Public
New Blog Post: Everything new is old again, or, the next 10 years of IT careers, described. http://is.gd/WT22To
As an IT generalist I am assuredly biased, but I don't see this role going away any time soon.
The IT generalist has his or her fingers in every technology out there. He or she understands how things are configured and how they need to interact with other things. At this time, I don't see most young or old office workers having an interest in anything beyond getting their job done with the tools they're given.
The white collar baby boomers have a decade or more left in them, and most of them are still hopelessly lost with any new technology. Many of them need their hand held for essentially plug and play operations like installing a new wireless router or printer. Considering the current rate of change in technology, I don't see that getting any better.
My experience with the Millenial generation is that they're good at using the relatively inflexible, pre-configured devices such as those from Apple, but they are quickly lost when something goes awry, or God-forbid you give them something that's rough around the edges. I have noticed a distinct lack of people under 30 at the user groups I run (GRWebDev, GRPUG, GRLUG), which says to me that they generally aren't interested in more advanced knowledge of the tools at their disposal.
The refrain I hear so often from people of any generation is, "I just want to use it, I don't want to understand it."
The examples you give in your post are power users. There always have been and I hope there always will always be a few people like them who want a deeper knowledge of the tools they're using, but I don't see this becoming the norm.Jun 1, 2012
that's pretty close to my follow-up post, ben!
What I see happening over the next ten years is that people will become able to do easily what the old it generalist used to do - but there will be an entire new set of things which are now /possible/ but /hard/. As long as the generalist learns to do these before the general public, I think he can do just fine. :-)Jun 1, 2012- I do regret a little bit of my rhetoric in the post, tho. I should have set up the 2nd post better.Jun 1, 2012
I think you are right that the IT generalist skills are often made super easy now - with new tools. However, I see 2 common failures in management related to this. Thinking "young people" automatically know everything about IT. I have seen plenty of reasonably smart recent graduates that have huge gaps in super basic IT ideas. And second not understanding the most important thing is understanding how to solve business needs with IT.
If asked to get data on our website, going and finding Google Analytics and then seeing it is super easy to setup is one thing - that really anyone semi-competent (and not scared of IT) can do. Knowing that is what will help solve the business need is the huge gap. I see plenty of people that would be able to implement what is needed but can't figure out what that should be. Frankly that was one of the things that separated a good IT generalist from someone that could just do that IT stuff when someone else figured out what was needed.Jun 2, 2012- Thank you for the comments - I have a new blog post up, part II of the (two part) series -- http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/unchartered-waters/everything-old-is-new-again-ii/Jun 7, 2012
Add a comment...