When did IT become the cool industry?

The IT industry deserves a workforce of diverse leadership and talent, regardless of gender, age and specialisation.

My timing has always been off … so it’s no surprise that I joined the IT industry, fresh out of university in 2001, yep, just after the dot.com crash. I had fallen into the technology industry and didn’t really have a clue what I was getting into, but what I grasped quite quickly is that for an industry that was meant to be cutting edge, it was not a cool place to be.

Back then, admitting to working in IT was akin to saying “I’m an accountant” or “snail farmer”, and often at dinner parties I’d find myself shunned to the end of the table with people from those professions. Very few people my age knew much about the industry and who could blame them? Databases, servers, mainframes, ERP and SCM were all terms that didn’t really serve me in the outside world.

A lot has happened since 2001, and it turns out I wasn’t late to the party after all - the real party hadn’t even started yet. Somewhere among the arrival of smartphones, Facebook and a million different applications that infiltrate our home and work life, working in IT became cool.

We have a new batch of tech heroes to worship - the Bill Gates and Larry Ellisons of the world have stepped out of the limelight to make way for a new generation of household names: Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page and, fortunately for FITT (Females in IT and Telecommunications), a new crop of female technology evangelists such as Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer.

IT is hot right now, and what that means for those of us already in the industry is an upgrade to the interesting end of the dinner party table as more cool people want to get involved. The best graduate talent from all disciplines are keen to join this exciting growth industry and importantly to FITT, the universal appeal of the new IT industry shakes off the image of IT being primarily male super-geeks. There is space for a diverse workforce, diverse leadership and the best of talent regardless of gender, age and specialisation.

Every year, FITT celebrates the latest buzz in the technology landscape at its high-profile ICT Trends event, where those in the industry get together for a five-star lunch while hearing about the cutting-edge technologies that will change the way we live and work. Top of the pile at this year’s event is 3D printing and IBM’s Watson, the supercomputer that finally brings the dream to reality that a computer can think like a human and process natural language while constantly learning. Could we soon have a scenario like the one portrayed in Spike Jonze’s movie Her where emotional relationships with our computers become a reality? For some, this relationship has existed for some time.

Obviously there is a downside to the pervasiveness of technology and the issues this creates for security and privacy. You only need ask the hundred or so Hollywood starlets who had compromising photos of themselves hacked from their personal iCloud accounts. But the fact that people entrust their precious files to a virtual system whose national identity is virtually unknown highlights the trust we place in our devices.

Who knows where these technologies will take us in the next 15 years, but I hope the industry will continue to evolve and encourage innovation through a diverse workforce where our role models are both male and female, where the geeks and cool kids will stand side by side. Long may the party continue.

*Catriona Walkerden is the Marketing Lead on the Females in IT and Telecommunications (FITT) management committee and also Marketing Manager at Optus Business. Her career has spanned almost 15 years with companies such as Oracle, Cisco and Sybase SAP in Europe.