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68 Journal of Global Information Management, 12(1), 68-82, Jan-Mar 2004

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The Relationship Between Information Technology Professionals’ Skill Requirements and Career Stage in the E-Commerce Era: An Empirical Study Seokha Koh, Choong Buk National University, Korea Sooun Lee, David C. Yen and Douglas Havelka, Miami University (Ohio), USA

ABSTRACT Building on prior research, a field study of IT professionals is performed to determine if and how IT professionals’ technical skills requirement change as they gain experience in the workplace. Based on the results of this study, it appears that IT professionals: (1) are required to have different technical skills as their careers progress, and (2) do possess different technical skills at different stages in their careers. Keywords: electronic commerce; end user computing, information technology

INTRODUCTION Learning is an indispensable component of any job in today’s professional workplace. This is especially true for information technology (IT) professionals in the Web-based, Internet-driven e-commerce era. Changes in the market, technology, and work processes reduce and may even eliminate the need for old skills and demand the development of new ones. Performance standards are becoming more complex and demanding (Ilgen & Pulakos, 1997). So

professionals should identify skill gaps, recognize areas to improve current performance, keep up with advances in their profession, and anticipate how changes elsewhere in the firm and the industry may affect work demands and skills requirements (Carnevale & Desrochers, 1999; London & Smither, 1999). It is becoming more and more difficult to specify and prepare for the skill demands of professionals in advance of beginning work activities (Barley & Orr, 1997; Mirvis & Hall, 1996). Web-based applica-

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Journal of Global Information Management, 12(1), 68-82, Jan-Mar 2004 69

tions that support e-commerce throughout the value chain may require different technical skills than those that experienced IT professionals possess. Not only are these new skills required, but the rate of skill and technology change is continuously increasing. Also, the number of factors influencing these changes is constantly increasing (Howard, 1995; Weick, 1990). Given these dynamic work environments, contemporary work roles require a significant amount of activity that is contingent and hard to predict (Darrah, 1994). As a result, skill deficiency in IT professionals has been found in various areas (Lee et al., 1995; Nelson, 1991; Trauth et al., 1993). To address this, IT professionals are continuously adding, replacing, and retrofitting their skill set to ensure an adequate stock of knowledge and expertise to perform their jobs (Alder, 1992; Carnevale et al., 1994). It should be noted that most of these issues and phenomena were observed prior to the push for Internet and web-based applications, this can only add to the changes and diversity in technical skills required by IT professionals. A great deal of learning takes place without any connection to either trainers or training programs (Marsick & Watkins, 1990; Van der Krogt, 1996). Marsick and Watkins (1990) estimate that up to 83 percent of workplace learning occurs informally1 or ‘incidentally’. Learning results from training and development activities provided by employers as well. A few outstanding organizations sustain competitive advantage through training and development activities (Olian et al., 1998). The average organization, however, fails to provide adequate training and is improving its training investments and practices at a slow rate (Bassie & Van Buren, 1999). Computer skill training consumes a major part of training and development activities in

organizations and is known to constrain training of other skills (Carnevale & Desrochers, 1999). Again, this can only be exacerbated by the new demands on IT professionals, and perhaps other business professionals, to develop skills to support e-commerce applications. Organizations sometimes choose to buy desired skills through hiring. Todd et al. (1995) found that the relative frequency and proportion of stated technical skill requirements in recruiting advertisements for IT professionals have increased dramatically, while the relative frequency of requirements for business and systems knowledge has actually decreased slightly. This suggests that new IT-related skills are imported from outside by hiring, whereas development of business knowledge and other skills originates mainly from inside the organization. Regardless, the burden is clearly on the individual to maintain and develop the skills necessary to successfully perform their job and for career advancement. The emphasis on human resource management and learning systems in the workplace is shifting from training to learning (Van der Krogt, 1998). Schools and universities should take this shift from training to learning in the workplace into explicit consideration to optimize their students’ life-long learning process. As it is not economical for organizations to train their personnel in areas where the personnel can learn the materials efficiently in an informal fashion in the workplace, it is also not economical for schools to instruct students on topics the students can learn more efficiently and effectively after graduation. In such areas, it is desirable to equip the students with the basis to learn upon (Couger, 1995). This argument is especially relevant when the skills and knowledge are not needed imminently, but are



required for roles and positions attained during the later stages of their careers. This paper presents an investigation into the technical skills required by organizations for the IT professionals they employ as these professionals move through different stages of their careers. Also, the technical skills that these IT professionals possess in these career stages are investigated. Obviously, as IT professionals progress through their careers, the jobs and responsibilities allocated to them change. It is to be expected that the roles and responsibilities of IT professionals at later stages in their careers would demand different technical skills versus those who are neophytes or in the middle stage of their careers. It also seems reasonable that as technology and the general business environment changes in response to the e-commerce era, so will the demands on IT professionals and their skill sets. The study undertaken provides some new knowledge with regard to the technical skills required and those currently possessed by IT professionals.

BACKGROUND Ashenhurst (1972) generated 37 skills and abilities that IT graduates or, equivalently, IT professionals should possess. He classified them into six categories: people, models, systems, computers, organizations, and society. Various classifications of the abilities, knowledge, or skills which an IT graduate must possess have been suggested since Ashenhurst (e.g., Couger et al., 1995; Lee et al., 1995; Nelson, 1991; Todd, 1995; Young & Lee, 1996). Despite the absence of a universally accepted classification scheme, the literature generally agrees that people regard ‘general’ knowledge such as interpersonal skills and business knowledge more important than ‘IS-related’ skills

(Garner, 1998; Lee et al., 1995; Leitheiser, 1992; Nelson, 1991; Trauth, 1993). This is true even for entry-level IT personnel (Young & Lee, 1996). Young and Lee (1996) found that the level of technical skill often determines an IT major’s access to an internship, which may directly result in permanent hiring after the internship. Todd et al. (1990) also found that recruiters put more emphases on technical skill than on business or systems knowledge when they recruit IT personnel. Recognizing that their finding contradicts the literature concerning skill requirements for IT personnel, Todd et al. concluded that there is a mismatch between what is achieved and what is desired. Therefore, the recruitment process does not respond to the true organizational requirements and is misdirecting its attention towards technical skills. However, another interpretation of these results is plausible: recruiters really do desire technical skills, versus other skills, when they recruit IT personnel. Almost three-fourths (75%) of firms place new IT hires into technical training programs, while less than a fourth (25%) of firms place new IT employees into management training (Young & Lee, 1996). These findings imply that organizations assign their newly hired, technically focused IT personnel to technically oriented jobs. And after they have acquired technical job experience, organizations assign them with increasingly greater proportion of ‘nontechnical’ responsibilities. Other research has suggested that the changing information technology work environment will force IT professionals to acquire new and different skills to be successful in the post-dotcom bust, e-commerce-driven business world (Prager, 1998). The importance of IT technical skills in the design and development of Webbased, e-commerce systems have also



been emphasized (Henneman, 1999). Additionally, recent research has suggested that virtual learning environments for IT skills will have a significant impact on computer self-efficacy, a significant negative impact on satisfaction with the learning process, and little or no difference in performance when compared with traditional classroom instruction (Piccoli, Ahmad & Ives, 2001). This indicates that not only will the specific skills needed in the future be different, but how IT professionals learn these new skills will also change. In a study of the technical and organizational skills of webmasters, it was found that employers seek technical skills over organizational skills, but that the webmasters felt that organizational skills were more important to performing their job (Wade & Parent, 2002). Additionally, the study found that a deficiency in either technical or organizational skills leads to lower job performance, but the negative effect of an organizational deficiency was larger. Another survey of employers found that employers rated non-technical skills higher than technical skills, and that “gaps” between expected performance and actual performance were greatest for non-technical skills (Cappel, 2002). In a similar study of IT students’ perceptions of the importance of technical versus non-technical skills to be a successful IT professional, the results indicate that students believe that non-technical skills such as communication, analytical, and managerial skills are at least as important as technical skills for a successful IT professional (Medlin, Dave & Vannoy, 2001). A study focused on computer skills for business professionals through the year 2005 found that 12 hardware and software skills and 13 Internet/Web-centric communication skills are and will be important for all business professionals (Zhao, 2002).

Additionally, it was reported that programming skills are important for IT professionals and that discipline specific applications are important for other business professionals. Finally, this study found that the discipline-specific applications were considered integrated components of the web-enabled enterprise; this also could imply the need for a change in the IT professionals’ skill set. Given the findings of this prior research and the lack of research into how IT professionals’ skill sets match the organization’s needs, a study was undertaken to investigate how well IT professionals’ technical skills match the organization’s requirements relative to the stage of the IT professionals career. It is reasonable to presume that less experienced IT professionals possess different kinds and levels of technical skills in comparison with more experienced IT professionals, and these skills may meet the organization’s needs to varying degrees. To investigate these observations, the following hypotheses are postulated for testing in this study: H1: The technical skills required by IT professionals will be significantly different in different stages of their IT career. H2: The technical skills possessed by IT professionals will be significantly different in different stages of their IT career.

RESEARCH METHOD & ANALYSIS Building on previous research that investigated general skill requirements for IT professionals (Koh, Lee, Yen, & Havelka; 2001), this study focuses on the evolution



of particular technical skills as IT professionals move through their careers in the e-commerce era. A list of technical skills widely used was assembled and consolidated into 29 items (Tables 4, 5, & Appendix A) arbitrarily. This set of 29 technical skills was used to test hypotheses 1 and 2 stated above. For each item of the survey, IT professionals were asked to assess the proficiency level that is required for that item (H1) and also the proficiency level that they possess for that item (H2). Every variable is measured by using a 1-5 rating scale:

1 for the lowest level, and 5 for the highest level. Two pilot tests of the questionnaire were conducted before the administration of the survey questionnaire. The questionnaire contains two parts: (1) a section for demographic data and (2) a section to measure the technical skill levels of IT professionals in industry. Organizations were identified that had a history of employing IT professionals in different industries. A total of 470 survey questionnaires were mailed and a follow-up mailing was made to non-respondents. A total

Table 1: Demographics of subject organizations and IT professionals responding

Number of employees

Percentage

Under 100 100-499 500-999 1,000-4,999 5,000-9,999 10,000 & over Gross Revenue ($ Millions)

1.3% 8.8% 7.5% 21.3% 5.0% 56.3% Percentage

Under 100 100-249 250-499 500-999 1,000-1,999 2,000 and over Age Under 20 20-24 25-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60 & over

9.3% 5.3% 6.7% 10.7% 9.3% 58.7% Percentage 1.2% 10.7% 23.8% 35.7% 22.6% 6.0% 0.0%

Types of Jobs (multiple entries allowed) AI/expert systems specialists Application programmer Data communication specialist

Percentage 1.2% 25.9% 1.2%



of 92 questionnaires were returned from the 470 survey questionnaires mailed. After excluding seven invalid questionnaires because of incomplete responses, a total of 85 records were used for the analysis, giving a response rate of 19.57 %. Table 1 shows the demographics of the sample. The respondents represent a variety of industries that employ IT professionals in a diverse range of positions (see the demographic results in Table 1). Recipients were assured that all data were confidential and that only aggregate results were to be reported. Table 2 summarizes the results of preliminary analysis followed by a multivariate analysis. As would be expected, IT professionals indicate that they possess the

technical skills required to perform their jobs successfully. The overall technical skill level possessed is equivalent to or higher than the technical skill level required in almost every area. It can be safely concluded that IT professionals feel virtually no deficiency in the level of IT technical skills that they possess when compared to what they consider to be required to perform their jobs. To analyze the influence of work experience, we divided the respondents into three groups representing different career stages for IT professionals: those with less than three years experience (Group 1), those with between three and ten years of experience (Group 2), and those with greater than ten years2 experience (Group 3). The multivariate analysis of variance

Table 2: Results of Preliminary Analysis (a) Statistics of the Variable Sets Quartiles Minimum

1st

2nd

3rd

Maximum

Technical Skills: Required

1.1

2.2

2.4

2.9

3.9

Technical Skills: Possessed

1.6

2.3

2.7

3.1

3.9

Variable Set

(b) Variables with significant difference between the required and possessed scores (*significant at α = .1, **significant at α = .05, and ***significant α = .01) Assembly language (.5)*** Presentation graphic tools (.5)*** Spreadsheet tools (.5)*** Fourth generation language (.4)*** Internet/navigation browser (.4)*** Statistics tools (.4)*** Word processing tools (.4)*** High-level procedural language (.3)*** PC-based DB tools (.3)** Client-server based DB tools (.2)** Decision support systems (.2)* PC operating systems (.2)* Web page production tools (.2)* Query language (.1)* Enterprise resource planning tools (-.1)** Simulation/optimization tools (-1)** Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.


(MANOVA) procedure in SAS V6.12 is used to test the hypotheses. The procedure uses only the records with no missing values for analysis. Because of the large number of variables, there are missing values in the data, making it inappropriate to test the hypotheses related to the technical skill at the variable level. Instead, the MANOVA is applied against the technical variables set in total, to test the hypotheses. Table 3 summarizes the MANOVA results. The MANOVA procedure in SAS V6.12 uses four statistics to calculate the p-value. The results on all four of the statistics are presented. In addition to the MANOVA, the univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA) is conducted for each variable to determine if significant differences exist among the different IT experience levels for specific technical skills. The results of the analysis are presented and discussed below for each hypothesis proposed. H1: The technical skills required by IT pro-

fessionals will be significantly different in different stages of their IT career. The MANOVA results (see Table 3) indicate that Hypothesis 1 is accepted (using all four statistics). This result indicates strong support for the proposition that different technical skill is required at different stages of an IT professional’s career. Using ANOVA to gain additional insight reveals six specific items that have significant differences in required technical skill among the groups (see Table 4). In Table 4, the variables with a p-value greater than .10 are omitted for simplicity. All the variables with a p-value greater than .10 are presented in Appendix A. This table contains 42 variables whose p-value is greater than 0.1. Because of random error, one should be cautious in interpreting this table. Any prominent pattern among requirement variables was not identified. It is, however, noticeable that, out of 19 possession variables, the long

Table 3: Results of MANOVA

Wilks’ Lambda .007 .000

Variable Set Technical skills set: Required Technical skills sets: Possessed

P-VALUE HotellingPillai’s Lawley Trace Trace .014 .004 .000 .000

Roy’s Greatest Root .001 .003

Table 4: ANOVA Results: Experience Level vs. Technical Skill Required

(Variables with p-value < 0.1) VARIABLE Expert systems/shells Transaction processing systems CASE/structured programming tools Enterprise resource planning Object-oriented languages PC-based database tools

CAREER STAGE G1 G2 G3 1.9 1.3 1.6 2.1 3.2 2.5 2.9 2.3 1.9 2.3 3.0 1.8 3.5 2.6 2.4 3.4 2.2 2.7

P-VALUE .031 .042 .001 .026 .090 .014



Table 5: ANOVA Results: Experience Level VS. Technical Expertise Possessed

(Variables with p-value < 0.1) VARIABLE CASE/structured programming tools Enterprise resource planning Object-oriented languages PC-based database tools Electronic mail tools Internet/navigation browser Presentation graphics tools Spreadsheet tools Web page production tools Word processing tools

experienced group scored the highest mean value in two variables: assembly language and multimedia production tools. These results strongly support the postulation that the shorter experienced IS professional generally possesses a higher level of expertise than those with longer experience in the area of IS software technical skills. Assembly language is an old technology and it seems reasonable that the long experienced IS professionals possess the highest level of proficiency. Multimedia production tools, however, are a newer technology. It seems highly probable that random error is dominant in this case. Clear trends exist in the scores of two of these required technical skills (see Table 4), CASE/structured programming Tools and object-oriented languages. In both cases the trend is a decrease in the required level of skill as the IT professional attains more experience. Several explanations for this pattern are plausible. These trends may be explained by the fact that the availability of CASE tools and the use of objectoriented languages are more recent phenomena and therefore the younger, less experienced IT professionals in the beginning of their careers are required to pos-

CAREER STAGE G1 G2 G3 2.9 2.6 2.0 2.1 2.8 1.7 3.5 2.9 2.3 3.8 2.8 2.7 4.6 3.8 3.8 4.3 4.1 3.5 4.1 3.8 3.4 4.1 3.9 3.4 3.5 2.8 2.4 4.4 4.0 3.7

P-VALUE .019 .006 .017 .024 .045 .010 .031 .023 .028 .049

sess these skills for entry level positions as organizations attempt to use these new technologies. It may also be the case that these skills have been taught in college and training programs relatively recently, and that as the individuals that were exposed to these skills move into more senior positions, the skills are applied to projects that they lead, thereby making these skills required for the more junior IT professionals that follow. Alternatively, it may be that both of these skills relate to the low-level, “grunt” work involved with constructing technical and therefore is required primarily by the personnel performing this work, i.e., the more junior personnel, and the personnel immediately supervising, i.e., the intermediate level of experience. It is also interesting to note that for both enterprise resource planning tools and transaction processing systems the highest level of technical skills is required by the middle group (G2: 3-10 years of experience). This may be explained by the nature of these technologies. Both ERP and customized transaction processing systems may require some degree of sophistication to understand and to work with, therefore only those personnel with proven track



records are assigned to these tasks. And as IT personnel gain even more experience they move into more technical areas becoming technical experts, or into more managerial roles. The other two areas of technical skills that demonstrate a significant difference across IT personnel experience levels are Expert Systems/Shells and PC-based Database Tools. Both of these technical skills demonstrate a pattern where the least experienced and the most experienced are required to have higher levels of competence in these areas than the intermediate IT personnel. For expert systems technical skills, this may be explained by the need for more experienced IT personnel to act as technical experts and the less experienced to bring in the latest technical skills from their educational programs. This would be consistent with the notion presented above that mid-level IT personnel will have a tendency to become primarily technical experts or to take on more managerial roles as their careers progress further. In the case of PC-based Database Tools, it appears that the significant differences found may be primarily due to the large difference between the level required by the least experienced and both the midlevel and more experienced IT personnel. This seems logical as the newer IT personnel would most likely be assigned to tasks involved with supporting user requests to get information from the existing database. H2: The technical skills possessed by IT professionals will be significantly different in different stages of their IT career. Hypothesis 2 is also supported by all four statistics of the MANOVA results (see Table 3). A more detailed analysis using

ANOVA results in 10 technical skill variables whose p-values are less than 0.1 (see Table 5), indicating differences in the level of technical skills possessed among the groups. Of the significant variables in the table, the senior IT group (G3) did not score the highest mean value in any variable. In fact, for eight of the ten significant variables, there is a trend in the reported scores from the junior IT professionals (G1) to the senior IT professionals (G3) going from the highest to the lowest. Moreover, the senior IT group scored the highest mean value in only two variables out of the 19 variables whose p-values are greater than 0.1 (see Table 6). These results are consistent with the notion presented above; as IT personnel advance in their careers, they take on more managerial types of responsibilities and their technical skills become less important. Similar to the trends observed for the skills required, the skills possessed shows a clear trend in the scores of the CASE/ Structured Programming Tools and Objectoriented Languages from a high level possessed in the early career stage to lower levels possessed in the later career stage. Also, the same result is seen in the skills possessed level for the Enterprise Resource Planning tools that occurred for the skills required. In this case the intermediate level IT personnel exhibit the highest level of skill. It is very interesting to note that the personal productivity skills such as electronic mail tools, word processing, Internet/ Web browsers, presentation graphics, and spreadsheets were rated as the highest technical skills among all the skills possessed for both junior and senior IT groups, although those in the early career stage group are consistently higher than those in the later career stage groups. This makes sense due to the fact that nearly all IT per-



sonnel should be expected to be “expert” users of these productivity tools, regardless of their level of experience; in addition, the newest hires would certainly be expected to be most up-to-date on the latest tools due to their more recent formal education. Overall, there appears to be a tendency that less experienced IT professionals possess, and are required to possess, higher levels of proficiency in most technical skills. The difference between the later career stage group and the earlier career stage groups is more prominent in the skillspossessed scores than in the skills-required scores. Again, this is consistent with the observation that most IT personnel advance from a more technical position when they get right out of college, to more management-oriented roles as they gain knowledge and experience. The one caveat to this pattern may be the IT personnel that choose to become technical experts. And even these specialists appear to view their positions more as management or business consultants than they would as technical specialists.

DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS The most obvious implication of the results of this study is that IT professionals must be dedicated to lifelong learning. Given that the nature of our profession is based on a continuously changing and evolving knowledge base, the IT professional must diligently monitor the technological environment and take action to learn and apply new technical skills to remain a productive and valuable employee (or consultant). This study adds to the evidence in support of the notion that as IT professionals move through their careers the skills

required to perform their job duties will change. This might be considered an “IT career stage theory” with related hypotheses. Some of these hypotheses can be deduced and tested by further research. First, this theory implies that only those individuals that have the ability and the motivation to learn multiple types of skills will advance into higher levels of IT management. Technical skills are required to get the first job and to succeed at it. As IT professionals gain experience, they are given more managerial responsibilities. Perhaps as the technical team leader and then as project manager of a technical project. These roles demand technical expertise as well as planning, coordinating, and communication skills. If successful in these positions, the IT professional is then expected to take on responsibilities that may include a budget and hiring, again demanding new skills. These new responsibilities require less technical ability and more “managerial” skills. To attain the highest levels of IT management, chief information officer or partner, requires different skills again, selling to customers, strategic thinking, risk-taking. Only those individuals able and willing not only to learn, but to master, different types of skills can take this path. Second, the career stage theory would suggest that organizations require different types of technical skills from the IT professionals in different stages of their careers. New hires are expected to possess skills related to the newest technologies. This is not to say that they possess high levels of technical skill, but that they should have been exposed to the most recent advances that have become accepted in the field. Mid-level IT professionals, like mid-level professionals in all areas, are the true work-horses. They are expected to have high levels of technical expertise for



the technologies that the organization uses, and they are expected to have high levels of understanding of business processes and industry-specific nuances. In addition, this is where the individuals that move to the next level are discovered. Individuals that have strong technical skills and demonstrate the ability to plan, lead, and coordinate are tapped for the “management” path. Lastly, in the later stages of the IT professional’s career, they are expected to be technical experts or managers. A third hypothesis of the IT career stage theory would be that the skills required by IT professionals will change based on the changing technological environment. As new technologies replace older ones, the specific technical skills required by new hires will change. This may have a ripple effect on the skills required at each stage of the IT professional’s career as each generation moves through the career stages. Or this could have one-time “shocks” to the organization that impact IT professionals at every career stage, requiring additional training and learning as these technologies are adopted. These three hypotheses, based on an “IT career stage theory,” are suggested by this research study, but further research is needed to test these propositions. In the study IT professionals were asked to give their perceptions of the technical skills required to perform their jobs and the technical skills that they possess. Overall, the IT professionals indicated that they possess the skills required for them to perform their jobs. Additional insight about the level of technical skill required and the level of skill that the IT professionals possess may be obtained by querying system end-users or managers in the same organizations or departments about their perceptions of the technical skills required by the IT staff and the level of technical skills possessed by

the IT staff. It would seem reasonable that these stakeholders would hold a different opinion than the IT professionals themselves, and may provide a more “objective” assessment of the current stock of IT skills at least in terms of the stakeholders’ different perspectives. This study has several limitations. Given the number of skill variables that were being investigated, more definitive analysis could be performed if a larger sample was taken. Also, the skills that were included in the study were taken from prior research and may not include the most recent skills needed, and possessed, by IT professionals for e-commerce applications. The study also considered IT professionals in three stages. More detailed research into these stages may be useful to design appropriate training and learning mechanisms for IT professionals. It may also be useful to make further distinctions among the skill sets required by different subsets of IT professionals, i.e., programmers versus project managers. The findings of this study have implications for both academia and industry– primarily, the importance of technical skill transition and lifelong learning in the IT professional’s career development. For academia, the study implies the importance of giving undergraduate students the technical skills they need to get that first job and strategies to learn quickly. For organizations, the study shows the importance of designing their continuing education and training programs to enable the e-commerce era workforce. Conclusion As new demands are placed on IT professionals to design, develop, and support Web-based e-commerce applications, the technical skills required by these indi-



APPENDIX A: TECHNICAL SKILLS VARIABLES WITH P-VALUE > 0.1 For both technical skills required and technical skills possessed Variable Item Assembly language Client-server based DB tools Data warehouse/mart tools DSS EDI tools E-mail Tools Expert systems/shells 4th generation languages High level procedural languages Internet/navigation browser LAN tools Mini/mainframe OS Multimedia production tools PC OS Presentation graphics tools Project management tools Query languages Simulation/optimization tools Spreadsheet Tools Statistics tools Telecommunication tools Tele/video-conference tools Transaction Processing Systems Web Page Production Tools Word processing tools

Required/ Possessed Required Possessed Required Possessed Required Possessed Required Possessed Required Possessed Required Possessed Required Possessed Required Possessed Required Required Possessed Required Possessed Required Possessed Required Possessed Required Required Possessed Required Possessed Required Possessed Required Required Possessed Required Possessed Required Possessed Possessed Required Required

Short 1.2 1.6 3.2 3.5 1.8 1.9 2.2 2.8 2.7 2.6 4.5 2.0 2.5 2.9 2.5 2.7 3.5 2.7 3.1 2.3 2.4 1.5 1.5 2.5 3.2 3.1 2.9 3.0 3.4 3.4 1.6 1.8 2.9 1.8 2.7 2.5 2.6 1.9 2.1 2.5 2.6 3.5

Experience Middle Long 1.1 1.4 2.6 2.9 1.7 1.8 2.2 2.3 2.7 2.6 3.6 1.3 2.4 3.0 2.6 3.0 3.3 3.0 3.3 2.4 2.7 1.3 1.3 3.0 3.4 3.0 3.5 3.4 3.2 3.8 1.3 1.6 3.0 1.4 2.0 2.2 1.8 1.7 1.6 3.0 2.3 3.3

1.1 1.8 2.6 2.8 2.0 1.9 2.3 2.4 2.2 2.0 3.8 1.7 2.2 2.4 2.4 2.7 3.3 2.9 2.7 2.4 2.5 1.7 1.7 3.1 3.0 3.2 3.2 3.0 3.0 3.0 1.5 1.6 3.3 1.8 2.0 2.1 2.3 1.8 1.8 2.6 2.5 3.5



viduals is expected to change. This study reports statistically significant relationships between an IT professional’s career stage, as measured by their work experience, and technical skills required and technical skills possessed. It appears that IT professionals: (1) require different technical skills at different stages in their careers, (2) possess different levels of technical skills in their careers, (3) require more technical skills in early stages of their career, and (4) possess more technical skills in early stages of their career.

ENDNOTES 1

Learning may be classified as formal, nonformal, or informal according to the mode of learning (Ilgen & Pulakos, 1997). Informal learning generally denotes the learning from daily experience and exposure to the environment. Nonformal learning and formal learning denote the learning associated with deliberate instructions and programs. Job training is frequently classified as formal or non-formal according to whether the trainee leaves his/her workplace or not. We will denote ‘learning in the workplace’ as any learning during a professional’s career. 2 This classification is arbitrary. For some tests, the p-value is reduced if we classify the groups differently. The results of the analysis, however, do not change much whichever classification is used. We used this classification for all tests for consistency. This classification provides a better balance among the groups with respect to the sample size.

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Seokha Koh is a professor of the Department of Management Information Systems at Chungbuk National University, South Korea. He received a Ph.D. and Master of Sciences in Management Science from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Professor Koh is active in research, he has published several articles which have appeared in Information & Management, Operations Research Letters, Journal of Optimization Theory & Applications, and Journal of Computer Information Systems, Telecommunication Systems, and Industrial Management & Data Systems among others. He was also a visiting scholar of Miami University, Ohio. Sooun Lee is a Professor of the Department of Decision Sciences and Management Information Systems, Richard T. Farmer School of Business Administration at Miami University. He received an MBA from the University of Colorado, Boulder and a Ph.D. in MIS from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Professor Lee has been teaching in Miami University for 17 years. His research interests are IS education, Web database, analysis and design, networking, and project management. He has published a number of articles in several academic and practitioner’s journals. David C. Yen is a professor of MIS and chair of the Department of Decision Sciences and Management Information Systems at Miami University. He received a Ph.D. in MIS and Master of Sciences in Computer Science from the University of Nebraska. Professor Yen is active in research, he has published two books and over 100 articles which have appeared in Communications of the ACM, Decision Support Systems, Information & Management, International Journal of Information Management, Information Sciences, Journal of Computer Information Systems, Interfaces, Telematics and Informatics, Computer Standards and Interfaces, Information Society, and Internet Research among others. He was also one of the co-recipients for a number of grants such as Cleveland Foundation (1987-1988), GE Foundation (1989), and Microsoft Foundation (1996-1997). Douglas Havelka is an Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems in the Richard T. Farmer School of Business Administration at Miami University. His education includes an A.B. in Chemistry and an M.B.A. with a concentration in finance from Miami University and an M.S.B.A. and a Ph.D. in management information systems from Texas Tech University. Dr. Havelka is a C.P.A. and prior to joining Miami in Fall 2000 was a project manager for industry standards at AT&T.
