It's all about skills this century. More and more employers want people who already possess certain skills and ICT skills are at the top of the list more often than not.
Why? It is because ICT demands that people have a broader level of intellectual skills than ever before. The reasons for that are historical as well as financial. Let's take a little trip back in time and look at how a few jobs have changed because of the incorporation of ICT.
The Office Administrator
Twenty to thirty years ago, before the advent of computers in the office environment (or, to put it better, their takeover of the office environment) keyboard skills were possibly even more important than they are today. People used this old gadget called a typewriter. You may have seen them in museums!
A typewriter was a device with a set of keys that when pressed allowed us to print characters directly on to paper. No screen! No spell check! They were indispensable in offices and until the 1980s no office would be without one. The introduction of ICT, in terms of Personal Computers with word processing software largely replaced the tasks which the typewriter had been used for.
But the personal computer also introduced a higher level of complexity. With a typewriter you could usually embolden words - that's where our IT term “bold” comes from. Some typewriters could even underline and italicize text. Fonts could be changed on some typewriters but this was time consuming.
That was pretty much it. With the personal computer people could suddenly change the font on a whim. They could change the size of the text, change the colour of the text, use a spell checker, introduce graphics in to their documents - the list goes on. Then came mail merge where a single letter could be sent out to hundreds or thousands of individuals with ease.
Then there is filing. We still have filing cabinets, but not the rows and rows and rows that had to be used when everything was done on paper. Computerized databases meant that things could be much more efficiently filed. Plus when an employee wished to something, for example, list everything filed in alphabetical order, or an alternative order, this could be done with a few clicks of a mouse. Information could be retrieved from a database in any number of formats and more complex questions could be asked of data than had previously been possible.
Let's not forget the internet. It is sometimes referred to as the largest free library in the work and that has meant that there has been a revolution in the way in which research is conducted. Previously many organizations would employ people specifically to research information that the company needed and these involved very high skills. But let's face it - anyone can Google anything! That's right, isn't it?
Of course, it's not all a bed of roses for the office worker. With the new technology came the demand for new skills - including a greater ability to think for oneself and solve problems independently. Plus, in the past only secretaries and typists would be expected to have keyboard skills. Now, anyone who works in an office needs them, like it or not! With the internet, all that information is at our fingertips. However, as any student will tell you, there is a skill involved in getting the right results from a search engine!
So, a historical set of skills has been replaced by others for office workers. Most would agree though, that because of ICT the expectations of employers about what their employees can and should be able to do (and the time in which they should be able to do it!) is much higher than any time in history.
NEXT: Complexity - More jobs
