Over the course of my lengthy, 5 day (including the weekend), vacation. I began thinking about the overall state of the IT economy.
IT is slowly comming out of its 3-4 year economic slump as it has before and will again. Its a cyclical thing. Get used to it. So, heres the real question: How does IT become a profession instead of just a technician’s job?
Allow me to set some specific guidelines that are widely accepted so we don’t have to negotiate a few terms.
Profession:
pro?fes?sion Audio pronunciation of “profession” ( P ) Pronunciation Key (pr-fshn)
n.
1.
1. An occupation or career: ?One of the highest compliments a child can pay a parent is to choose his or her profession? (Joan Nathan).
2. An occupation, such as law, medicine, or engineering, that requires considerable training and specialized study.
3. The body of qualified persons in an occupation or field: members of the teaching profession.
2. An act or instance of professing; a declaration.
3. An avowal of faith or belief.
4. A faith or belief: believers of various professions.
Technician:
n)
n.
An expert in a technique, as:
1. One whose occupation requires training in a specific technical process: an electronics technician; an automotive technician.
2. One who is known for skill in an intellectual or artistic technique.
Now, when doing my undergraduate studies I was taught that a profession was much more limited than the above loosely based definitions in that a profession was limited to requiring an advanced education where admittance to the field would ultimately be determined by a profesional organization by passing some form of standardized testing procedure(s). That is to say actual ‘professions’ would include: Physicians (not ‘doctors’ which is a pet peeve of mine), Dentists, Lawyers, Certified Public Accountants and Engineers. Short list all and all.
What the IT industry instead or has allowed to become an area where anyone can call themselves an ‘IT Professional’, ‘Computer Technician’, ‘Network Engineer’, et. al. without the slightest bit of actual training or knowledge. Theres simply no law against it. Though I suppose I could buy a garage and refer to myself as a mechanic its just as useless for me to say.
Are we hurting ourselves by not setting the highest of standards? In an industry with a surprising number of standards applied to nearly everything we do we are surprisingly lax about setting standards on the human capital side of the equation. How does a technical field become an acredited profession?
Calling much of the support staff: Engineers or Network Engineers really ticks off the 4 year PEs (Professional Engineers) of the world. Yet, I have a Bachelors, Masters and Ph D in Computer Science and much of what I do and have done in the past requires a great swath of cross disciplinary skills, i.e. Heat disapation, economics, structual engineering, bandwidth analysis, break and fix, forecasting, statistics and an entire host of others. These are just a tip of the iceburg when you think about it. How would a newly created professional organization set testing standards? Its been tried before and obviously failed miserably. Same can be said for unionizing IT.
My observation is that IT needs to strive forward in order to be taken less for granted and more like other recognized fields of study. Untill IT decides what type of field it wants to be the field will forever be given a back seat to more developed fields of study. Theres a good deal to be done here and I am interested in hearing or reading your remarks on the situation as these are all very broad statements and questions.
Enjoy!
– beads
