Training Toolkit

Is IT a good career choice?

Greg Ross CNET News.com

Published: 03 Aug 2005 11:30 BST

Being in IT for my entire career, parents and young college students frequently ask me whether I think it's worth it for them to pursue a career in IT. The last time someone asked me that, I had to really stop and think about what my answer was. Let's assume that the person is mentally tough enough to be in the field, and knows that there is rarely such a thing as a 40-hour workweek. Instead, let's focus on the issue of whether they will be able to get a job. Although the IT job market has rebounded nicely from the recession, there are still a lot of challenges to breaking in to a career in IT.

One of the challenges, especially for recent college grads, is the decreasing number of entry level IT jobs in major American corporations. Many large US companies have outsourced help desk, application support, and programming jobs. And companies that haven't outsourced these jobs are trying to fill them with fewer and fewer people. In the past, these entry-level jobs were where new IT professionals could break in to the industry with a large company and get that much needed real-world experience. Now that there are less of these jobs, how does a young college graduate break into the field?

While it might not be the ideal job situation, young graduates could try and get a job with an IT vendor or IT services company as a "road warrior". These jobs deal mostly with travelling to remote client sites and providing on-site support, upgrades, and maintenance to their systems. Usually, these jobs consist of network and PC support, but they can also involve application type support. Depending on the type of company you work for, you may also get the type of hands-on experience that may lead to better jobs as a network engineer, security specialist, or application support leader. The pay is not always great, but it does provide exposure to a broad range of IT skills.

A second option is to try to land a programming job at an IT vendor or a company in an industry that works with processing a large amount of data (i.e., publishing, financial services, insurance). These companies may be more likely to hire entry level programmers because they have a lot of custom development needs in areas where the level of complexity may not be as great as other industries. Pay is usually a little better on the programming side of IT, and it opens up a lot more doors than the hardware side.

In my opinion, the safest option is go get a second degree, or at least minor in finance or accounting, in addition to computer science. With all the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance issues around today (and in the foreseeable future), there is no shortage of compliance related IT jobs. Heavily regulated industries will continue to have compliance related needs for decades ahead. While it may be difficult for existing out-of-work IT pros to put food on the table and go back to school for a finance degree, young college students are in the perfect position to add the skill set to their resume in order to better position themselves down the road.