As you’ve no doubt noticed if you’ve been reading for a while, a lot of the content at this blog is aimed at driving home the message that information technology training is well worth pursuing because it leads to stable and lucrative careers. However, we would not want to be accused of presenting a distorted picture of the field, and to our credit, we have made considerable effort to highlight the highly competitive nature of IT placements, and the challenges that aspiring IT professionals face in order to keep their skills and knowledge up-to-date.
What we’ve never acknowledged before is that there is an open question as to whether those challenges are worth overcoming. There is every indication that most people who have completed a course of ITIL training or other forms of information technology training believe the answer to be yes. Yet a recent article at TechSeen indicates that such topics are not without dissenting opinions. And in fact, as the field of IT becomes both more competitive and more complex, that dissent seems to be growing.
The article features survey data from people who have successfully completed information technology training and found positions in IT service management. Looking ahead to just the next three years, nearly half of the participants said they believed it would become harder to work in all IT roles. More than a third of participants said this would be true of some roles. And 72 percent said they felt their contributions to corporate operations were not being sufficiently recognized.
The survey also raised a topic that has tended to mostly be limited to other fields of endeavor: automation. Approximately 15 percent of ITSM professionals believe that artificial intelligence is a major threat to jobs in their field, and a further 44 percent said that some jobs would be lost to AI over the next three years.
Both of these topics cast some doubt on the value of information technology training, but we believe both of them can be effectively answered. There is no indication that the corporate value of IT professionals will diminish, and thus there is every reason to believe that the already considerable salary expectations of these individuals will continue to trend upward. So while it may become more difficult to find work in the field and maintain a high level of satisfaction with your employer, the fact remains that the you will have excellent career prospects if you can make yourself more valuable than fellow job-seekers and potential AI replacements.
This means that recurrent information technology training is more important than ever. And this is especially the case in light of the fact that much of that training will probably be refreshed to accommodate growing challenges. The above-mentioned surveys reveal that only 24 percent of ITSM professionals think ITIL training has kept up with changing circumstances. Still, this does not diminish the need for ITIL and other forms of information technology training. If anything, it amplifies them, because when new best practices emerge, the people who will be best able to adapt to them are the people who are fully up-to-date on the practices they will be building upon.