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The Profession of IT
A Technician Shortage
In our elation about rising CS enrollments, we are overlooking
a growing shortage of computing technicians. Our education system
is not responding to this need.
signer jobs, do not attract the university graduates. Community colleges
and two-year colleges do not seem
to have enough capacity to meet the
need. There are few programs to transition workers displaced by digital
automation into these digital technician jobs.
As our graduates find more and
more clever ways to automate knowl-
edge work, the number of displaced
workers will rise. The displaced would
readily take the IT technician jobs
but the education system offers them
few paths for retraining. To quote The
Economist (Oct. 4, 2014): “Vast wealth
In 2007 CS enrollments bottomed
and began to rise steadily, attaining
in 2013 75% of the peak level. Surveys
show students are taking up comput-
ing not so much because they expect
good salaries, but because they per-
ceive computer science as compat-
ible with almost every other field. A
major in computer science gives the
flexibility of deferring a career choice
until graduation.
This reversal has brought great
rejoicing among computer science
academic leaders. Their attention
is focused on coping with the surge
of enrollments, which seems like a
happy misfortune.
But the surge diverts attention from
an underlying big, messy problem.
Most CS university graduates are heading for the currently plentiful elite designer jobs, in which they will create
and design new computing technology. There are a great many more unfilled technician jobs and more will be
needed to support the infrastructure.
Who will operate and maintain the
information infrastructure on which
so much else depends? That is our
worry. Universities say they are not
preparing technicians; training is
outside their scope. Technician jobs,
which do not pay as well as the de-
DOI: 10.1145/2723673
