Tom Adelstein wrote:
I'm hearing numbers like 2.5 million tech jobs lost permanently. More
jobs lost in IT than all jobs created since 2000. A large percentage of those jobs have 3-5 years of moss. They are not counted in the "official" unemployment statistics. We can also talk about manufacturing jobs lost and so on.
We have a big pool of IT talent unemployed and we see headlines that students do not want to go into tech careers in college. So, we need "retraining" or "skill enhancement" or something.
I'm just throwing an idea around. What's wrong with curriculum that will focus on the hot IT topics to help people find jobs now and then curriculum growing as the landscape changes?
I would say things are forever in such a state of "explosion" that that it's unlikely curricula will be able to keep pace. University CS depts are typically somewhat behind, imho of course. Not to be overly pessimistic, but in the words of Sponge Bob: "Good luck with that".
I don't see open source technology solving this problem but I'm willing
to listen. IMHO, this shift in employment trends transcends the open vs
proprietary argument.
There's IT, and everything else, and (imho always) training people in IT is probably not doing them any favor, as the very goal of most hardware and software is to make it simple enough that it doesn't require so many technicians. The trend you are refering to is the end of the natural lifecycle of the "computers for computers' sake" era. Open source gives students opportunities that proprietary doesn't -- but I don't think the "IT" opportunities are the most valuable. Rather, the opportunity to develop software to solve problems in any field is a more valuable opportunity. -CC