The party isn't over for IT

There's plenty of talk these days about where IT is going after recovering from the recession. Will it be growing domestically or will the trend toward outsourcing continue to eliminate jobs in the continental United States?

Will new technologies consolidate existing systems and remove redundancies in workers' daily tasks--making a human hand less essential?

CIO.com reports in a recent blog that baby boomers and Gen Xers are steering Millennials away from a career in IT. The reason is outsourcing and cost cutting. But blogger Sharyn Leaver, of Forrester Research IT, writes that IT-related jobs are still the best potential career path for young, smart graduates looking for a place to hang their hat and grow their careers.

Here are some of her reasons:

• Businesses will depend more and more, not less, on IT functions.
• IT will become more embedded, not less, in every kind of business scenario. 
• The need for technical expertise is growing as businesses work to consolidate and get the best profits from their products.

There are plenty of IT careers that are hot right now--security for one. And one piece of advice from pros is to learn Drupal, a free software package that makes publishing and managing social content on the web easy.

Meanwhile, look around to find gaping holes in IT processes. There are likely many jobs that need an IT expert to fill in the gaps once the recession ends. Think of it this way: Even COBAL, that old mainframe language, still needs to be maintained now and then. And where are the IT workers who know how to do that?

For more on the future of IT:
- see this CIO.com article

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