A career in IT

A career in IT can be a daunting prospect – there are so many possible routes in, and an even greater number of potential job types. Ally that with the increasing rate of change in IT, which can make some skills irrelevant very quickly or over-emphasise others, and it is evident that an informed choice requires research.

What are the main employment areas?

Even in broad headings there are many alternatives. For example, systems development can be reduced into the categories of software engineering, business analysis and project management.

Software engineers deal with the full development life-cycle: from definition to installation. Business analysts are concerned with the wider view of translating business goals into defined and realistic specifications and, as most areas of IT are collected into projects and programmes, project management is a key role. The project manager is responsible for delivering a project within preset time, financial and quality parameters, requiring planning, progress monitoring and remedial action skills.

In the service delivery area the main aim is maintaining an efficient IT service. Here support, planning and control are the vital areas. Likely a helpdesk that logs incidents and initiates corrective action will be a main component. Members of these teams would deal with breakdowns in the hardware, problems with network service, or support development and service delivery relating to problems with the application systems themselves.

A growing area is change and configuration management. In a dynamic environment there are updates and changes needed for the systems and infrastructure that need to be controlled when introduced into a live system - so that service is not interrupted. This is change management. Configuration management aims to minimise the impact of a change.

There are many other important areas, such as quality management and standards, education and training, research, software testing, database design and web design. It is best to enter these specialist areas after gaining a good foundation of training and experience in systems development or service delivery.

For more information please visit www.bcs.org or www.insidecareers.co.uk

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