management Fundamentals Certificate, granted by Microsoft.