Go home and tell your mom what you do
I was given a relatively easy task recently: give a couple of words/insights/thoughts on what it is to be an IT Professional from a student's point of view.
Seems easy enough. A couple of lines and out, right? But, trying to define what that means proved more difficult than I'd imagined. What started as a simple exercise became laborious: I ultimately crafted these words from all that I could muster from the depths of my understanding of this conceptual modern enigma of a profession and pressed forward toward as poignant a description as possible.
I then realized I was writing this for myself. And maybe for you.
As we move into the 21st century, business culture is definitely witnessing the evolution of the IT Professional. No longer is the role only for computer programmers and engineers. Today’s IT Professionals are positioned to be crucial knowledge workers for a diverse range of professional situations that can and do go beyond the technical, to the executive and educational levels.
The IT Professional must bring an understanding not only of technology itself, but also of the possibilities that those advancements have for both businesses and society. This realization also instills the IT Professional with the responsibility to educate, manage, and demystify: technology without informed, able users serves little purpose.
The IT Professional creates for oneself a wide swath of opportunity by comprehending the extraordinary power that technology has toward unifying once-seemingly divergent career paths and employment choices. Distance education seminars and telemedicine sessions can be conducted using the same types of technology that keep corporate email and personal phones performing accordingly, and IT Professionals are indispensable in understanding how to make each function.
In this new economy, as technology continues to pervade, the line drawn between IT Professionals and non-IT Professionals will not merely blur, but will necessarily dissipate. Leaders will be at a disadvantage in this new economy if they lack at least some understanding of the technology that surrounds them and the systems that enable normal operations.
My personal venture into the world of the IT Professional is in fact due to all of the above factors. By creating for myself a broader understanding of the industry, I am not only reeducating myself on the functions and possibilities of the new economy, I am actually helping to craft and design its future.
This personal reinvention will allow for actual invention.
Jared Linder
Graduate Assistant and Institute Fellow
Center for Information and Communication Sciences
Ball State University
2/21/07