In a previous blog post, we discussed an essay by Melinda Gates which made the case that technology could be a force for positive social change, if developed and used by capable, earnest hands. It was our hope that the topic would inspire some readers to seek out information technology training for reasons other than the typical promise of a lucrative career and a bright personal future.
The demand for skilled workers in this industry calls for more than just people with the ambition to succeed. It calls for people who are driven by specific motives – the sorts of personal causes and ideas that could lead them into an entirely different field, or could lead them to apply information technology training to the sorts of technological solutions Mrs. Gates highlighted a few weeks ago.
But this isn’t to say that you have to be a software developer or a serious technological innovator in order to use your information technology training in order to have a noticeably salutary impact on the world around you. If you’re the sort of person whose personal interests encompass, for instance, java online training and systems analyst certification as well as social justice, there’s more good news from the world of technologically-oriented activism.
The Dallas News recently reported that that Texas city had become the fifth region in a program to provide free information technology training to people, especially youth, living in poverty. The intensive, full-time, eight-week program proposes to utilize software training courses, associated training, and the consistently rising demand for IT skills in the workplace to provide underprivileged Americans with a direct pathway to a better life.
The Dallas program has reportedly participants from annual incomes in the vicinity of 7,000 dollars to post-training incomes beginning around 30,000 dollars. In time, one could expect this to lead particularly astute people to make even more dramatic transitions from meager situations in inner-city Dallas to lucrative information technology placements in the Bay Area or other major IT hubs.
As much as this pilot-program in information technology training represents an opportunity for poor workers who are starting out with no IT skills, its current expansion also represents a growing opportunity for skilled professionals who are seeking IT placements that give them a particular sense of purpose.
Without having to personally design the IT cure for the common social injustice, and without having to complete certified scrum master training and integrate into a collective project with similar aims, a person with a general suite of information technology and business analyst skills could pass his know-how on to people who might benefit from it in a socially transformative way.
This blog previously presented a training and development specialist job description as a suggestion for what type of information technology placements a person might seek out if he has a broad set of skills and also the ability to communicate effectively and work well with people. But in light of emerging programs to provide such training and development to impoverished communities, we might wish to add “a sense of social responsibility” to the characteristics that could make a person a good match for such a job.
In other words, positions now exist and will soon exist in larger quantities, in which common training and development job responsibilities overlap with one’s responsibility to his fellow man. And for someone who wants to do real good and make good use of his information technology training all at once, that may be among the most appealing information technology placements of all.