Sorry, I thought it was a joke. That was partly because "computer application specialist" may set some kind of record for ambiguity, considering the number of specialties that could fit under that umbrella.
E.g., I'm probably somewhere in the neighborhood of the top 2 per cent of competency in using and troubleshooting WordPerfect. Makes me sound like a computer application specialist. The term could also mean a developer, a system administrator, a marketing specialist for a particular app, on and on. Still don't know what you mean, even after skimming the reading list titles. I don't know anyone who gets paid just for memorizing information as an occupational specialty. What do you want to get paid for *doing* with the information you learn? Writing software documentation? System administration? Not being feisty here; trying to be helpful. You asked a question about long-term career prospects. Different specialties have different prospects in the U.S. IT industry. Plus using "computer application specialist" in a resume would leave a prospective employer wondering. As to the original question, I can only offer my perspective as to the U.S. IT industry's prospects in broad strokes without more specific information. I spend a fair amount of time looking at the various Free Trade Agreements (deceptive title) and their implementation. E.g., we have the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, which amongst other things governs the preparation, adoption, and application of IT standards and conformity assessment procedures throughout the territories of member nations, a particular interest of mine. That agreement is intertwined with another, the Agreement on Government Procurement, aimed at opening up government procurement processes to foreign competition globally. The trade agreements are at various stages of implementation, but just the ones in place now and their implementation schedules guarantee increasing downward competitive pressure on American wages from foreign workers. E.g., the IT sector items in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) implementation schedule are not yet implemented but the schedule is there. The Trade Agreements are all about making national borders largely irrelevant in a global economy. IT workers in the U.S. are especially susceptible to foreign competition, primarily because: [i] there is no regional dependency for raw manufacturing materials as there is with a natural resource; [ii] those raw materials --- bits --- are ultra portable courtesy of the Internet; [iii] there is an enormous disparity in prevailing IT wages between the U.S. and emerging IT powerhouses offshore; [iv] it's far easier to offshore a lot of IT work than to relocate physical product manufacturing facilities; i.e., IT tends to move before other major components of a company move; [v] the U.S. has been in economic decline for a very long time in terms of balance of trade ratios and currency exchange rates; our trade debt is staggering and we are no longer the global leader in commerce; [vi] we've fallen from first to twelfth globally in standard of living while moving to 16th globally in the poverty index. Increasingly, we are a nation of haves and nave nots. The middle class consumers that have driven the U.S. economy are becoming increasingly rare with the movement being to the lower economic classes. Trickle-down economics doesn't work as a national economy recovery plan in a global economy. Too much of the money trickles to other nations; [vi] there is no comprehensive U.S. strategic plan to reverse the ebb of our economic power in a globalized economy; and [vii] there are major wild cards for the U.S. IT sector, such as the big investments in cloud computing. Cloud computing so far is not gaining a lot of traction in the market, but if it does, the future of the U.S. IT sector just might be illustrated by the photo and product described on this site. <http://www.sun.com/products/sunmd/s20/index.jsp>. Packaged and ready to be shipped wherever costs are lowest. The modular, all-weather, self-contained, and portable data center. No building required. Just park it, connect to energy supply, link to other modules, and add that module to Solaris. multiple instances of Windows High Performance Cluster Server run atop to break the Windows Server scalability barrier. I'll caveat that I am not an economist so this is all a layman's view. But it seems to me that the most stable jobs in the U.S. IT sector --- unless you can successfully market yourself as rock star class --- may be those that have strong local ties that defy off-shoring. System integration, maintenance, and repair for local businesses and governments comes to mind. A useful rule of thumb might be to focus on the kinds of jobs that require face-to-face contact with folks whose jobs won't be shipped overseas or into the cloud. Inspect your career plan and opportunities closely for susceptibility to non-local competition. Not just your job, but your prospective employer's business as well. A connected world requires connections and that includes local connections too. Focus on the local connections and think about whether the given local connection might be off-shored. As one example, 85 per cent of lawyers in the U.S. fly solo or work in firms with 5 lawyers or less. That's not likely to change; law is pretty much a face-to-face with customers service business. And lawyers are going to be far more resistant to moving their computting into the cloud because of their duty of confidentiality in regard to client records. So an IT services specialty for local law firms has fair prospects of survivability. (But you'd have to get into Windows because of the lack of profession-specific apps on Linux.) At the same time, I'd counsel not to be fearful of a career change down the line; perhaps even plan to do so. E.g., save enough money so the pink slip doesn't put you eating out of garbage cans and sleeping in alleys the same week. I had a first career in typography, two decades into it when I saw the automation handwriting on the wall. I worked as a typographer in newspapers, government, commercial printing plants, and was a partner in two print shops and a small press book publishing company before I switched careers. Got out at the peak when I could still afford to buy a new car every year, experimented with different jobs for a few years while occasionally working the extra board in newspapers, then went to law school. Skills you learn in one career tend to rub off in the next, although your most important job portability skills may not be obvious to you during the first career. E.g., I learned to strive for excellence, to do teamwork in complex business processes, mastered the written English language, learned to love the challenge of deadlines and working under their pressure, learned to design and create complex custom graphical and written works, learned to design custom workflows, learned how to help customers, the boss, and co-workers be happy. After the career change, did I miss the daily feeling of accomplishment when the press starts rolling and another edition is put to bed? The smell of news ink? The drama of producing a giant literary graphic work start to finish in a day? The fun of working with tiny pieces of lead and complex machinery to build a succession of pages every night? Reading the news before it's published while you're converting that mess from the editorial department into something that will pass the proofreaders' inspection? Sure I did and still do. I have fond memories of those days. But my biggest barrier in switching from typography to law turned out to be my daily newspaper-driven psychological expectation of having my work done each day. Finding enough daily sense of accomplishment to sustain my psyche in projects that can take years to complete was difficult for me for quite awhile. But I found my niche in prepping major cases at the bleeding edge of the law, where my work was a constant learning and creative experience, capitalizing on both my new skills and those I learned in my typography career. Do I blame the folks in the I.T. industry for obsoleting my first career? No. One thing 62 years on this planet has taught me is that change is inevitable. You either learn to love change or you spend your life in a state of progressively worsening mental depression. Change happens on this planet. It can't be dodged. E.g., when I was a kid in Kamiah, Idaho, there were only about three tractors on neighboring farms. Tractors affordable for what was mostly small farms were a new thing after World War II. Most farms were still doing field work with horses. The last horse-drawn stagecoach run pulled out of Kamiah only 5 years before I was born; the owner's son enlisted in the Army right after Pearl Harbor, leaving the business without a driver. Like everyone else who had a telephone, we were on an 8-party line. My family's telephone number was 23-J. The operator's name was Thelma. She lived in the apartment built into the back of the Ma Bell office, handled company business, ran the switchboard, and got out of bed to make the connection and later disconnect if a call came through while she was sleeping. I've seen incredible change and I'm barely 62 years old. But the point I'm striving for here is that you can look at the prospect of a career change as a potential loss or as an opportunity for new adventures. If you work in a field that requires you to keep your brain stretched, your most important occupational skills really are not the technical skills you acquire. Your most important skills develop at a level meta to the technical skills. Another thing I've learned in my 62 years is that at lest for folks with an IQ a fair bit higher than their belt sizes, life is one big ball of new opportunities. There isn't just one occupational road in life. As you walk down your own road, you will encounter one fork after another, each representing a choice between the road taken and the road not traveled. Part of occupational life is learning how to choose more wisely which road to take. But to me, the most important relevant thing I learned was to enjoy the journey, to mentally treat each fork in the occupational road as a choice between new adventures. It's a given that we're all going to live until we die; we're all just passing through, some with traveling companions, some without. I learned to opt for the most interesting path when I come to a fork in the road, not for the path that pays the most. Feeling good about what I do and the people I work with is way more important to me. When the work is fulfilling, enough money always seems to be there. When the work is unfulfilling, all the money in the world couldn't make it bearable, at least for me. Different strokes for different folks. I had an older brother-in-law who got his bachelors degree then a law degree and went to work for an insurance company as an underwriter. Ten years later, he quit and got a job working on a loading dock at a trucking company. And loved that less-pressure job until he retired. To him, a much lower income but predictable hours and his friendships with the guys at work was his niche. He'd had it with cutthroat corporate infighting and what he called "screwing the customers for a living." But I've seen a steep decline in the numbers of folks in the U.S. who manage to hang onto the same career until retirement. Globalization is accelerating that trend. In the IT sector, I'm not sure there ever was such a prospect. The pace of innovation and obsolescence within the industry is astounding. Well, I've rambled on too long already. Hope this helps in some way. Best regards, Paul -- Universal Interoperability Council <http:www.universal-interop-council.org> _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list euglug@euglug.org http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
