"Over the next few decades demand in the top layer of the labor market may well centre on individuals with high abstract reasoning, creative, and interpersonal skills that are beyond most workers, including graduates."
-Economist, vol413/num8907, Oct 4, 2014, "Special Report: The Third Great Wave. Productivity: Technology isn't Working"
The rest of the Special Report lays a convincing argument that people who have automation-creation as part of their primary job duties are in for quite a bit of growth and that people in industries subject to automation are going to have a hard time of it. This has a direct impact to sysadminly career direction.
In the past decate Systems Administration has been moving away from mechanics who deploy hardware, install software and fix problems and towards Engineers who are able to build automation for provisioning new computing instances, installing application frameworks, and know how to troubleshoot problems with all of that. In many ways we're a specialized niche of Software Engineering now, and that means we can ride the rocket with them. If you want to continue to have a good job in the new industrial revolution, keep plugging along and don't become the dragon in the datacenter people don't talk to.
Abstract Reasoning
Being able to comprehend how a complex system works is a prime example of abstract reasoning. Systems Administration is more than just knowing the arcana of init, grub, or WMI; we need to know how systems interact with each other. This is a skill that has been a pre-requisite for Senior Sysadmins for several decades now, so isn't new. It's already on our skill-path. This is where System Engineers make their names, and sometimes become Systems Architects.
Creative
This has been less on our skill-path, but is definitely something we've been focusing on in the past decade or so. Building large automation systems, even with frameworks such as Puppet or Chef, takes a fair amount of both abstract reasoning and creativity. If you're good at this, you've got 'creative' down.
This has impacts for the lower rungs of the sysadmin skill-ladder. Brand new sysadmins are going to be doing less racking-and-stacking and more parsing and patching ruby or ruby-like DSLs.
Interpersonal Skills
This is where sysadmins tend to fall down. A lot of us got into this gig because we didn't have to talk to people who weren't other sysadmins. Technology made sense, people didn't.
This skill is more a reflection of the service-oriented economy, and sysadmins are only sort of that, but our role in product creation and maintenance is ever more social these days. If you're one of two sysadmin-types in a company with 15 software engineers, you're going to have to learn how to have a good relationship with software engineers. In olden days, only very senior sysadmins had to have the Speaker to Management skill, now even mid-levels need to be able to speak coherently to technical and non-technical management.
It is no coincidence that many of the tutorials at conferences like LISA are aimed at building business and social skills in sysadmins. It's worth your time to attend them, since your career advancement depends on it.
Yes, we're well positioned to do well in the new economy. We just have to make a few changes we've known about for a while now.