High tech jobs
Over the past decade, high-tech jobs have shown substantial growth all over the world. The term “high-tech” is defined for industries, occupations, and products in which the newest technologies are used. These technologies shape the design, development, and introduction of new innovative products. As high-tech companies apply scientific and technical knowledge to solve problems and create new products, they need workers with knowledge of science, technical, or engineering. When making decisions about what areas to study, college students need to know that in addition to better job prospective, higher salary, these jobs are also provide more opportunities to advance than any other areas.
The use of the Internet and wireless technologies has exploded all over the world, creating phenomenal growth for the information technology (IT) industry. The demand for skilled workers has exceeded the supply so there is a shortage of IT workers in almost every country. In additional, high-tech goes beyond computers, software, and the Internet as it is now evolving into many newer fields such as Biotechnology, Bio-computation, Medical informatics etc. Students in these areas need in-depth knowledge of both theories and practices of science, engineering, and mathematics, acquired through college education ranging from a bachelor degree to a doctorate. Although most high-tech jobs require college degree in a specialized field, there are also some jobs that do not require college education. For example, workers operate and repair the products used in high-tech industries. These include computer and office machine repairers, network installation and maintenance, and electronics technicians. Most of these occupations only require an associate degree or several months of vocational training.
The latest U.S government study estimates that by 2020, hightechnology employment will need approximately 8.5 million workers globally. Between the 2010-2020 period, the shortage of hi-tech workers is projected to be between 1.5 to 3 million. As employment of high tech workers increase, so is employment of high tech managers. According to survey data, for every twenty high tech workers will require a high tech manager, if the shortage for workers is projected to be 3 million than the shortage for manager could be at least 150,000. These projections should be used by career counselors when helping students make career selections or schools could also use these projections to plan training and educational programs. Among the high tech jobs, computer scientist, software engineers and information system management are projected to have the fastest growth among all occupations. In addition, the number of information technology support workers are also expected to increase by 57% as more companies are updating their information systems and networks.
Since technology is changing rapidly, many training programs also need constant update. This create significant pressure for some state schools. especially in developing countries as they usually do not have the most current training programs. With globalization, if you cannot catch up, you will be left behind and it already happens in several countries. For example, there is a high demand for high tech workers in India but also a high unemployment of high-tech graduates because many of them are not properly trained. The latest Indian government's survey found that over 70% of high-tech graduates could not work in the high tech industry as their knowledge and skills are obsolete. The state school training programs are many years behind other countries and are still focusing mostly in theories, not practices. It will take many more years to catch up but unfortunately by that time, technologies will probably change already. Therefore from the state owned schools, it is impossible to meet the need of the high tech industry. Today, high-tech companies have two choices: They can hire then retrain these graduates, which is very expensive since they have to pay them when they are under retraining. They can create their own private schools in which students will have to pay them for their training, in this case they can select the best graduates for their companies. A majority of company selected the second choice so in the past five years, private colleges owned by high-tech companies are becoming the top choice among students. For many years, state schools are the prestigious and highly respected but now it is the private schools that have the most practical training programs and are in high demand since they develop better skilled workers for the industry. Even country like China, for many years do not allow privately owned schools is now accepting the fact that private school is the better solution. In just few years, there are large number of private colleges emerged all over China with high number of students enrollment.
The challenge for college entry students is to explore educational and training opportunities that will lead them to high-tech careers. They need to find the right training programs, the right schools that have the most current programs.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
