What Can I Achieve With an IT Career?

With a worldwide financial meltdown in progress, and major league players like Yahoo! announcing that they suffered a 64% downturn in profits in the last fiscal quarter of 2008, is this really the time to think about a career move into IT?

The marketplace - is IT really that important?

Well, it's not all bad news on the job front in the UK. Research published by the Globalisation and Economic Policy Centre at the University of Nottingham(2) has said that although one in seven private sector jobs are lost in the UK each year, more are being created in their place. The indications are that the private sector work market is extremely fluid.

Dr Peter Wright, associate professor at Nottingham University confirms this notion of a constantly evolving marketplace: "This shows how dynamic the UK employment market is. This also has important implications in terms of training provision, as many workers are likely to need to regularly change or update their skills."

The growing and transient job market has shifted position in the UK over the past 30 years, away from manufacturing and towards IT based industries - ranging from the financial sector, multi-media applications, even the much-maligned call centre. The opportunity for careers in IT has never been broader, or more accessible.

The widespread adoption of the Internet as a tool for business has seen a surge in 'over the 'net' sales. In 2005, 93% of business in the UK with ten or more employees reported that personal computers were being used in day-to-day business (2).

Amongst the largest businesses (those with 1,000 or more employees), the figure was nearly 100%. This demonstrates quite clearly how essential information and communication technology (ICT) has become to the UK and indeed the global economic model.

The same survey by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) found that in 2005 the value of sales over the Internet was £103 billion, accounting for 34% of sales across all kinds of ICT by non-financial sector businesses. If you include the financial sector into that equation, the numbers increase dramatically.

Even industries that you would not normally expect to be heavily influenced by the use of IT, such as wholesale, retail, catering and travel, reported the highest value of sales over the Internet at £49 million, representing £47 out of every £100 of goods sold.

The clear indication amongst all these statistics is that jobs in IT have never been more important to the global economy. Without a solid foundation in the application of ICT technology, a business will be hard pressed to compete on equal terms with its rivals. Which is why IT careers will continue to offer both opportunities for employment in almost any marketplace and a decent salary to boot. The stale, hackneyed vision of 'speccy techs' in the IT department of any company is now passé. Geek is the new chic.

IT career development

Over one million people are currently employed in the IT sector, and over 150,000 new entrants are needed by a whole range of industries in the UK every year. However, your horizons are not just restricted to the UK. With internationally recognised qualifications crossing borders and country boundaries, the chance to work anywhere in the world has opened up the movement of IT professionals across the globe. The international oil industry, for example, is prepared to pay well for IT professionals who can incorporate their IT training into oil exploration and research into alternative fuels.

If heavy industry is not your particular field, then the more creative industries now rely on those with good IT qualifications and experience to supply them with ever more exciting visual images - on their websites, their advertising and their marketing. Without the benefit of IT, the Internet would be a far less visually stimulating place. Starting salaries in the industry average around £23,000. With higher level qualifications and a willingness to continually update and compliment your training, that figure can rise considerably.

Working life has changed dramatically in the past few years, with more people starting to realise that the possibility of working from home gives them a greater control over their work/home life ratio. Christopher Pissarides, in his keynote address to the Austrian Presidency conference on Innovations in Labour Market Policies(3) concludes that, "...essential labour market reforms include an increase in the flexibility of employment."

Although he highlights the UK and the Netherlands as being the most pro-active countries in developing a more flexible working environment, the advent of a new age in which IT careers play a dominant role can only help to improve that situation. IT is a multi-faceted career choice that enables people to be particularly selective about how they work and how their career develops. It gives them the opportunity to take back control of their careers.

With the right IT training, which can be incorporated into career development or run parallel to an existing job, the potential marketplace opens up for a candidate. Networking (a particular growth industry as the national boundaries break down between businesses), database administration, web design and programming are all real-time opportunities, once the appropriate training has been applied. A senior web designer can earn as much as £40,000 and, if you cast your net further afield and look to working abroad, can be much higher.

So what can you achieve with an IT career? Take your pick - of locations, of job descriptions, of future career development - whatever you like. The limits are only ones that you impose yourself. The IT industry is far from fully grown, and with the rate of technology development growing rapidly, there is little chance that a newly qualified IT specialist will be entering a shrinking marketplace anytime soon, despite the poor figures from Yahoo!.

In the 18th Century, the Industrial Revolution propelled the world forward into a new age. In the 21st Century, it is safe to assume that the second revolution, the Technological Revolution, has only just started.

(1) HRM Guide 2008 - University of Nottingham
(2) Office of National Statistics, e-Commerce survey
(3) Innovations in Labour Market Policies: Challenges in Times of Globalisation - Vienna, 16-17th February 2006