The IT Industry Desperately Needs to Get Cooler
Information-technology jobs are suffering from an image crisis among young Americans, says Fortune’s Geoff Colvin, and that poses a significant threat to U.S. businesses (no link available). In just a few short years, careers that once were seen as cool now are thought of as dweeby. Enrollments in computer-science programs at U.S. universities have plummeted since hitting a 20-year high seven years ago, notes Mr. Colvin, echoing of the concerns expressed by some prominent U.S. technology executives. Nationwide data aren’t available, but “some schools saw enrollment drop to 25% of what it had been,” says Kate Kaiser, an associate professor of information technology at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wis. What happened? “The pop-culture image of infotech workers flipped from dot-com billionaires in Gulfstreams to Dilbertesque drones writing code in cubicles and Third World masses working for pennies an hour,” says Mr. Colvin.
The U.S. technology sector can afford to lose those cubicle-dwelling programmers to developing nations, writes Mr. Colvin. But the exodus of students from computer-science programs hurts more, partly because of the impact on the quality of technology leadership in the U.S. The Society for Information Management, a professional group, recently published a report that suggested that perhaps half of the chief information officers in the U.S. aren’t as good as they should be, often because they lack business acumen, says Mr. Colvin.
“A lot of IT jobs in the future will deal with face-to-face interaction,” says Stephen Pickett, CIO of Penske Corp. and a former president of SIM. To try to feed more talent into the tech sector, the group has been holding sessions across U.S. universities to raise information technology’s profile among students. OPT CUT: At Boston’s Northeastern University, speakers talking up the benefits of careers in information technology included the IT chief from the Red Sox, and the founder of a hip-hop Web site. — Robin Moroney
Source: WallStreet Journal
Information-technology jobs are suffering from an image crisis among young Americans, says Fortune’s Geoff Colvin, and that poses a significant threat to U.S. businesses (no link available). In just a few short years, careers that once were seen as cool now are thought of as dweeby. Enrollments in computer-science programs at U.S. universities have plummeted since hitting a 20-year high seven years ago, notes Mr. Colvin, echoing of the concerns expressed by some prominent U.S. technology executives. Nationwide data aren’t available, but “some schools saw enrollment drop to 25% of what it had been,” says Kate Kaiser, an associate professor of information technology at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wis. What happened? “The pop-culture image of infotech workers flipped from dot-com billionaires in Gulfstreams to Dilbertesque drones writing code in cubicles and Third World masses working for pennies an hour,” says Mr. Colvin.
The U.S. technology sector can afford to lose those cubicle-dwelling programmers to developing nations, writes Mr. Colvin. But the exodus of students from computer-science programs hurts more, partly because of the impact on the quality of technology leadership in the U.S. The Society for Information Management, a professional group, recently published a report that suggested that perhaps half of the chief information officers in the U.S. aren’t as good as they should be, often because they lack business acumen, says Mr. Colvin.
“A lot of IT jobs in the future will deal with face-to-face interaction,” says Stephen Pickett, CIO of Penske Corp. and a former president of SIM. To try to feed more talent into the tech sector, the group has been holding sessions across U.S. universities to raise information technology’s profile among students. OPT CUT: At Boston’s Northeastern University, speakers talking up the benefits of careers in information technology included the IT chief from the Red Sox, and the founder of a hip-hop Web site. — Robin Moroney
Source: WallStreet Journal
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