Information Technology Profession Essay

Information Technology plays an important role in today’s society. It plays the role of an enabler of social goals as well as business objectives of the organizations. IT professionals are involved in creating IT infrastructure and communication networks. Another set of IT professionals create applications that run on these IT infrastructure and network. These applications help to deliver with speed, the social programs of governments as well as enable business transactions to be conducted with accuracy, speed and ease. With the Internet access gaining popularity and the increasing volume and variety of information, the information technology has revolutionized the world with the IT professionals leading the change. IT as a profession has the primary responsibility of implementing projects and programs which can help in realizing the goals of an organization. Implementing IT requires a thorough understanding of business processes, knowledge of technologies available and working with a group of people who deliver as a team. At times, the technology bit is a small portion of the entire IT work, though a very important one. Technology roles in IT comprise of hardware and network professionals, programmers, database and storage professionals, software testers and project managers. A very important set of IT professionals are those who maintain and support the IT applications. These are people who ensure that the systems are always available for business use. Support professionals ensure the integrity and stability of the IT applications post implementation. IT requires a good educational background with some amount of proven analytical skills. IT professionals develop and mature in their careers over a period of time and so the people who are required in IT are essentially educated and intelligent people but they are not offered a fast paced career as they think they deserve. Data shows the level of declining interests in the field of computing research (Zweben, 2008). Also, the current negative perception of the job market is seen as the prime factor for the decline in the American students opting for IT as a career. There is a wide perception that the jobs in IT are endangered due to outsourcing (Murphy, 2008). This is not so. The US has the highest number of IT professionals and the only jobs outsourced are the ones which can be done by a lower level of skills. Most of the job portals offer a range of IT jobs and one should be able to gather information about various types of IT career options from job portals as well as IT organizations websites.