It’s an exciting time to join the ServiceNow ecosystem, but newcomers looking to launch a career with the platform might want to arm themselves with knowledge about what roles and skills are most in-demand – and where other professionals are finding real value.
We sat down with Jayney Howson, Head of Global Learning and Development at ServiceNow, to discuss what skills are hot in the marketplace right now.
“Join the Dots” as a Business Process Analyst
Business Process Analysts, who can bridge business requirements with platform capabilities, are experiencing high demand, Jayney told us. The role sees professionals using data and technology to solve complex business and customer problems.
We asked Jayney what roles would be the closest thing to the ‘hottest roles of 2025’, if such a thing exists.
She told NowBen: “It’s really hard to say because the demand is so high… and I’m not just saying that it’s just because we are later to the game than others are.
“There are skill gaps across the piece. I think what we are definitely seeing is the business process analyst area of it.”
Jayney said that companies need someone to “join the dots” throughout the business, and the platform itself, as well as integrating AI elements. She also stressed that there is still high demand across most ServiceNow roles due to the platform being relatively late to market, when compared to competitors.
ServiceNow University offers a journey for those looking to become Business Process Analysts.
Don’t Mind Having Your Head On the Block? Be a ServiceNow Platform Owner
The role of platform owner is also becoming a significant career choice for managing ServiceNow implementations within organizations.
Jayney said that, while it’s a finite position, the role of Platform Owner is “becoming a career choice”.
“Owning the ServiceNow platform within the business or within the partner is a big opportunity as well,” she added.
Jayney said that ServiceNow has seen a tremendous response to its real-life learning events, which she attributes to having content which is not necessarily geared towards the product itself, but about driving transformation within a business using the product.
“How do you actually bring AI into the workplace? How do you lead a transformation with AI? That seems to be very much in the platform owner space, the people whose heads are on the block for the success of the platform,” Jayney said.
“They are the ones who want to understand that agentic piece.”
Why These Roles?
When asked why these roles are becoming so prominent, Jayney said that “everything is a data problem”.
“I think the gap between the AI utopia and the future is a bit of a data hell,” she said. “You have to go through this process of mapping the data, understanding what that data means. And there’s more of it than ever before. I think it’s just a massive growth in that area and there is a massive reliance that the AI has [on data].”
“I think the gap between the AI utopia and the future is a bit of a data hell.”
Jayney Howson
She added that, in the past, it was perhaps a more straightforward approach to training on a particular system and becoming skilled, whereas now, learning general agility, adaptation, and curiosity skills are very important, because “there’s no road map”.
“No one’s done this yet,” Jayney said. “So I think the business analyst role is the closest to the person who can write that.”
The Honorable Mention (To No One’s Great Surprise…)
It might not be surprising to learn that AI training has become extremely popular.
Tens of thousands of people are taking introductory AI courses weekly, and AI learning days have seen three times more registrations “than expected”, Jayney told us, highlighting the massive demand for AI transformation content.
When it comes to integrating AI, this requires an understanding of both business processes and technical implementation, not just layering AI on existing processes.
AI is a theme which underpins just about every new idea in the tech sector at the moment, and this likely won’t change for some time. If anything, it’s going to bleed into other sectors. In short: the transformation of the last few years is going to continue.
“The one thing we can be absolutely confident in is that, for the foreseeable future, businesses aren’t going to stop transforming, and they are going to need a platform to take them through that,” Jayney said.
“That is going to be ServiceNow. We’re confident in that. So skills on this platform are going to continue to increase… I will also say that anyone coming in should be building those same agility and adaptive skills, and all those human skills we need to go with that.”
Final Thoughts
Jayney is confident that ServiceNow is going to be the platform to help businesses ride the AI wave and undergo that coming transformation, and there’s certainly a debate to be had on that topic.
But on the question of which skills are in demand – and, therefore, which skills IT professionals should seek to develop and enhance – it seems that becoming the person with a long-range, zoomed out view of the entire business, and how AI relates to it, is a valuable thing to be at the moment.