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Do you really need to choose IT as a career?
TWO years back information technology was considered to be the most wanted field for study in this country. Many young students and professionals from diverse fields took a chance on making a prosperous career out of IT, thinking that it would change their fortune overnight.
That was the general conclusion without understanding the term itself and paying any heed to some basic questions, such as what’s the future of IT? The areas of specialization in IT? These misconceptions lead to yielding quantity but quality product for our IT industry.
Information technology deals with the accumulation, storage, management, and retrieval of data. Besides, it involves the development of the hardware and software that handle this massive data accumulation and storage.
It can also be defined as the use of a range of technologies, especially computer systems, digital electronics and telecommunication, to store, process and transmit information.
It can be subdivided into various special fields, depending on the individual requirements of a particular segment of industry or commerce. However, the broad-spectrum categories of opportunities available in IT include programmers, network technology specialists, systems analysts, enterprise systems developers, web design and management, and technical articles writers.
Future of IT
Human history is sometimes broken into four major ages:
(1) Hunter-gatherer Age (up to about 10,000 years ago);
(2) Agricultural Age;
(3) Industrial Age (began about 200 years ago);
(4) Information Age (began about 40 years ago).
We are living in information age. Information technology is all around us, every day, in every way. Computers, and the technologies behind them, have altered almost each and every aspect of our society; no matter it is business, government, military, entertainment, or the home market. We shop, conduct our banking transactions, and book our vacation and business travel arrangements online. Computers not only alter the sounds of the music we listen they also influence the movies we see. They enable virtually instantaneous communication with people at the far corners of the world. They put the whole world at your fingertip; whatever you would like to do you just need a click of mouse.
In recent years, we have been seeing a steady increase in the amount of computer and telecommunications technology being used in our educational system. This is opening a window for innovations, competition, and major change in our educational system. In fact, we are barely on the threshold of changes but many of the current components of our formal educational system will be hard pressed to meet the challenge, implement appropriate innovations, and survive the changes that are inevitable. The pace of change has been increasing — and this is built on huge changes that have already occurred.
During the next ten years, the widespread availability of new and cheaper information technology will trigger many highly visible shifts across the commercial landscape. Traditional barriers (such as price) will continue to fall away.
Some growing areas in IT forecast the future of IT, by knowing these areas we will be able to guess that where the IT is heading. We should also know how many and which type of jobs are there for IT people to predict the future of IT related people.
Growing areas
There are seven key emerging technologies which have spawned the growth of major new market opportunities. Users looking at new technologies should explore the prospects of semiconductors, multimedia, object-oriented programming, neural networks, massive parallelism, groupware and distributed environments. Among these seven growing areas the three largest growth areas are semiconductors, multimedia and object orientation, parallel processing is another important aspect of growing areas in IT.
Perhaps the greatest opportunities of all will lie at the intersection of all these seven technologies.
The most reliably robust advanced technologies and markets in the next five to ten years will be located in the above listed seven sectors. Why there? Because these areas intersect needs with growing opportunities. The needs they address are very real, increasingly apparent and not well addressed by their more customary rivals or opponents.
Semiconductors: They are used to make chips, diodes, transistors, photoelectric devices etc. We can say that the semiconductor is the mother of all technologies. All other computing technologies are based on it.
Multimedia: They deal with hardware and software for media compression, media storage/ transport, workstation support for multimedia, data modeling, and abstractions to embed multimedia in application programs. The future of multimedia lies in virtual reality (VR).
Object orientation: This is the best way to deal with the exploding complexity of multimedia data types and event-driven, message-oriented processing. To overcome software bottlenecks object-oriented technology offers the most hope.
Parallel processing: This will promote far greater hardware efficiency and scalability than is possible with monolithic von Neumann architectures.
Groupware: This is increasingly important as it drives communication down into the application, allowing the natural interaction among humans to grow out onto the network.
Distributed environment: Cooperative processing relies on distributed storage and distributed operating systems. A distributed system or environment is a collection of independent computers that appear to the users of the system as a single computer. It’s future lie in wireless “virtual networks”.
Neural network: It is concerned with the modeling of brain and behavioral processes and the application of these models to computer and related technologies. Applications that require pattern recognition, such as speech recognition and machine vision, neural networks approach works very well.
IT-related people
No doubt IT is committed to employment equity. It encourages women, aboriginal peoples, persons with disabilities and members of visible minorities to work and earn peacefully, but there are some aspects which may discourage the people willing to join this field, it might appear that the job market for skilled information technology workers is on a decline.
Since last year, there’s been a 44 percent drop in demand for IT workers in the US, according to the Information Technology Association of America. But, there are still plans to hire 900,000 technology workers this year. Why? Because they want people having the right skill set.
Several sources indicate that there are currently between 350,000 and 400,000 IT jobs waiting for the individuals with the right skill-set to fill them and join the approximately eleven million individuals currently employed in IT-related positions.
The IT field has created more wealth (almost in 30 years) than virtually any other single technological advancement in the history of mankind. It created over 7,000, millionaires or billionaire which no other industry has created.
Careers in IT
Types of jobs available in IT include computer systems analysts, programmers, engineers and computer operators and so on (see table).
For getting a good job in IT field you can choose to write system or application packages or both. You’ll need to learn one or more programming languages, such as Visual Basic (VB), C++, Java, C sharp, Visual C++ (VC++), RPG-IV, and COBOL.
Web design, and website administration are also fields that will need many skilled individuals over the next decade. In this side, primarily you have to deal with the creation and maintenance of web sites.
Database system is another important field in IT. Database systems are designed to manage large bodies of information. For building, maintaining and managing a database system you should learn oracle, Structured Query Language (SQL) server or My SQL for back end programming and for front end programming you can use VB, developer 2000,VC++ or Visual InterDev.
Knowledge of network and internet fundamentals is essential, as is the ability to program effectively in HTML, XML as well as the development of Active Server Pages, Java Server Pages, Java Scripting and SQL.
On the career side, training is an essential factor, and it’s really important in IT to keep skills sharp, so there must exist a strong commitment to continuous learning, both formal courses and opportunities for things like job shadowing and assignments.
However, even in today’s uncertain economy, IT professionals are in demand, and many companies looking to hire are committed to diversity. However, the types of jobs available are changing.
No one can deny the absolute importance of the ITC sector in today’s business and economy but, because of the nature of technology, a lot of time is spent keeping abreast of its latest developments, you don’t just focus on a single technology, there are constantly new challenges to take on, and new things to learn. It’s an ever-changing world and you always try to stay on top of the latest developments, which is possible only when you are fully equipped with right skill-set of IT.
The wirter is a final year student of BS at department of computer science, Karachi University
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