Can you imagine a time when military basic training includes not just a battery of physical tests but also things like PMP training and certification, or online information technology training courses? You probably don’t see a lot of overlap between the roles of your average foot soldier and the roles and responsibilities of a California business analyst or an IT professional. But that overlap is the sort of thing that is implied by recent comments by India’s Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar.
While it’s not clear that he actually shares our fanciful image of a new, modern infantry that utilizes ITIL training and can effectively double as an online IT training consultancy, he most certainly perceives a situation in which, as he puts it, “future wars may be cyber wars.” And it should go without saying that he’s not the only one to have envisioned such a military role for future IT.
Always a prescient source of social commentary, The Simpsons aired an episode in 1997 in which the head of a military elementary school explained to the graduating class that in the wars of the future, most of the actual fighting would be done by small robots. “And as you go forth today,” he concludes, “remember always your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots.”
In an era of increasingly prominent drone warfare, we can now see the reality that has emerged from behind the joke. And as such it’s easy to see how software training courses, Agile training, and even business systems analyst training and certification could make for skills that will be at a premium on the battlefields of the 21st century. In this sort of military landscape, there is ample incentive for young people to try to delve into online information technology training at an early age, even if their plans for the future follow a course that traditionally puts brawn before brains.
The fact is that there that type of path through life is increasingly un-traveled. And more than that, the general need for brains is ceding more and more ground to a need for actual technical skills. If this is true of the military, you can imagine how true it is of careers in fields that were once regarded as unskilled.
Over the past couple of decades there has been a lot of talk about the disappearance of American manufacturing, for instance. But the truth is that not only have those jobs not disappeared, there are some signs that they’re returning. The trouble is that the manufacturing jobs of the 21st century increasingly require information technology training in the USA, because the work has more to do with operating and personally programming industrial machinery than it does with manually operating analog technology.
Even if you’ve had a retail or food service job in the past several years, you’ve probably noticed how elaborate the cash registers and other pieces of technology have gotten. While a reasonably intelligent person can still learn to operate these with no particular background, prospects for upward mobility may increasingly be constrained by the limits of one’s ability to fully understand those technologies, program them, and find workarounds for technological problems.
The bottom line is that the list of livelihoods that don’t require some amount of information technology training seems to be getting shorter all the time. So if you are a parent or if you personally haven’t taken much of an interest yet in ITIL training of scrum master certification, we urge you to look into online information technology training for yourself or your children, lest you risk being left behind by the progress of technological history.