Death of the IT Project Manager

I was one of the early adopters of the Project Management Professional qualification and held it for nine years from 2003 to 2012. I was reading about the PMETs who are losing their jobs and wanted to understand why there is such a wide gap between the skills desired by the markets and the skills which middle-aged PMETs like me have.

I also read a really badly written book called the Neo-Generalist by Kenneth Mikelsen, one of the worse books ever written in support of a generalist career which paints the picture of a polymath as someone who is a trickster, hipster, and has few practical skills. The book was a horrible experience but it gave some insights into how the modern economy is changing.

For a start, lets look at the typical engineering/IT career path for Generation Xers.

In your 20s, you start out with a Bachelor's in Engineering and is highly specialised in one discipline. It easily lands you a solid job with an above average pay because you can do what you are paid to do. But your knowledge is "I" shaped, it is narrowly focused in one discipline.

In your 30s, you branch into project management. Some guys get MBAs but project management is the only way to maintain a high salary glide-path in your 30s. At this stage, with a certain amount of maturity, your knowledge becomes "T" shaped because you have to develop some organisational and business skills which are fairly broad and general in nature.

At this stage, a lot of people don't realise that becoming a PM has a hidden cost.

The broadening of skill sets comes at a sacrifice on technical skill sets, so it become rusty after a while. The introduction of cloud computing was a hint as to what was to come. And paradigm shifts like functional programming, DevOps and data analytics represent a knowledge hurdle which a technology professional needs to overcome but companies will generally not invest in their workers in Singapore.

So in your 40s, your knowledge is "T" shaped with a broader horizontal line but shorter vertical line and the next paradigm shift eventually kills your career. The older generation of IT Project Managers can talk about servers, routers and switches, but we have since moved into the cloud and are running projects to analyse datasets owned by the company.

The bulk of us in our 40s ask ourselves why are we jobless in spite of having an engineering degree and MBA. Can't really blame the industry as I've attended talks on Blockchains where the Senior staff of some local firms are plugging security solutions which are over a decade old for a technology which isn't even centralised and controlled by one party.

It gets even more exciting if you hit your 50s. If you survive, you will be just those director level staff with no real technical skills whose only job is to keep costs low and retrench staff. At this stage, your knowledge flatlines into a "-". I do not have kind words for senior IT staff as they are quite obstructive and do not add any value to the business. A skill-set is to repeated cut costs through outsourcing and hollowing out of the IT department until they do not even have a team to manage anymore. This explains why Gen-X has some real beef against the Boomers. What skills do Boomers have that Gen-X don't which entitles them to a salary of $250k -$350k. Worse, they are the ones with the hiring and firing power. And don't get me started on how the Boomers benefitted the most from the asset inflation throughout the 90s which Gen-X did no fully get to subscribe to. 

An IT professionals only recourse now is to become "π" shaped. Project managers in their 40s have to literally kill their careers to function as a technical specialist again in a radically different field so that they can continue to be taken seriously. Data Analytics requires a statistics foundation which very few 40-something year old IT professionals can handle. Alternatively, an IT PM may have to take a qualification in a vertical like a "HR qualification" to remain relevant. 

But for the bulk of 40-something year olds, the key question is whether you can accumulate enough wealth to survive a long winter. 

The IT industry with government policies on immigration has basically allowed many engineers to climb a ladder in their 20s but in their 40s they find these ladders got taken away by a combination of policy and technological change. 

They suddenly have no valuable skills and no capability to develop new ones which are in high demand in Singapore today. 

I expect that the same will happen to the elite Computer Science graduate today. 

Hope they can resist the lure of project management career track for as long as they can.