IT careers: Less confusion means more students
Young people are not choosing technology careers because of confusion rampant across IT, according to senior industry figures.
According to Queensland government CIO Peter Grant, students today are no longer sure just what a career in IT entails.
Speaking at the Australian Computer Society's Great IT Jobs Debate yesterday, Grant said of a recent skills summit that some of the participants, especially the high school and university students, said they didn't choose careers in IT because they "couldn't figure out what it looked like".
It is "time for us to actually put on the table what a career looks like," he added.
According to a report from the Department of Education Science and Training, IT student numbers have been declining since 2001, with 2006 recording a 13.6 percent year-on-year decrease in new IT students.
Grant's solution to help define IT has been to create a framework detailing four different streams of jobs, which is now used in the public sector.
The first stream is having a career in "build[ing] stuff", where workers can be a programmer or an engineer. The second is working within the services industry, where they might work for firms such as IBM or Microsoft, or work in internal relations and IT office support. The third stream is change management, helping implement IT changes within an organisation. The final stream of IT work is planning how the architecture of the future will look like, not just the technology but also how it affects businesses.
Grant said that if the industry doesn't communicate how many people work in these sectors and what is being spent, then: "We are underselling just how wonderful and diverse an IT career is."
Charles Noble, IBM development executive for global technology services, told the event: "I don't think that we as an industry have really well communicated to the public the difference we make to life and the opportunities that are available to graduates."
According to Noble, there are graduates working for IBM in Australian research and development teams as part of worldwide projects to solve some of the world's most difficult problems. Among others, he talked of projects to find virus solutions in Africa, projects to conduct traffic management systems in Europe and Asia, and projects to better understand global warming.
Noble said that jobs in IT have diverged from the backroom coding stereotype. By the time people have completed 10 years within IT, Noble continued, they will have had two or three different careers.
"All the boundaries are blurring," he said.