Time to Reinvent IT

Computerworld - They’re at it again. This time it’s the Society for Information Management that has launched a program to convince kids they should become IT professionals. We’ve seen this before — remember a decade ago, when actor Jimmy Smits was hired by the Information Technology Association of America to “make IT hip, happening and cool for the kids out there”? (No kidding, those are the words an ITAA spokesman actually used to describe the program.)

Of course, there are two nagging little problems. First, kids aren’t taking computer science courses — or going anywhere near them. And second, kids know that the really cool technology isn’t in corporate IT shops — or anywhere near them.

As Computerworld’s Thomas Hoffman reports in "SIM Targets Shrinking IT Workforce in U.S.," SIM is now targeting high school students and guidance counselors with presentations about IT career opportunities. Let’s all wish them well. But don’t expect much.

After all, these kids are swimming in a sea of technology. They’ve never known a world without Macs and PCs, Nintendos and PlayStations. Computer games, programmable robots, texting, blogs, homemade videos and Web sites — cool technology is all around them.

They learn as much about technology as they need to accomplish what they want to do. They don’t see a need for lots of classroom theory. And they don’t have any use for a job that will make all this interesting stuff deadly dull.

But it’s worse than that. Eventually, they will grow up and start thinking about careers. That’s when they’ll notice that the most education- intensive jobs in IT are the ones that get shipped offshore first. They’ll recognize that computer science courses are full of theory that doesn’t match real-world employers’ needs.

They won’t waste their college time and money on that. Hey, in their shoes, we wouldn’t either.

That’s what SIM is up against. To these kids, a pitch for a computer science education and a corporate IT career sounds like just so much snake oil.

Maybe it’s time to stop selling IT snake oil and instead start reinventing corporate IT again.

Look, our IT shops aren’t based on today’s reality. We expect computer science diplomas from job applicants because 30 years ago there was a glut of techies in the job market, thanks to the post-Sputnik push for better science and math education. We stopped teaching literature majors how to program in Cobol (they were good at syntax and punctuation) and instead started hiring computer scientists to custom-build our big, critical applications from scratch.