Recruiting IT Students: Fighting Misconceptions

It has been a prime objective of ours' this year to increase enrollment in our IT programs. IT enrollment has suffered nationwide and on our campus, despite that all signs point to IT being a very healthy career option. It is our belief that this is due in large part because of some misconceptions propagated by sensationalistic news stories about the DotCom crash and the impact of offshoring. When something is repeated often enough, people accept it without question - and stories about the DotCom crash and offshoring have been repeated so often that it is just accepted - erroneously - by many is that in the USA, that IT is not a viable career choice. It seems clear that students that may otherwise be interested in IT as a career are being scared away by this myth. I have posted several times on this blog signs to the contrary - that IT is indeed a very health career option , and have spoke to a variety of groups within the campus community - to get this message out to our campus and ultimately, to the public - and to help correct the misconceptions. Our goal is to educate the public about IT Careers. To that end, we are embarking on a marketing campaign. A chief goal of the campaign will be to dispel the misconceptions that exist about IT careers.

Two recent Computerworld articles describe today's healthy IT Job Market, and address the need to educate the public on the reality, so students are not scared away from IT as a career choice.

From Why Good Technologists Are Hard to Find:

Today's students need to know that IT is a viable long-term career path. Unfortunately, industry and the media have been complicit in propagating the myth that IT is a dead end. First, the dot-com crash shattered the illusion that those in high-tech jobs would always emerge from economic turbulence unscathed. Now, students are hearing that a four-year degree in programming or engineering doesn't matter because all of those jobs will eventually go offshore to foreign workers at very low wages. A generation has been dissuaded from pursuing what is in reality a very promising career choice.

The article points out 5 reasons why IT is "a very promising career choice." They are:

• IT has become vital to business profitability.


• The fast pace of technological change keeps IT careers interesting.


• The threat of offshoring is overstated.


• The globalization of IT is an opportunity.


• Demand for IT workers in the U.S. will remain strong.

The other article, Good technologists are hard to find - NOT? takes a balanced, yet optimistic view

Many highly skilled jobs are shifting, painfully, away from the U.S. But the long-term trend is a toward a global distribution of jobs, not an elimination of them in the U.S.

The article acknowledges that the transition has been, in some cases, painful.

All of this is not to say that IT professionals don't face difficulties today with all of the transitions going on. But don't count out the U.S. IT worker yet. In the long run, many IT jobs will remain right here. Americans have the education, mobility and a more open and agile economic system in which to operate than other countries - including China and India.

The article concludes by asking the questions that I am sure are on many IT and potential IT students' minds:

Are we seeing the vast majority of our highly skilled IT jobs draining away? Is it time to put up the sign, "Will the last American IT worker please close the door on his way out?"

Or would Computerworld readers recommend IT careers when speaking to the next generation - say, students in a high school computer science class?

I'd bet on the latter.

I agree with his optimistic answer.