The IT Jobs That Are Becoming Obsolete
The WWW and Internet have now been around for a good 15 years. Like many new technologies, as time moves on and things become more sophisticated, modified or removed, the IT world has changed. Looking forward, a study shows some job fields that were once needed just five to ten years ago, are now, obsolete. Like any legacy infrastructure, there will always be some leftovers, but the job fields listed are headed for the chopping block at many mid to large firms.
Look at John Doe, MCTS, CCA, CTSGIT, MCITP, CCNA, MCP. Last held position: Assistant manager at Starbucks. What is wrong here? Mr. Doe has spent most of his time learning, while impressive, he lacks any experience. Because of increased automation, even high-level Cisco Certified Infrastructure Engineers could be facing the same fate as the dinosaurs. The new network model is no longer having people interface with it but more about machines and software communicating via programmatic interfaces.
With System Administrators, both private and public clouds are making their functions dubious. Few firms want to deal with e-mail in-house. Most of the these jobs will migrate to the cloud companies where demand is higher. Those not in cloud domains are being outsourced to India or elsewhere. Granted, some will be around but their numbers are dwindling.
Data Center employees are those on the way out. These are people who maintain machines. They know a depth of knowledge about hardware but little about software. In the future, there will be very little need to have local hardware-oriented technical knowledge.
The Repair Tech is one field you would not think would be on the endangered species list. Trade schools promote them because all firms need someone who can fix a computer. The reason why they are not needed as much is because the cost of hardware has dropped considerably and mobile devices rendering desktops a thing of the past for many. Hardware has gotten so inexpensive that it's cheaper to replace something that's broken than to waste time and money fixing it with a repair tech. Also, more applications are running from virtualized platforms or Web-based interfaces in the Cloud. They are a dying breed.
Another job that has become dubious is the Web Designer, or one with mostly basic skills. It is so easy to throw up a fairly nice website. Companies offer this as a service. There many website creation tools out there for free and the trend is moving to less dynamic websites that are more friendly to mobile devices, Web designers need to become to SEO experts very quickly, most are not.
Unix Specialists are a dying breed also. Thanks to Linux, which is far cheaper to run and setup than a Unix server. More companies are switching to Linux. Following closely are Programmers in Cobol and Fortran. Routine programming jobs are largely being offshore or eliminated outright. Code writers today need to be at a software engineering level for large firms and need to also be integrators of business logic and cloud tools. Even code writing for mobile apps is not a sure thing.
