Quote:
December 1, 2005 1:32 PM PST
Will IT specialists become Maytag repairmen?
The Gartner industry research group made an interesting prediction the other day that went largely unnoticed: The demand for information technology specialists, it said, could fall by 40 percentin the next five years. The projection was startling at first but, upon reflection, seems entirely plausible.
IT specialists
Take, for example, the once-vaunted position of Webmaster or Webmistress. A decade ago, these jobs were considered essential to any Web operation. But as tools got smarter and HTML less foreign, the duties of that position were largely absorbed by others.
As sophisticated technology continues to become ubiquitous in everything from cars to copiers, functions that used to be the province of experts will be increasingly handled by the rank and file of companies in every industrial sector. In fact, it has even been suggested that customer support as we know it may eventually become extinct. So it's not beyond reason that IT specialists of today may become the digital equivalent of the Maytag repairmen tomorrow.
