CIO alert: Information technology is a $4 trillion global business
Research from IT advocacy group, CompTIA, offers interesting data about the size, scope, and growth of the information technology industry. For CIOs and other IT professionals, understanding the trends can help you create company strategy, identify job opportunities, understand areas of growth, and sidestep the impact of industry weakness.
For example, there is a skills migration taking place from managing on-premise infrastructure to designing for the cloud and helping companies become more user-centric. Every person working in IT should be aware of these trends and recognize the potential impact on both company strategy and personal employment.
CompTIA conducted its analysis based on research from a survey of 673 respondents along with data from IDC, EMSI, Burning Glass Technologies Labor Insights, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and others.
Based on the data, CompTIA concludes that the global IT industry generates almost $4 trillion annually, including $1 trillion in the United States. In the US, IT employs over 5 million people.
Key segments of this market include IT hardware, services, software, and telecom:
The following chart shows the composition and size of the IT workforce in the United States:
The report lists these as the top seven IT growth roles in 2015:
- Cybersecurity Analysts
- Web Developers
- Software Developers, Applications
- Software Developers, Systems Software
- Systems Analysts
- IT Support Specialists
- IT Managers / Directors / CIOs
Importantly, these are the IT jobs expected to gain most traction through 2016:
- Chief analytics/data officer
- Data scientist
- Dataviz/Data visualizers
- Social media analyst
- Augmented reality designer
- Content manager/strategist
- Marketing technologist
- Container developers and architects
- Cloud systems engineer
- Internet of things architect
- Information Assurance Analyst
- Computer security incident responder
- Agile project manager
- Responsive web designer
For IT professionals wondering which industries offer the greatest number of jobs, the top five are:
- Professional, scientific and technical services
- Information
- Government
- Finance and insurance
- Manufacturing
Of course, IT is a technical discipline, and so the report offers a list of up and coming technologies, including blockchain, machine learning, containers, many others.