'It Takes Two to Tango'

I have looked at articles on this topic, most  of them published since about the year 2000, and a few important things emerge clearly from this exercise. Here's a very brief overview of what they are:

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• The shortage of skills, measured as the difficulty in hiring the right people for a job, has increased year on year since the beginning of the twenty-first century.

• The workplace’s job needs mutate with time, witnessed by the fact that a search on ‘IT skills needed in <name a year>' vary markedly depending on which year you choose. They may often overlap but are sometimes totally different.

• Jobs themselves also mutate over a few years or even disappear. In fact, it is said that half the jobs which will exist in five or so years do not exist today and many that are around today will not exist tomorrow.

Example link here?​

• Almost any specialisations, such as in AI, machine learning, cybersecurity etc., are not islands of skill, remote from the rest of IT but are embedded in the IT scene and a knowledge of the IT entities surrounding these specialisms is important. This mandates that anybody entering an IT career – specialist or general – needs a base understanding of the IT universe.

• Commandment: Man cannot live by specialisation only, but from every topic in IT. Remember Isaac Newton's; 'If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants'. IT specialists should stand on the giant base of a general IT education.

• Can you imagine a medical specialist (consultant) reaching that position without going through general medical school or equivalent? Of course not, but that is exactly what is happening today in IT education. I have examined many specialist course curricula and only ONE had any prerequisites at all. What does this tell us?

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It tells me, at least, that there is a great and growing need for a general, underlying IT education path with routes to specialisations and/or internships/apprenticeships. These latter do not stand alone and will lose value without a view of the rest of IT from 5,000 feet.  Such a course does not exist but it should, covering pragmatic aspects of IT and evolving with IT. Static courses in such an environment are of limited value: in short, of limited use and with a sell by date on them..

 

This background education should provide introductions to scientific computing, enterprise (often mainframe) computing, graphics and scientific client/server applications plus fixed methodology material such a SLAs, DR, PDWs etc. If you do not know what these important terms mean, you are a candidate for this general IT course. These terms are de rigeur in IT. As an example, SLAs are of great importance in cloud computing as are other skills which may not be obvious to the general IT employee population.

put iceberg pic here?

A common misconception around computing is that only IT department people need to know IT. This was true 40 or more years ago but consider the situation today. Unlike the 'old days', IT and business are closely coupled and business changes, for example digital transformation, is a joint effort between these parties, meaning that each needs some knowledge of the other's needs and concerns.

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What Knowledge is Needed?

One outcome of this is that executives/managers need some knowledge of IT at a suitable level so that they can partake in the initial design phase alongside IT and ask questions pertinent to business aspects. A example is RTO (recovery time objective) for the recovery of their application after an outage thereof. They should also understand the objectives of a BIA (business impact analysis) where potential outages are assessed for possibility of occurrence and recovery from it should it occur.

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These topics are only a few that need to be understood by management and IT practitioners and at the appropriate level of detail.

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Who Dictates What Skills are Needed?

What is the answer? The skills requirements should come from those that need them and who suffer if they are not available, not from academia or politicians. The latter are often, in my view ultracrepidarians, a term coined by essayist William Hazlitt  for people who know nothing about a subject but pontificate mightily thereon.

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There are several sources which list the skills that IT needs, produced by industry bodies, technical organisations, standards bodies, authors and research organisations such as Gartner, Forrester, IDC and others. Needless to say, they rarely agree in skill type or urgency of need,

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