CURRENT IT UNEMPLOYMENT

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This author has problems with the future projections and figures issued by the Bureau of Labor discussed earlier in this chapter. At present, we have widespread unemployment in the IT industry. Unemployment in the IT profession reached 6 percent in 2003, and the media is reporting "unprecedented" levels of unemployment for a career path that, until recently, was a sure path to a well-paying job. IT unemployment rates were as low as 1.2 percent in 1997, but rose sharply to 4.3 percent in 2002—see Figure 6.3.

Figure 6.3. A graph showing IT jobless rates in the United States from 1989–2001. Source: U.S. Department of Labor—Bureau of Labor Statistics

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The growth in unemployment over the past five years in the IT industry can be traced to multiple shocks to spending and employment trends, including many of the following events:

  • The end of Y2K projects in 1999.

  • The bursting of the Internet and telecom "bubbles" in 2000.

  • Dramatic reductions in corporate IT spending.

  • The U.S. economy in recession.

  • The 9/11 terrorist attacks.

  • The subsequent war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  • Big swings in the world stock markets, creating uncertainty.

  • Constant moves to outsource major applications and networks overseas.

  • Investor and business uncertainty as the WorldCom, Enron, and Tyco frauds, the mutual fund controversy, and other business scandals of the late 1990s and early 2000s unfolded.

  • Continued market caution after the liberation of Iraq and the uncertainty of the reconstruction outcome to democracy.

  • Accelerating global IT competition.

In addition, a half million jobs, or 10 percent of the U.S. IT professionals currently working in IT services firms, will be displaced in the next 18 months as their jobs move overseas, according to Gartner, Inc., the Stamford, Conn.-based research firm. This would bring total IT job losses to one million, when added to the 500,000 IT professionals estimated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to have lost their jobs in the United States since 2001.

So the question of how will autonomic computing impact these figures arises. Will this technology make unemployment worse than it already is? In the future, automation improvements and the development of autonomic applications may harm some IT career paths. So perhaps the career advice should be is to avoid the technical aspects of the profession and focus more on IT management. It is not clear how IBM and other autonomic vendors are addressing this unemployment issue.

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Autonomic Computing
Autonomic Computing
ISBN: 013144025X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 254
Authors: Richard Murch

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