A Career in Information Technology is Hot

Not really, say the experts. While some companies have consolidated their information technology departments and outsourced in the short run, the long-term growth prospects are robust.

In fact, employers complain there are too few qualified candidates from top information technology programs seeking a career in information technology, and that the shortage of skilled talent is a major challenge to staying competitive. The U.S. Department of Labor offers these encouraging projections:

• The "information supersector," which includes Internet service providers and data processing services, will grow by 11.6 percent by 2014.
   
• The "professional and business services supersector," which includes computer systems design and technical consulting, is forecast to grow by 27.8 percent.
   
• Employment for computer and information systems managers is expected to grow by 16 percent by 2016, faster than average for all occupations.

It's true that economic challenges often require businesses to restrain spending and cut staffing. But they also encourage greater reliance on the technology that information technology professionals build and maintain, so a career in information technology is actually a sound choice.

As the world's economies recover, demand will be strongest for candidates from the top information technology programs to help build the infrastructure to support:

• Upgrading financial systems
• Clean technology
• Health care
• New media

Increasingly, ours is a data-driven economy, and the evolving technologies of the Internet are generating new kinds of business that generate, manage and analyze data.

While American companies have shifted some of their information technology jobs overseas to data centers in India and China, a study by the Association for Computing Machinery indicated that this is a smaller threat to workers in the U.S. than is commonly believed. They expect that the growth in domestic careers in information technology will outpace the two to three percent of jobs lost annually to low-wage countries.

Nor has increased globalization driven down wages for U.S. information technology workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with wage increases steadily between two and five percent a year.

In addition, the transfer of data centers to locations outside of the U.S. has changed the nature of a career in information technology. Increasingly, technology departments are recruiting "versatile workers," candidates who bring other expertise to the job such as project management, customer service, mathematics and financial analysis. A study by the National Academy of Sciences suggests that candidates who combine technology skills with artistic and creative talents, like those needed in computer gaming, will be needed as well.