Technology

Why choose IT as your career?

By Ted Pin ⋅ April 28, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

I used to be a teaching assistant at my college when I was student there. I taught introduction to programming to Management Information Systems majors. By “taught,” I literally mean taught; between five other assistants, we lectured, graded, and answered the questions of all the class’s 80 students.

One day, a student moseyed into the TA office and, after a few words about the upcoming lecture, suddenly became very quiet, as if he was unsure whether or not to ask what was on his mind. I encouraged him to go for it and he asked abashedly: “Can you tell me why I should choose this career?”

We had a long talk about that. Afterward, I began to realize how many of our students were, in one way or another, asking the same question.

First of all, I’d like to distill what an IT career tends to entail. Whether you’re working for a buttoned-up large corporation, a small local company, or a paradigm-shifting outfit like Google, IT people are basically divided into two basic roles: designers and builders.

Designers, like architects, decide what elements are needed, where they should go, and how they should work together. They produce blueprints.

Builders (better known as developers), like construction workers, translate blueprints into functioning technology systems. They produce code, computer hardware, and networks.

Often, designers are builders, and vice-versa.

So, why choose IT as your career? Well, the first thing most people want to know is how much they can get paid. Information technology people are some of the highest paid groups, on average, in any organization. For non-management positions, the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) indicates that IT workers, on average, earn 77% more per year than any other occupational category [1].

Obviously, specific professional occupations, like doctors and lawyers, can outrank IT by a good margin. However, when compared in terms of the BLS occupational categories, only Legal Occupations outrank IT - and only by $13,000 per year.

Why? Information Technology people are responsible for building and maintaining the computer systems that keep modern companies running and competitive; without those systems, some would lose literally millions of dollars a day, while some would simply go out of business. Imagine what would happen if your bank stopped functioning because a natural disaster damaged its networks, resulting in interrupted deposits and withdrawals. People might overdraw their accounts, miss payments, etc. It would wreak havoc for the bank, its customers, and all the other businesses that depend on those same customers. Hence, IT people are paid well to provide their critical, behind-the-scenes service.

Now that we have the compensation piece out of the way, are there other reasons to choose IT as a career?

There are many (albeit subjective) reasons to enter the IT industry.

The biggest one is that IT is a great place for people who like problem solving. Both designers and developers in IT are confronted with many variagated puzzles almost daily. They are tasked with creating fixes for very tricky problems, like how to balance a website’s user-friendliness with the number of features it has, or whether it’s better to make a program faster or crash less.

One of my favorite things about IT is that you are always building things. Whether it’s a database, a piece of software, or a network, the feeling of accomplishment you get from knowing what you built actually works, and works well, is a feeling like no other. If you ever made paper airplanes as a child, and were constantly tweaking a plane to make it fly further, faster, or higher, and you  succeeded, you know how it feels.

On a more pragmatic note: the time and cost for learning IT skills is very low. This means that you can learn well-paying skills very quickly. In fact, many highly-skilled IT people are mostly self-taught. Additionally, computers are cheap and give you access to endless amounts of information via the Internet that are like launch pads for developing whatever skills interest you - website design, programming, database design, security, and even building computers. Through the course of my career, I have acquired enough skills to have been paid for three of those five types of jobs and have allowed me travel the world on someone else’s tab - and all at relatively very young ages.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about an IT career is that you are building skills that you can use to join an exciting startup or start your own business (both of which I have done continue to do). Because IT skills are, I believe, very easy to pick up, and because the cost of creating a new website, piece of software, or other “next greatest thing” is just the cost of a computer, some cheap (often free) software, and your time, you really will have a shot at becoming the next Google or Facebook.

But, if all that risk is not your style, you can always get a good gig with a big corporation. In Michigan, the unemployment rate for IT workers is around 2%. The unemployment rate for all sectors is over 7%.

Good luck and happy building!

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