Diane Morello, a vice president and research director at Gartner, predicts that those who remain in the field will become "IT versatilists, equally at ease with technical and business issues." Travis of AMR Research calls them 50/50 professionals. Fairchild Semiconductor’s Watkins brings up a similar picture: "The IT cohort of the future has to be a good technologist and protector of technology, but also be a savvy businessperson."
Will the IT professional of today want the position of tomorrow? Some will and some won’t. "The content of jobs is changing and will continue to," says David Foote, president of IT management consultancy Foote Partners. "A number of people I know who are really smart stopped working in IT when they realized what it would take to be this hybrid, versatile person. They’ve said, I’m not interested in being a [multitasking] Swiss Army knife. I want to be a big bowie knife."
Consider this hypothetical company in 2010, for example. Paul, the Cobol programming expert who once boasted that he spent all day every day for a year doing Y2K remediation, doesn’t work in the IT department anymore. He’s begun a second career as a carpenter and is actually enjoying spending more time with his family. At his old desk sits Bianca, who has an MBA from Boston University. Just back from a two-year stint at her company’s office in Ho Chi Minh City, Bianca has a meeting to discuss a business case for a joint marketing and IT project in the morning, and will review the post-implementation audit of the recent biometrics installation over lunch. In the afternoon, she has a Six Sigma class so that she can effectively manage the development of a CRM project at the company’s Chinese outsourcer.
Like Bianca, the IT applicants of tomorrow will have to position themselves differently. "I tell my students that the job market is forevermore global, not local," says Venkatraman, who advises his protŽgŽs to consider taking a position in Ireland or India or China if only for the sheer market value of global experience. "You may think there’s a shortage of your skills locally, but companies aren’t going to look at local value alone anymore. You need to compete globally."
Despite downward pressure on U.S. IT salaries (the average compensation for tech workers grew just 1.7 percent from 2001 to 2002, while inflation was 2.2 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute), experts expect wages to stabilize. But IT workers hoping for the fat paychecks and big bonuses of the past will be sorely disappointed. Normal cost-of-living increases and enough lift to keep up with other corporate positions are more likely, agree Intel CIO Busch and SIM’s Markle.
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