In the time that this blog has been live, we have focused mostly on industry trends and career prospects related to online information technology training. But along the way, we have made a point of publishing a few features dealing with non-economic aspects of working in information technology.
In particular, we’ve discussed the ways in which training and development specialist roles and responsibilities can be a way of giving back to the community, either at home or abroad. By helping to convey the benefits of your own online information technology training to other people, you can help to give a skills boost to underserved minorities or to developing regions of the world.
But in the same way that these topics highlight the non-economic benefits of pursuing a career in online information technology training, it may also be important to note that things like training and development roles and responsibilities can bring non-economic benefits to the communities or groups that you serve in our career. Sometimes those complementary benefits are actually more substantive than the money matters that usually drive a person to pursue online information technology training.
For instance, there are clear prospects for the influence of IT skills in situations where information technology and internet usage are tightly controlled by a government authority. In many such situations, the ability to effectively manage the IT landscape can not only provide individuals with better futures for themselves; it can help to liberate an entire society.
To some, this may seem melodramatic or self-aggrandizing. But we have seen terrific examples of how the effective use of social networking and information technology training has brought peoples to the cusp of democratic revolution in places like Iran. And in that same region of the world, we can also see how a young, well-educated, and tech savvy population is regularly able to get around repressive government restrictions.
The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran recently ran an article in which it criticized major, Western-based tech companies for paying too little attention to the security issues facing ordinary web users in that country. But the site’s reporting also pointed out that those issues are somewhat less serious than they could be, thanks to the use of proxy servers and the existence of some social networks that are marginally more secure than their most commonplace alternatives.
So this leads to at least two different ideas about how you can use online information technology training in service of political and human rights-related activities in distant places. On the one hand, the development of new and more secure networks and technologies is a definite weapon in global fights against tyranny in the 21st century. And on the other hand, a US-based training and development specialist may be able to find opportunities to teach foreign activists and ordinary citizens a great deal about how to more safely navigate an online landscape that increasingly has the power to bring down governments.