Is your IT job set to survive?

The major changes that are reshaping the IT profession and the IT jobs market will leave us with just three types of IT roles, says Jason Hiner.

The anxiety gripping much of the IT profession in recent years contrasts starkly with the mood just over a decade ago. A skills shortage at the end of the 1990s enabled IT pros to command large salaries through training and certification, job hopping, and, in many cases, being the only qualified candidate for a key position in a stretched jobs market.

At the time, IT was held up as a profession for the future, to which more of the best jobs would migrate as computer-automated processes replaced manual ones. Unfortunately, that idea of the future has vanished, or at least morphed into something very different.

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The halcyon days when IT pros could name their price ended with the passing of the Y2K crisis and the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Suddenly, companies didn't need as many coders. Suddenly, there were far fewer start-ups buying servers and hiring sysadmins to run them.

At about the same time, there was also a general backlash against IT. Many companies had been throwing money at IT projects in the belief that tech was the answer to every problem. Because IT had driven major productivity improvements in the 1990s, many companies were overambitious and overinvested in IT. As a result, many large, expensive IT projects failed.

When the downturn of 2001 hit, these massive IT departments presented a large target for budget cuts. As the effects of that downturn dragged on into 2002 and 2003, IT pros hoped they just needed to ride out the storm. Things would bounce back. But the unexpected happened: IT budgets remained flat. The rebound never occurred.

The present IT situation

Fast-forward to 2011. Most IT departments are a shadow of their former selves. They've drastically reduced the number of tech support staff, or outsourced the helpdesk entirely. They have far fewer administrators running around to manage the network and the servers, or they've outsourced much of the datacentre altogether.

These were the roles that were at the centre of the IT jobs boom in 1999. Today, they haven't totally disappeared, but there certainly isn't a shortage of IT workers or a high demand for those skillsets.

Today's users don't need as much help as they used to. Cynical IT pros will contest that idea until they're blue in the face, but it's true.

That's because the IT environment has changed dramatically. Traditional software has moved to the web, or at least to internal servers and served through a web browser. Many technophobic baby-boomers have left the workforce and been replaced by millennials who not only don't need as much tech support, but often want to choose their own equipment and view the IT department as an obstacle to productivity.

In other words, today's users don't need as much help as they used to. Cynical IT pros will contest that idea until they're blue in the face, but it's true. Most workers have now been using technology for a decade or more and have become more proficient than they were a decade ago. Plus, the software itself is better.

So where do those changes leave today's IT professionals? Where will the IT jobs of the future be?

1. Consultants

Let's face it, all but the largest enterprises would prefer not to employ any IT professionals, or at least as few as possible. It's nothing personal, but it's just that IT pros are expensive and when IT departments get too big and centralised they tend to become experts at saying no. They block more progress than they enable.

As a result, we're going to see most traditional IT admin and support functions...