Deficit of Young IT Minds Can't Fill Demand

From ACM TechNews Alert for Friday, October 27, 2006


Deficit of Young IT Minds Can't Fill Demand
Des Moines Register (IA) (10/22/06) Elbert, David

The United States is not turning out enough high school students who are interested in studying information technology and college students who are interested in pursuing IT-related careers, according to Iowa State University IT security expert Doug Jacobson. As a result, employers and technology companies may not be able to fill their need for IT workers in the years to come. About five or six years ago, people started believing IT employment had bottomed out, Jacobson says. At the time, there was "sort of a triple witching hour," says Jacobson, which involved the Y2K fizzle, the dot-com crash, and fear that IT jobs would also be overrun by outsourcing. News reports of technology companies going out of business or downsizing gave students across the country the impression that the prospects for a career in IT were limited, and young people were no longer interested in studying computer science, software engineering, or other IT fields, he says. However, technology is a field in which innovation continuously sparks new opportunities. Today, big financial services continue to add IT workers, and local tech companies continue to expand.
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