Sometime between the dotcom melt down in the late 1990s and the May 2003 publishing of “IT Doesn’t Mater” in Harvard Business Review, the acronym CIO was snarkily reinterpreted by tech-skeptics as meaning “Career Is Over.” With the rapidly expanding capability of AI, there are some wondering whether the entire IT career category is doomed to disappear.
IT, for a variety of reasons, is no longer universally perceived as a preferred place to work. As a futurist I believe IT is a great occupation today and will continue to be if one persistently and patiently continues to construct career-enhancing levees.
A levee is a human-made embankment, usually constructed of compacted soil or concrete, built along a river or coast to prevent flooding. A career levee is a self-developed barrier to professional obsolescence.
In the 1967 film The Graduate, a cocktail-swilling suburbanite gave collegiate Dustin Hoffman one word of career advice, “Plastics.” Fifty-one years later, Apple CEO Tim Cook in 2018 suggested, “Coding is an essential skill … [that] should be offered in every school in the world.” Now, a mere eight years since that decree, the AI commentariat warns that computer programming jobs are the No. 1 “most exposed to AI.”
It’s not the skills, but the people your skills benefit
Our industry has long labored under the erroneous belief that a certain skill set or certification will create a moat protecting our employability. Skills — particularly technical skills — are subject to rapid obsolescence. What lasts and what is perhaps your strongest career levee are your relationships.
Though this may be a growth area for many of us, the most successful IT professionals are adept at socializing. This alone provides indication that we need to transcend our perpetual feeling of being an Ishmael, an outsider.
The folks making hiring, firing, and compensation decisions are not particularly interested in the specific skill sets you bring to the table; they are obsessed with the benefits those skill sets deliver. Comedian Steve Martin, when he was working his way up through the comedy club circuit, adhered to the mantra, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.”
Attention management
Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan was one of the first to understand the importance of attention in society. IT professionals have to exponentially increase their sensitivity to what key stakeholders are paying attention to. Attention is a tricky area: What people think is important and what is actually important are not always the same.
For example, the No. 1 cause of death in America in 2023 was heart disease (29%).
However, media coverage — a proxy for what we are paying attention to — essentially ignored heart disease (2.8%, 2.9%, and 2.3% of coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Fox News, respectively).
A perpetual challenge of IT professionals has been how to get the muggles to focus on what really matters. This is an aspirational career levee. We need to understand what stakeholders are paying attention to and why.
Uncertainty requires conversation
Being uncertain is a part of being human. In 1624, a secretary of Cardinal Richelieu, Léonard Marandet, concluded that, “There is nothing more certain than doubt.”
As a futurist it pains me to admit that none of us knows with decimal-point precision what is going to happen next. IT professionals blessed with the conscious awareness of our ignorance of the future need to sponsor conversations that render explicit our cognitive (how we think), emotional (how we feel), and behavioral (what we do) responses to not knowing.
Legitimacy increasingly flows to whoever processes uncertainty first. IT professionals need to avoid the hubris of technocratic expertise (i.e., “this is what the future looks like”), choosing rather the “technologies of humility” — institutional mechanisms, including greater stakeholder participation, for incorporating a wider range of experience and views regarding what comes next.
Uncertainty can be exhausting. But it doesn’t have to be. IT professionals can help stakeholders suffering from feeling they are perpetually running up life’s down escalator by generating conversations that eliminate ambiguity regarding what we want to happen in the future. The future may not be certain but our hopes and dreams have shape and substance we can aim for.
Uncertainty needs to be reframed not as a threat but rather as an opportunity. Uncertainty offers the “opportunity for life to go in different directions,” says Stephanie Gorka of Ohio State University’s College of Medicine, “and that is exciting.”
Hope
Hope is the oxygen for IT. IT needs to be honest but can avoid dystopic and tenebroso (“dark/gloomy”) language when describing the path forward. IT needs to be a vessel for stakeholder agency. As Wes Nicker suggested in his closing salutation on radio station KSAN in the 1970s, “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.”
See also:
Read More from This Article: ‘Career is over’? IT still has a lot to offer, despite uncertainties
Source: News