Salaries are rising.

Hmmm… salaries are going up again Speaking as an employee, not an employer, this sounds like good news. 🙂

One quote, however, which qualifies as a blinding flash of the totally obvious, was this one:

Candidates were loyal to their skills and their careers, rather than to employers, Ms Bianchini said.

Well, duh. Employers aren’t loyal to their staff, so why should their staff be loyal to employers? Very few employers offer genuine training and mentoring to their staff, let alone realistic career paths (at least ones that don’t end up in management). In IT, career skills are very much subject to depreciation – if you simply stay in a job for several years, odds are your marketable skills will have been severely reduced.

Employers have little incentive to assist their staff in skill development – for the work they currently do, their staff are (mostly) sufficiently skilled, and for new work, they’ll bring in new expertise and maybe train up a select few. After all, you can’t just bring over everyone – there’s all that old stuff to support, right? This means that people tend to stagnate unless they take an active role in developing themselves.

(At Suncorp, we had a very deliberate policy: those few staff we picked to transition to new technologies were selected precisely because they were self-motivated enough to start the journey by themselves)

If you are an IT professional, and you don’t invest in your own development, then it’s a matter of time before you’ll be pushed out of the market. Your career development is your own responsibility, and it’s not surprising that market analysts such as Ms Bianchini are realising this.

Author: Robert Watkins

My name is Robert Watkins. I am a software developer and have been for over 20 years now. I currently work for people, but my opinions here are in no way endorsed by them (which is cool; their opinions aren’t endorsed by me either). My main professional interests are in Java development, using Agile methods, with a historical focus on building web based applications. I’m also a Mac-fan and love my iPhone, which I’m currently learning how to code for. I live and work in Brisbane, Australia, but I grew up in the Northern Territory, and still find Brisbane too cold (after 22 years here). I’m married, with two children and one cat. My politics are socialist in tendency, my religious affiliation is atheist (aka “none of the above”), my attitude is condescending and my moral standing is lying down. View all posts by Robert Watkins