Some light at the end of the tunnel
This article is old, but it does add some balance to the Clouds on the horizon:
One of the things pointed out is that the baby boomers are retiring (leaving the job marketplace). That's a big generation of people. The better ones occupied some top positions. The boomers' collective retirement will certainly ease some of the job pressures. My caveat is that a lot of boomers don't have enough savings to retire, and so will stay in the workplace as long as they can.
The other thing the article points out is that new, more generalist jobs will appear to replace the old specialist jobs. The new workers will be expected to pick up new learning quickly, and this will be facilitated by automated tools. The new jobs will be closer to business activities than say, an Oracle DBA. They will also require less training and experience, and so will command less money.
The IT worker of the future learns everything on the fly, specializes in nothing, and is closer to the resource so many managers speak of today, than the highly trained specialists currently working in the IT market. They resemble skilled business analysts with significant semi-technical skills.
The article says something like "half of all IT jobs will be gone by 2020" while I say "75% of IT jobs will be gone in five years". Both numbers sound alarmist, both are un-measurable and so practically nonsense. We write like that to give people a feel for the giant magnitude of the coming changes. No one knows how big, how fast, what sector, which employee.
All that matters to you is: you lose your job, unexpectedly, before you could get ready, and replacement jobs are hard to come by. Given the gigantic business motivation (replace up to 90% of a company's most expensive prima donnas with a service that costs 10 to 20% as much, concentrate the company on business rather than tech), the side of the volcano is about to give way, unleashing one hell of an explosion.
One of the things pointed out is that the baby boomers are retiring (leaving the job marketplace). That's a big generation of people. The better ones occupied some top positions. The boomers' collective retirement will certainly ease some of the job pressures. My caveat is that a lot of boomers don't have enough savings to retire, and so will stay in the workplace as long as they can.
The other thing the article points out is that new, more generalist jobs will appear to replace the old specialist jobs. The new workers will be expected to pick up new learning quickly, and this will be facilitated by automated tools. The new jobs will be closer to business activities than say, an Oracle DBA. They will also require less training and experience, and so will command less money.
The IT worker of the future learns everything on the fly, specializes in nothing, and is closer to the resource so many managers speak of today, than the highly trained specialists currently working in the IT market. They resemble skilled business analysts with significant semi-technical skills.
The article says something like "half of all IT jobs will be gone by 2020" while I say "75% of IT jobs will be gone in five years". Both numbers sound alarmist, both are un-measurable and so practically nonsense. We write like that to give people a feel for the giant magnitude of the coming changes. No one knows how big, how fast, what sector, which employee.
All that matters to you is: you lose your job, unexpectedly, before you could get ready, and replacement jobs are hard to come by. Given the gigantic business motivation (replace up to 90% of a company's most expensive prima donnas with a service that costs 10 to 20% as much, concentrate the company on business rather than tech), the side of the volcano is about to give way, unleashing one hell of an explosion.
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