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Is IT a "safe" industry to work in?

ThuggerThugger

in-terms of the industry always looking promising with jobs available?

Reply 1

Trinculo

Any sector is going to have openings for you commensurate with your skills and experience.

Reply 2

ThuggerThugger

Original post by Trinculo

Any sector is going to have openings for you commensurate with your skills and experience.

Not true, I was once on the doll and the amount of unemployed fully qualified plumers I ran into was a joke.

Reply 3

Trinculo

Original post by ThuggerThugger

Not true, I was once on the doll and the amount of unemployed fully qualified plumers I ran into was a joke.

What I'm saying is - your skills and experience are what are most important for IT and this will be reflected on the demand side. If your skills are that you are a MCSE from 10 years ago and you have 1 years experience on Windows 7, then you're not going to do very well. If you are recent and up to date with Cisco, have experience and you also knock holes in walls - then there will be a lot more work for you.

Reply 4

ThuggerThugger

Original post by Trinculo

You are describing the entire job market here but simply applying it to IT and changing words.. you need to first get a job to get experience..

Reply 5

winterscoming

Demand for skilled IT professionals has been increasing at an exponential rate for as long as companies have been using IT to run their business (which is over 50 years now, going all the way way back to the 1970s when businesses were investing in huge mainframe systems). The constant feature of IT jobs is that everything changes all the time, and the skills which people need to be able to stay relevant is constantly evolving. The key is always to not allow yourself to stagnate.

For example, 10 years ago there were a lot of web developers who would be innundated with work about hacking together HTML, CSS and JavaScript to create websites; however these days anyone can build really sophisticated websites just using Wordpress/Wix/etc without needing to know any of that. Yet there won't be many unemployed web developers out there because most of them learned new tools like Angular and React for building web apps instead.

Similarly, infrastructure engineers were primarily concerned with physical servers and needed to be experts at securing and configuring operating systems running directly on real hardware back in 2009. These days the cloud has taken over and infrastructure engineers are using a whole different set of tools from cloud providers like Amazon/Google/Microsoft. Again, there won't be many unemployed infrastructure engineers because most of them will have put the time into learning cloud computing, or will be able to make the leap within 3-6 months if they switch jobs.

There's also other areas which didn't really exist or have as much prominence 10 years ago; for example, in 2009 there weren't really many jobs out there called "Cybersecurity analyst" or "Data Scientist" or "DevOps engineer" -- these are all relatively new branches of IT which have emerged as a result of new trends and changes in technology. I'm sure that Data Scientists will be doing totally different things in 10 years time than they do now, but most of them will probably be pushed by their employers to learn new tools and stay up-to-date.