What is your career history?

EdwardCastle wrote: »

It is out of necessity for many people, the world is changing technologically an awful lot faster in every industry than a few decades ago. Many traditional type jobs that an older generation would have worked for 50 years of their lives are gone.

Today's world, it is expected that the majority of people will change career at least 5 times in their life.....out of necessity!

And IT is one of the worst in that respect. A good few years ago, Microsoft discontinued support for Windows 98, and the entire team that had worked on that product, and knew their way around fixing it and tweaking it was let go, a completely new team was formed for the next operating system. Nothing like cleaning house, and making sure that there's no continuity going forward, and then people wonder why there are changes that break things that have worked for years.

XP is about to go the same way, and one of the reasons to upgrade being given is that patches released for later versions will allow hackers to reverse engineer ways of getting into XP that will make it even more vulnerable. In some cases, the same patch for XP is also applied to Win8, so the concept of getting rid of good people is flawed.

The other issue is the race to the bottom. Skilled people are valuable, but how many employers are prepared to recognise and pay for that value. Not many these days, it's all about minimum wage and zero hours contracts, skills are a "luxury" that are not worth paying for, and that's one of the reasons why we see things like banking systems that crash and are unusable for a number of days or longer, the understanding and skills have been removed from the loop, because they are too expensive.

When things go bad, that's where paper qualifications start looking very transparent, and real experience and hands on are worth a lot more, but they don't come with a piece of paper to prove they exist, they are developed and nurtured by employers that understand the value of experience. Once it's gone, it can be extremely expensive to replace.