Industry trends 2012
According to the latest industry study (June 2012), Information Technology (IT) spending is forecasted to reach $4 trillion in 2013, and created additional 12 million new jobs worldwide. As more companies are using information technology, the amount of data is increasing ten to hundred percent and these data must be stored, organized, updated, and analyzed accordingly. The study predicted that there will be 4 million new IT jobs to be created in relate to the collect, analyze, organize and store of these massive amount of data (Big Data). The U.S will need at least 2 million additional workers in this field but there are not enough skilled workers available so the shortage will be severe. It is estimated that the U.S industry can only get about two hundred thousand qualified workers and the rest must be outsourced. However these skills are also in critical shortage worldwide and it would take several more years to fulfill the demand. IT workers with skills in Database, Data mining, Data Warehouse, and Data analysis experts will be in very high demand. An executive said: “These jobs will be needed to grow our business, data collection and analyses are critical for every industry in this information age and they are the future of the new information economy.”
Today most IT systems are fully connected. The IT industry is entering a new era where the integration of cloud computing, social collaboration, and mobile technology are essential. This is also a time of accelerating change, where many old IT systems are becoming obsolete, as well as many IT training programs worldwide. Not long ago, computers are mostly stand alone, workers develop software in isolation without any collaboration but today every systems are connected with new collaboration processes, new integration methods, and new development techniques. Therefore university trainings must also change to adjust to this aspect. An industry representative said: “School official must understand that the next age of computing is already here. We need to work together to aggressively change our training programs to meet the urgent need. Industry like to see more trainings focus on data mining, cloud computing, and mobile applications. The cloud computing will be the foundation for everything; mobile is the key platform for all development, social media is only possible via the cloud, and “big data” will be stored in the cloud with all the “Killer apps”. Connection is the permanent fixture and the foundation of all future IT business. If you do not understand and knowledgeable about connection and collaboration between IT systems, you will not have a future in IT industry.” An executive commend: “The trend is so obvious and it has been around for decade but I do not understand why schools and students have not figure it out. If the schools are still teaching the traditional software development methods, your students will not have jobs.”
Today, companies are quickly moving into cloud computing for cost-cutting. Software is no longer just a product but also a service. This change brings new approaches to applications development with more focus on integration, and security. As mobile phone have reached the 4 billion users worldwide with over 2 billion are smart phones, about half of global workers will access the Internet via their mobile devices and it will become the prefer way. A software executive explained: “Mobile apps development is the new wave, similar to web application five years ago and personal computer software more than ten years ago. This is an area when all future development jobs and all future applications will be. As the whole world is connected, people will interact with each other via their mobile devices wherever they go and workers will be much more productive than today as they can work anywhere.”
We can see the evidence of such mobile workers as in less than two years, iPads and other tablets already become more common in business than laptops. Large companies are ordering million of these mobile devices for their workers. At the same time, fewer people are buying PC or Laptops and it is predicted that by 2016, two third of computer users will use tablets and mobile phones instead of PC. It is also predicted that in the next three years, social computing will become even more important as it is moving from individuals and groups to business and companies. Social computing is changing the fundamentals of management from “top down to flat out” where workers make their own decisions based on their roles and responsibilities. They will tap into a continual stream of information from internal and external sources to get the information that they need to make decision, they do not need direction or supervision as businesses today have an endless opportunities for transforming decision-making, discovering new insights, optimizing the business, and innovating the industries for efficiency, effectiveness and higher profit than ever before.
All of these changes require a fundamental change in the way students are educated. As technology continues to evolved, lifelong learning is becoming a necessary skill and continues education for adults will be the norm in education.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
