There seem to be several IT professionals in this group who are doing well financially, so I thought I would ask this in here.
I have been asked by a family member, who has a child who may pursue an IT career, about the long term viability of this. The main concern is the threat of offshouring and the subsequent reduction in jobs and therefore financial remuneration.
You've gotta be hands-on to make money - which is why plumbers / joiners / bricklayers are in the money now, because you can't outsource them kind of jobs.
Helpdesks, programmers etc not doing well as they can be well served by india / africa. My specialist market was decimated 9/11/01 and I've got by since by falling back on my exchange / sql / server skills and running as part-time IT manager to a bunch of local companies and getting my hands dirty on some rollouts.
The ones who are struggling are the ones afraid of work. Rates are nowhere near what they were pre 9/11/01 for general IT stuff. My advice is to have a second string to the bow - I've done electrical retail to make ends meet in the not too distant past.
i've done IT in the past and you gotta be REALLY good at it these days as most people can do the basic crap that companies used to pay people shit loads to do! i've done general office jobs that have paid more than IT, actually cleaners probably get more than IT people :)
Yep, that is a major part of the concern. The only part I can see that is not open to outsourcing is sales and installation. However I know several people in the US who perfom that kind of function who have been dropped in favour of imported foreign workers (H1B). so even that might not be safe.
Thing is you had something to fall back on. You had the oppertunity to learn exchange / sql / server skills at some point and work somewhere to gain experience in those. so when you got to a local company to offer these skills you are proven. If you were just leaving uni with a degree in comp sci \ IT \ soft eng, etc can you get a job if the big firms, which take the majority of grads, have no internal IT?
I am in a similar situation to you, but I don't know if I would enter IT now if I were 18.
Even the BCS are admitting that outsourcing is a problem but there solution is to up skill. which is great but everybody has to start at entry level, and that is the part that has gone offshoure.
So would you give the advice to go to uni get a comp sci degree (or similar), pay a lot of money in fees, etc and then try and get a grad job?
Of course you can... but as a grad with no experience expect 12-15k/yr max. Best to take day release and do bricklaying / plumbing / electrical as a course for a fallback, or if you really want to make it in IT from an academic point of view become an electrician to earn money and study for a higher qualification part time.
No. I'd say you look for an apprenticeship kind of thing, get into a company with an IT dept and work up. Experience seems to count more than qualificaitons (it did when I employed people) and you get the character and confidence that way. If his intention is an analysis / architect role then the academic background will help.
Don't rely on the IT job being high paying. High rates come with experience and reputation and with having a portfolio of good clients under your belt. Until you get that you have to be prepared to work for low pay.
As with other careers much depends on chance and necessity. I never thought that I would be making all of my money from IT. I used to be a biochemist and had quite a good career at that, however science and computing are now locked together. Most of my colleagues tend to be engineers and physicists, both good backgrounds for a particular type of IT work.
The major reason I earn decent moolah is because I know a f*ck of a lot about a type of network that no one else has much interest in. There is just a slack handful of people in the UK who can do my job and they're all busy too. In consequence we get paid well to keep us sweet and to make sure we do daft things - my working week can be 72-96 hours some weeks, 0 the next. I've ended up driving to some remote corners of the UK to work and ended up doing 24-36 hours without a break, then sleeping all day in a hotel (hard to do, the sodding maids keep waking me up).
Howeer like the eatanter I have painted myself into a corner. If the work dries up, there's probably not much else to go for in the same line of work. Hence I keep up to date and reinvest my dosh in training courses and in prospecting for new work.
I don't think anyone will be doing this straight out of college. Even if they are capable, credibility is hard to obtain without "doing time" in the industry.
So errm short answer, if the child is bright, can cope with maths of a high order then I'd suggest taking a maths, physics or engineering degree rather than an IT qualification. Because after that there will be many more careers choices open. If the child can't hack that sort of thing then I'd think hard about IT as a career because then you'd just be in the bracket of those whose jobs can be sent abroad easily.
I get about five or six 96 hour weeks a year, I get about three weeks a year where I'll only be working a day or so. It's a bad time at present (OK a good time for pay) because someone promised someone very important that a huge network upgrade would be completed before January.
Its nice job once you get higher up, pre 2000 I was earning 30+ an hour, now its no where near that, I stopped contracting in 2001 to go full time, mainly look after Exchange 2000 servers, rates vary but expect to start at around 15k pa rising to 30k+ for managers.
IT has changed alot since I started, it used to be you had to specialise in
1 subject and you carried on doing that, now you tend to have do everything and get paid less money. The area you live makes alot of difference as well.
I started doing an MCSE back in 98 on NT4 then worked on 2000 and now 2003, I like MS products and most companies I have worked for insist on MS, except the councils who still use Novell.
I would suggest if you want to get into IT webdesign especially JAVA and Flash are still very good area's to specialise in, as well as SQL server.
Brickies earn more than IT staff due to the house shortage at the moment, so perhaps think of manual labour.
There's alot of money in network installations and plenty of it but you need to know what you're doing when setting it all up. Every startup company needs networking doing and have a wad of cash to be parted with. Once they've gone bust you can look forward to the next company coming along and starting over again.
Do a gap year first in whatever you think it is you'd like to do, so you know whether it's for you before you shell out on a degree. Work out what the typical entry requirements of the type of company you're aiming to go into after uni are. Make sure these will be met. Get as much and varied work experience as possible (gap year, all the uni holidays, summer internships etc).
Not sure I'm "doing well" exactly, but I get by :)
It's viable - computers will only become more and more common - and even though reliability is continually improving, people are always gonna be needed to fix things when they go wrong, and perform the necessary upgrade every 3/4 years.
HOWEVER, if this is really an issue, then he needs to be looking at building, plumbing, electrician, etc. etc. - they're where the money and security are these days.
BUT, surely it's MUCH more important that he ends up doing something he actually enjoys ? I entered the I.T field cos I like the work - and that was pretty much my only reason. You wouldn't catch me doing a job I didn't like, in a million years - regardless of the pay and security.
Liking your job is the most important thing ! What could be worse than toiling from 9-5 every day for the rest of your life, doing something you don't actually enjoy ?
You can't really outsource the "in person" jobs - so as long as he doesn't end up being telephone-tech-support or a programmer or whatever, then he's pretty safe.
Also bear in mind that outsourcing is only really something that large companies do. If he ends up working in I.T. (personally, or part of a team) for a smallish firm, then there's very little chance his job will go away - they like having people onsite.
No - I would go to Uni, to do whatever I liked doing. Which is exactly what I did, infact...
If he's into Music and stuff, then he should do a Music degree. If he finds foreign language a challenge, then he should do French. etc.
Choosing a career based on it's prospects is loonacy - what if he hates it ?
The whole "career thing" is neither here nor there anyway - as long as he likes the job he ends up with, then all is well. Whether that's as an MCSE for a large enterprise, or an English teacher in Japan (as a couple of my friends have ended up doing) doesn't matter does it ?
If money is a major issue, then he should be looking at being a Merchant Banker, or an Auditor or similar. A friend of mine is a Senior Auditor for the BBC, on £60K per year. But he has to live next to London, commute for almost 2 hours per day on a crowded tube, occasionally work weekends, rent a LUDICROUSLY EXPENSIVE teeny flat, etc. They'd have to pay me £INFINATE to put up with that sort of life :)
I tried an IT degree. It was really crap and I hated it. I realised that my interest in computers went no further than GNVQ IT. I couldn't hack the maths either (does anyone else in here think that 4 and 7 look exactly the same)
What's the child good at? You can stick an ad in the paper and go round fixing people's computers at their houses for quite a few quid.
The industry I work in is Information Design / Technical Authoring. Contractors can earn loads doing this. An IT knowledge and background can really help. You can get sent all over the world. My company has just sent a guy to Barcelona for 6 months, in which time he will earn £26,000 before tax, plus get two free return flights to the UK per month and a free flat for the first month until he finds his feet. I'd take the rest of the year off!
My course was dead easy (if you're good at it of course) and only had 17 people on it, plus it's the only course of its type in Europe. Unfortunately I had to do it in Coventry but it was worth it. I walked literally straight out of uni straight into a £21,000 salary job with really great prospects. Doesn't mean I'm well off though, as everyone here knows, I drive a £250 C reg Nissan Micra...
Anyway I don't want a career, this job is a great way of getting my foot in the door and I'm making a name for myself but I'd much rather be self employed in a few years, after having travelled the world. I'm currently saving up/paying off uni debts in order to reach this goal.
It's a shame that people are now following an educational route in order to get a career. It's turning us all into oily cogs of the corporate machine.
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