Observations on the Techie World
Just my take on what the world of IT and technology is all about.
Wednesday 8 August 2007, 5:08 PM
IT industry in crisis.
Back in the 90's IT as a career was seen as a good option by students entering further and higher education this meant lots of qualified IT workers and happy days for the IT industry.
The proliferation of off shoring coupled with a general downturn in the market after 2000 however, put a lot of skilled IT people out of work and because they were quite skilled pretty intelligent people they either decided to do something else or simply went else where.
This short sited attitude to IT workers back then has given IT, as a career, a rather poor image, after all who wants to study a subject for years at university only to find all the jobs have gone to India when they graduate. This has lead to a massive downturn in the numbers on IT courses and has therefore lead to the situation we now find our selves in. Numbers going into IT courses has only just started to improve, so it will be years before we get greater numbers of IT graduates.
Now thats great for people like me who still managed to get work during the lean times and are now much in demand but is bad for industry as a whole. However I can't help thinking that short term profiteering by off shoring everything in site is a lot to blame for the situation. When CTOs realised that lots of their off shored projects were failing they decided to bring the work back in house and, oh dear, found there were no longer skilled workers left to do it. That situation has also now been compounded by a general upturn in the market.
People got stung pretty badly and it's going to take a long time for those memories to fade. IT is now no longer seen as a good career choice and as it takes so long to acquire the skills needed in this business the problem is not going to go away over night. This is compounded by the fact that much of the work still done in the UK is very highly skilled as most of the simpler stuff is still off shored. This makes entering the IT industry very difficult as you need a very high level of skill to fill even junior positions these days.
Now I'm not against off shoring all together but something should have been done several years ago to limit the number of jobs going off shore, therefore sustaining the IT industry in the UK. The consequences of this short sited 'gold rush' in the early part of this decade is going be felt for years to come.
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