The Hidden Potential: Explaining How and Why Late-Entry IT Professionals Move Into The IT Profession
Paper Number
1515
Paper Type
Completed
Description
To sustain the rapid technological evolution, more than our internal market of young IT talent will be required to satisfy the need for IT staff. Integrating skilled non-IT professionals in the IT sector may help combat the IT skills shortage. However, we still lack an understanding of how and why non-IT professionals enter the IT sector late in their careers. We address this research gap by drawing on the careers of 53 successful late-entry IT professionals. By combining the theories of boundaryless and protean careers with the signaling theory, we discuss how we see shifts in the signals of knowledge, skills, and abilities that lower the barriers of the IT profession and explain how signals of behavior and practices act as door openers into IT. Lastly, we introduce four career patterns of late-entry IT professionals and thus shape our understanding of contemporary career development in but also outside of IT.
Recommended Citation
Prommegger, Barbara; Joseph, Damien; and Krcmar, Helmut, "The Hidden Potential: Explaining How and Why Late-Entry IT Professionals Move Into The IT Profession" (2023). ICIS 2023 Proceedings. 9.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2023/techandfow/techandfow/9
The Hidden Potential: Explaining How and Why Late-Entry IT Professionals Move Into The IT Profession
To sustain the rapid technological evolution, more than our internal market of young IT talent will be required to satisfy the need for IT staff. Integrating skilled non-IT professionals in the IT sector may help combat the IT skills shortage. However, we still lack an understanding of how and why non-IT professionals enter the IT sector late in their careers. We address this research gap by drawing on the careers of 53 successful late-entry IT professionals. By combining the theories of boundaryless and protean careers with the signaling theory, we discuss how we see shifts in the signals of knowledge, skills, and abilities that lower the barriers of the IT profession and explain how signals of behavior and practices act as door openers into IT. Lastly, we introduce four career patterns of late-entry IT professionals and thus shape our understanding of contemporary career development in but also outside of IT.
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