A Techie, Absolutely, and More

For computer science students, "expanding their expertise beyond computer programming is crucial to future job security as advances in the Internet and low-cost computers make it easier to shift some technology jobs to nations with well-educated engineers and lower wages, like India and China.

"'If you have only technical knowledge, you are vulnerable,' said Thomas W. Malone, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of 'The Future of Work' (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). 'But if you can combine business or scientific knowledge with technical savvy, there are a lot of opportunities. And it's a lot harder to move that kind of work offshore.'" ...

"Jobs that involve tailoring information technology to specific industries or companies, like software engineers who make applications and specialized systems, have grown. Total employment among information technology professionals, the government reports, reached nearly 3.5 million by the end of last year, surpassing the previous high in 2000, when the technology investment boom peaked.

"At the same time, the march of computing is rippling across all academic disciplines. Even as computer science students are being encouraged to take more courses outside their major, students in other disciplines are finding more often that they need to use, design and sometimes write computer programs."

"'Computing has become the third pillar of science, along with theory and experiment,' observed Daniel A. Reed, director of the Renaissance Computing Institute, a collaboration of researchers from the University of North Carolina, Duke University and North Carolina State University."