The golden opportunity

Today the job market for Information Technology is “Exploding” all over the world. This is a golden opportunity for many students, and new graduates because of the shortage of technically skilled people. The most interesting news is the highest shortage is not in the U.S. or Europe but China as this country is in a rush to implement the new policy to be the next “Technology center” for the world since the “Manufactures center” for the world model is now obsolete.

A 2017 global study concluded that the world will need at least three to five million workers in technology fields each year to meet the high demand. However, despite the high number of jobs available, few college graduates are qualified because their training programs are NOT keeping up with what the industry needs. The study warned that unless there is an urgent solution to solve this shortage, the global economy will be slow down significantly in the next few years. Today every industry is relying on information technology to operate. As more automation and robotics technologies are being implemented, the need for more technical workers has become a major concern for most businesses. The advance of technologies such as Artificial Intelligent, Robotics, Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, etc. has created a very big skills gap that will take many years to fill because most schools are slow to adapt to these changes. In the U.S. the job market is so hot, many companies are hiring people even without a college degree. Google, Facebook, Apple and many more, all announced that they will hire anyone who has the skills that they need. An executive said: “It does not matter where they learn the skills, whether self-learning or online courses if they have what we need, we will hire them.”

To seize this golden opportunity, students need to select a high demand field of study and develop their skills accordingly. They need to follow the market trends to broaden their knowledge and respond quickly to the changing in job market conditions. Even having a job, they still need to continue to learn new things to keep their skills current with technology changes. By knowing a foreign language such as English, they will have more choices, more companies to choose to work for as the job opportunity could be in another country.

Sources

  • Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University