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Tech-Savvy Workers Increasingly Common in Non-IT Roles (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: IT professionals are becoming an increasingly common presence outside of the traditional IT departments, new research has found. According to CompTIA, it seems executives are calling for specialized skills, faster reflexes and more teamwork in their workers. According to the report, a fifth (21 percent) of CFOs say they have a dedicated tech role in their department. Those roles include business scientists, analysts, and software developers. There are also hybrid positions -- in part technical, but also focused on the business itself. "This isn't a case of rogue IT running rampant or CIOs and their teams becoming obsolete," says Carolyn April, senior director, industry analysis, CompTIA. "Rather, it signals that a tech-savvier workforce is populating business units and job roles."
I got an engineering degree and certification, then was tossed out of work by a major recession. I went back for a CompSci degree and managed a low-level job in the then-new field of PC support, won a promotion to IT "coordinator" (manager w/o staff, because they were all rented on a project basis from the IT department) with the Waterworks for several years.
Then Waterworks remembered my engineering degree after 100 reminders and took me in as a construction-planning engineer, but I found my IT skills were key to the engineering job. I handled the drafting and GIS systems, was a lead on the project to bring in the new work-order system, was developing small solutions (tiny web apps, fancy VBA spreadsheets, etc) practically ever day. Heck, just knowing real SQL rather than trying to coax complex reports out of Business Objects was a vital skill for construction and maintenance management. It wound up being the last 20 years of my 30-year career.
I can't recommend this career strategy enough; it's more interesting than either IT or the base profession alone, and more secure than either, too. The hardest thing in IT is getting across the real user needs to the developers - and an IT-savvy member of the customers is always going to be the guy that's either handling the IT specifications, and usually the IT project management from the user side; or just throws their hands up at the IT bureaucracy and develops the solution themselves. (Some of my "small solutions" would up taking weeks of time and growing over years into >1000 lines-of-code; hated to do it, but IT bureaucracy would have taken even longer.)
So I tell people interested in IT careers to first become a nurse, accountant, engineer, technician, even lawyer - any profession that USES a lot of IT. Then add in IT, and you are practically guaranteed an interesting and lucrative career.