Devil's Advocate: The making of an IT professional

Is IT now a profession, just like law or accountancy? Martin Brampton has his doubts…

Talk about jobs in IT always seems to involve constant use of the term 'professional'. At one time, the emphasis was on achieving comparable status to the established professions such as the law. These days it seems to be more about so-called key skills. Why is it relevant at all?

One feature that characterises the learned professions is that it is very difficult for people outside the profession to really understand what its members are up to. While anyone can acquire a basic understanding of legal principles and even the basic practice of commercial law, experts have a vital role. Not only do they need to know a lot about past cases, they need to be able to assess the likely course of legal argument in a particular case.

Likewise, accountants constantly make judgements that are difficult to understand without both experience and knowledge. It might seem that accounts are factual, with no requirement for judgement. Not so. The Enron affair highlighted the extent to which flexibility exists in the interpretation of accounting rules. A rule is nothing more than a piece of text and there is no end to the possible interpretations of a text, especially when powerful interests are at stake.

The result of the complexity of such judgements is that society finds it very difficult to regulate the activities of professionals. No solution exists other than to allow them to be well paid and to encourage them to regulate themselves in a way that avoids too much scandal.

None of this seems to apply to IT. In the early days, the fear was that all kinds of people were becoming IT specialists, with no entry regulations. That was true but then some very unlikely candidates turned out to be highly skilled. In fact, despite the lack of regulation, many of the systems that were built long ago turned out to be so reliable that they lasted far beyond their creators’ expectations. Legacy software may have been derided but often it was retained for decades because it was robust and met real needs.

When legacy software was first being written, there were hardly any academic courses in IT. Some recruiters relied on aptitude tests but later these were shown to bear no relation to actual success in IT. Now there are large numbers of IT graduates and computer science is even a GCSE subject.

The complaint of those that want to define an IT profession has shifted. With IT graduates plentiful, there are constant complaints that they have been taught the wrong thing. It is extremely hard to identify a genuine body of permanent skills on which to found IT knowledge and recruiters often complain that they need candidates with specific knowledge of current technology.

But basing an IT education on current technology is obviously a very short-lived solution. What is left of the IT professional’s skills when all the then current technology has become obsolete? Indeed the constant refrain of “skills shortage” is merely a reflection of the collective reluctance of employers to spend money on training, which is inevitably a constant need in the face of ever changing technology.

Perhaps that suggests the appropriate solution. What is really needed is an aptitude for handling IT problems and an ability to absorb fresh training. It is unclear that an academic environment is ideally suited to establishing people with these fundamental attributes. And far more than lip service is needed to the principle of lifelong learning. Both government and business should have a role here but it is not clear that either properly understands it.

** Martin Brampton is a director and founder of Black Sheep Research (www.black-sheep-research.co.uk ), an independent consultancy providing research, writing and speaking services on a wide range of business and technology subjects. Martin was previously a director at Bloor Research, and has worked with IT as a user and analyst for over 20 years. He can be contacted at silicon@black-sheep-research.co.uk. Or contact us at editorial@silicon.com.

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