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Paul Gillin's Blog - Social Media and the Open Enterprise

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Businesses minting more IT managers

InformationWeek picked up on an interesting trend: the number of IT managers is growing. The newsweekly cites Bureau of Labor Statistics figures documenting a 44% increase in IT management titles since 2001, while programming and support jobs are down 19%. The publication cites several reasons for this shift, principally outsourcing and the trend toward aligning IT people with the business, which means more project management and less coding.

This is a welcome trend. Outsourcing has finally reached a level of legitimacy within most businesses that executives are rethinking the wisdom of having a captive workforce of people who don't add value to the business but mainly tend the machines. This is actually good news for technical IT people, too. A glass ceiling has existed in corporations for a long time when it comes to IT. Technical people could only go so far in the organization before their lack of business skills held them back.

The figures indicate that a two-track model is developing. Technical people can go to work for organizations that specialize in providing IT infrastructure and development on an outsourced basis. They have a good career path there. IT people with business skills can go the management route within businesses, who are increasingly outsourcing non-strategic functions. They'll have more opportunity than they would have had in the past, too.

Kudos to IWeek for spotting this shift.

¶ 7:04 AM