The massive worldwide decrease in IT jobs over the next Decade: Why?

The IT profession is one that is relatively young. Compare the age of this profession to that of professions in Management, Medicine, Law, sciences like Physics or Chemistry and conventional Engineering such as Civil, Mechanical and such, by drawing timelines. What would the result be? It is a profession that has been around, for a relatively short while. And then look at it's growth. In the last three decades, no other field of study or profession has created more jobs on our planet, or the history of it in such a short period, than has IT.

Now, if you are not an IT professional or worker yourself, ask, what do the IT professionals, most of them that you know, within your organisation do? The answer is likely, unless your organisation is in the business of IT, that they support you, your organisation and your needs, with that computer, with that platform, with that database, with that ERP system, with that Information System, with your email server and that company website.

Whether your IT function is in-house or outsourced, predominantly, the IT jobs today exist, for the purpose of troubleshooting, maintenance, monitoring, prevention, security and basically all things, keeping the system working as smoothly as possible, to minimise disruption or disturbance to day-to-day business activity. Why this has long been necessary, is that IT has still all this while been a new field, domain or frontier. Now picture this. How many full-time carpenters do most organisations need, to make sure their tables, chairs and cabinets hold up? If you understand this latest question, you will see the point.

IT is to business today as is the office space, office furniture, the pen, the paper and the telephone. To permanently incur cost to maintain a necessity does not make sense. Also, till now, IT has been evolving and evolution means change. In the current Innovation Age, change is the only constant and going to be so for a very long time ahead. Given that, to find semblance of normalcy, for normalcy is a necessity for purpose and direction, people will try to seek minimisation where possible. And to seek minimisation of change, it is only natural that businesses will seek out technology that will require the minimum amount of change or evolution ahead. This then reduces the need to rely upon professionals to facilitate evolution or change with regards to that technology. If you don't see where this is going, what this means, is that organisations will increasingly invest in technology, including Information Technology, that will come with minimal requirement for after sales follow-up or support or future upgrading or updating or evolution and so on. From the business case point of view, its the only thing that makes sense. And IT being a victim of its own success, is very much rendering this possible, at an ever increasing pace.

Will IT jobs ever disappear? Foreseeably at this point in the human story, it does not look possible. The question here is, will we need as many people working in the IT function ahead, as we have needed till now increasingly over the past 2-3 decades? The answer is, with the progress that IT professionals have made over that same period, absolutely no.

The world is mostly connected. There is little left in terms of new infrastructure, relatively now, in comparison to the heyday of IT's job creation days. IT has also seen its days of entry, into the era of automation, and it is well past the gates. We live now in an era of automated templates and systems that are self-sustaining and self-managing. For the last two years of my life, I have been building and maintaining my own websites with drag and drop functions that easier to use than the functions for playing games on Facebook. And these are available widespread. I am able to use these functions to see to my needs, without any help and without having any technical background to rely upon. Just an example, of where IT is heading.

Databases, Information Systems, Executive tools, they are all getting easier and simpler for the end-user, while also becoming more stable, more secure. Increasingly, all things IT are becoming aligned, synchronised and integrated. Just think this paragraph alone and consider how much IT work we've known in the past as non-IT professionals, is rendered obsolete.

Now, lets really get Hi-Tech. There are Programming Wizards today, that are writing software and programmes that improve, upgrade and evolve without need for further intervention from persons trained IT, entirely from subsequent end-user interface or input. Apps like Pika allow end-users to create their own Windows Programs without any programming knowledge. Just Google it. And lets also be honest, such applications are not a novelty or rarity any more. And they are only increasingly improving to the extent, that they are diminishing the need for both programming knowledge and programmers. Yet, just another example.

Let us take the period 2014-2015. The largest portion of IT jobs in the world exists in India. Fact is, India predominantly supports the global IT needs today. As that need diminishes, we see companies like Tata Consultancy Services, the world's largest IT support firm in terms of IT manpower, laying of massive numbers of employees, numbering in the tens of thousands. Just an argument for those who would find courage to dispute earlier facts stated herein this Pulse post.

Lets face it, job cuts due to mechanisation, robotisation and mass-automation are not unique or exclusive to the IT profession.Nor are they going to be ahead. Mass-automation is going to lead to the virtual disappearance of the Blue-Collar trades altogether well before 2050. That means no more factory workers, cleaners and even waiters (they have already started using Drones to replace waiters in some F&B establishments well ahead of their times in some places; Google it). Mass-automation also means disappearance of a good number of White-Collar jobs across a range of fields, with the disappearance of Quantitative, replicative or repetitive tasks (a cause for worry to Statisticians and Accountants ahead, definitely). The irony we are seeing is, that the disappearance or diminishing of White-Collar jobs thanks to mass-automation, is beginning with the very profession at the forefront of facilitating the coming about of mass-automation itself. And that is the IT profession. And again, it makes natural sense.

When we say automation, what exactly are we talking about? To be precise, we are talking about the automation of technology. IT or Information Technology, is well, technology. And so then, where would we expect the starting point for impact to be then? The difference between Blue-Collar and White-Collar when it comes to the impact of automation is this; Blue-Collar jobs will disappear altogether whereas White-Collar jobs will necessarily remain in existence, though the numbers will decrease. And the first as it is becoming apparent with the lay-offs (not just in India, though that is where we are likely to see the biggest impact), IT job numbers are and will be the first to decline. And this will be in tandem with the progress in technological evolution we are expecting to see over the next decade; our experience in general will improve, we will be more enabled, we will be more empowered, we will need to turn to less products or too as lesser will be required to suffice and we will need less help or support from someone technically trained.

Who then will retain or find a job in IT ahead then, over the next decade and then after. Oh, the absolute best off course. We are looking at individuals who we can class as absolute geniuses in coding and software creation, to a point where they cannot just be trained, groomed, educated in the field or nurtured, but will have to possess their own defining qualities rendering them so talented, that others cannot keep up with them. Think Bill Gates. Think Mark Zuckerberg. And the folks who are intellectually, in IT speak, close. Off course not everyone as smart is a billionaire or even a billionaire, but they certain stand a chance at being gainfully employed. For those who are not the absolute best, at Information Technology, the painful harsh reality is, a job in IT, is going to be a problem. Unless you can create something original and great that others cannot or will not want to do without, as a global populace, a job will not be there. The TCS lay-offs in India, are not even a scratch on the surface, of the beginning. Search "IT job cuts" on Google news and you will see a worldwide pattern building up.

Security which has been providing a major chunk of the employment opportunities for IT graduates thus far is also now increasingly becoming a government prerogative around the world moving away from being a corporate burden. This again makes sense, just as the physical security of an individual citizen is the responsibility of the state police. This shift comes about very much thanks to the exploits of attackers who infiltrated Sony Corporation in late 2014. And the damage they managed to cause. This incident while some may have hoped would be an opportunity, has done damage to the long-term job prospects rather. Governments around the world since have been seeing value in hiring hacking wizards to create blanket systems and strategies to prevent a similar occurrence against anyone within their jurisdictions ahead. And the governments are willing to do this in collaboration with each other. Compound sum effect in short, fewer jobs, with synergies arising from centralisation of the security task in state hands. And as breaching, with such means, becomes less possible, the need for IT professionals to keep information and systems alike secure, diminishes.

Some thinkers will call this Karma. The IT profession has been blamed for sometime now, for rendering redundant many traditional jobs with the automation or simplification it has been bringing about or will be bringing about as outcomes ahead. The birth of IT however, was a paradigm shift in the human story, that required rapid action towards adoption and adaptation, which required much manpower in a short span. Now that the shift is complete and the field is mature, normalcy is coming into being. From a convergence point of view, this was bound to happen, and should long have been foreseen.

A good job saving tip for young IT professionals of today who don't want to be imagining themselves doing something else a decade from now, would be pursue jobs at big names like Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Cisco and such, and do everything they can, to be seen as talented long-term assets by the folks at the very top.

How does this translate in numbers? Taking a solely qualitative approach, this Professional Futurist will not be surprised if the number of people receiving wages to support themselves and their families for IT or IT related work by June 2025, is only 30% of or less than the total number of people earning wages as such around the world, as of June 2015. Not all change after all, can be pretty.