blog Remember last week when REA Group chief information officer Nigel Dalton published a somewhat disturbing article on his site noting that Australia currently trains more fitness instructors than IT professionals? Delimiter jumped on the post as evidence that, as a nation, Australia just isn’t interested in the knowledge economy, and is more interested in following the latest stampede to help people become The Biggest Loser. However, as it turns out, Dalton may have been wrong, and our concern may have been half-baked. El Reg has run its own numbers and reports (we recommend you click here for the full article):
“Dalton and his source are right. To a point. Australia’s universities are producing fewer IT graduates than the various training establishments pumping out personal trainers. But to suggest that Australia is producing more trainers than IT pros is wrong. And by excluding TAFEs from an asessment of Australia’s national performance in IT training is to ignore an enormous part of the education sector.”
The issue, as El Reg points out, appears to be that Dalton’s analysis didn’t include the large numbers of IT professionals who graduate from TAFE colleges and other non-university tertiary institutions in order to pursue a career in IT. Hell, a lot of IT professionals never went to either university or TAFE — as far as we’re aware, there’s no requirement to, if all you want is a Microsoft, Cisco or Unix certification, for example. We’re betting that one of the quickest paths to riches as an IT pro these days is to train yourself up in VMware. Virtualisation is all the rage, after all.
Probably not VMware anymore… that’s so 2012.
What would it be these days?
Hyper-V?
Quite possibly :) or maybe familiarity with Amazon AWS.
Storage experts are also always in demand …
I suppose we’ll find out what it was when we reach 2014 ;)
VMWare?? Can you really count a virtual IT professional? :P
Virtual IT professionals are highly dynamic!
They can stretch and contract their resources at will!
I’m not sure what the fuss is all about, they just need to consolidate all the virtual IT processionals to just 2 (to ensure high availability if one is off on sick leave) and Australia will be fine.
These guys are highly efficient!
But their billing is questionable…
Its a good point. I have been saying for years that the support side of IT is much more like a trade.
Especially getting started. Once you are in and established it requires more education, but initial on the job learning is worth much more than a UNI degree.
(Support stream I am talking about, not Software stream)
Dam I was considering becoming a hot attractive fitness guru Renai
Now you’ve shattered my dreams and going to eat a pie now! *bite*
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