I’ve blogged and written articles a few other places than my personal blog. I’ve also done some 6 training conferences and meetings around the world. Needless to say I’ve been busy and neglected my personal spaces like this blog and twitter. So, here are some thoughts for today.
The world seems to be polarizing e.g., political (need I say anything), technology (see the schools of software testing – https://huddle.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/rant-over-schools-of-software-testing-we-need-them/), sports (see the fights in baseball) and people at work. I want to address the people at work (or trying to work).
I hear people quoting stats that illustrate there are almost 1 million open IT jobs with the U.S. Government. The security czars on the news have said that “we need 300,000 cyber security people.” At conferences, I meet very good people on H1B VISAs trying to match some of these numbers, but I also meet Americans who cry about not getting good paying jobs. I have several relatives who say, “Gee I want to work, but learning that IT stuff his hard.” Whenever I offer my help as a trainer and author in software testing, they run away.
I am left wondering if many American are “hungry” enough to work. They are looking for the easy, high paying, low skill jobs. Guess what? Those jobs are being taken over by robots and going away. This trend will continue to get worse around the world. The joke is: “The factory of the future has 2 workers and many robots. The 2 workers are a dog and man. The man’s job is to feed the dog. The dog’s job is to keep the man away from the robots.”
We all need to be working on improving our technical skills. I’ve been using computers for 40 years and I’m still learning.
However, when I teach technical people, sometimes I feel even technical people are looking for the “easy” path in IT. This is worrisome. If an IT job is easy e.g., manual test execution of scripts and automation then robots will take it over, and then you are at risk of becoming the man (or the dog?).
So, you should spend time every day learning something new. You should target those “critical” IT skills like cyber security or IOT. Take some risks. Be curious. I did. And for the last 10 + years, I’ve worked, played and had a lot of fun doing the things I wanted (even work).
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