The rise of the do-it-yourself tech executive

It must seem contradictory to many that, at the same time that the IT industry faces an unprecedented skills crisis in many ways, organisations are slashing their IT workforces.

In August 2022, the Tech Council of Australia announced that the federal government would create 1.2 million tech jobs. However, by the end of January 2023, there had been 85,000 tech redundancies in the Australian tech industry. Despite being the seventh largest employer in Australia, the tech industry has the second-highest redundancy numbers.

The latest redundancies have come from Telstra, which announced it was cutting 8% of its entire workforce.

History tells us these things are cyclical and hiring will start again. There will also be growing businesses and opportunities for IT professionals to enter non-IT fields. But perhaps the question we need to be asking is whether people will even want to return to a corporate environment if there are other opportunities and avenues.

People are getting sick of workplaces

As much as working from home has been a revelation, it has also given rise to employer behaviour that can make employees feel uncomfortable. For instance, there was a 1700% increase in searches for employee tracking software during the pandemic. Harvard Business Review cited a doubling of demand for employee monitoring software, including keystroke tracking, GPS location tracking and video surveillance.

During the pandemic, employee tracking sometimes felt more of a priority than the wellbeing of the employees, which wasn’t a positive influence on morale.

Changing attitudes and requirements within the workplace is another challenge for many. Rules such as the “Right to Disconnect” sound like a positive step in maintaining work/life balance, but can disrupt the normal way that a business and its employees operate. Meanwhile, changing attitudes around how people interact with one another within office environments can leave people feeling isolated and dehumanised.

Essentially, there is a growing dissatisfaction with corporate culture and the atmosphere that comes from some working environments. For some the workplace has become the ‘woke’ place where some employees feel out of place in the face of perceived ideological conformity, and sometimes a focus on social issues that is confusing or unwelcome for workers whose careers evolved in very different environments.

Bring these things together — discomfort in workplace environments, the sense of micromanagement and the willingness for organisations to slash staff to meet other objectives — and it’s easy to see why some would want to wash their hands of the workplace entirely.

The rise of the ‘Telecom Mum’ and the future of IT

In light of these challenges, many are considering the prospect of starting their own business. While starting a business offers an escape from these pressures and a chance to be true to oneself, it’s not easy and can feel daunting.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. A trend is emerging — call it the ‘Telecom Mum’ trend — of incredibly qualified female IT experts who left the business for various reasons and have now returned but have done so on their own terms. These women leverage the rise of work-from-home and their deep expertise to enter the workforce but not the workplace.

The model was pioneered first through the US, but is now resonating with women across the world as an opportunity to push forward their capabilities while maintaining the work/life balance and being able to sidestep the cyclical nature of redundancies and uncertainty that seems to have set in in the IT industry.

The Telecom Mum has helped forge an alternative technology industry ecosystem in which they build a network of partners that they can take to their clients and provide expertise in addressing their gaps in skills and technology that they might otherwise struggle to fill.

It’s also worth noting that while the term is Telecom Mum, there are also plenty of men in similar positions who are opting to take ownership over their own destinies in the IT industry.

Essentially, those who are well and truly done with the corporate environment can now forge their own pathway. Taking those first steps in self-determination can be a source of anxiety in themselves, but working in collaboration with others who are also doing so can help overcome these initial hurdles.

Now we are seeing corporate IT veterans with decades of experience, men and women alike, building a parallel industry infrastructure built on strong relationships and powerful competencies and knowledge. This trend will only continue as more highly talented and experienced IT workers are shown the door by the big companies.

And none of this talent will need to tiptoe over the loaded eggshells of corporate work environments again.

*Tony Heywood is Founder & Managing Director of Prodo Technologies, a technology solutions distributor. In this capacity, he helps SaaS vendors develop an agency-based channel across the ANZ and ASEAN regions.

Top image credit: iStock.com/Delmaine Donson