BCS says it's time to get professional

The IT industry is still immature and its members must collaborate in order to evolve into an established profession, such as architecture or accountancy, the British Computer Society (BCS) has said.

In the BCS' newsletter, Adam Thilthorpe, the manager of the organisation's professionalism programme, wrote that the industry has grown quickly and is ubiquitous throughout society, yet still not really mature.

"The profession appears to have matured at an exponential rate, if the way it's been absorbed into everyday life is anything to go by. Yet, despite the fantastic, and some would say, frantic, achievements over the past 15 years, the IT profession is still very much an adolescent in terms of professional maturity-that is, it is an organised community, but not much more," he wrote.

Just 15 years ago, there was no such thing as an IT professional, noted Malcolm Sillars, the head of the professional development business unit at the BCS. "In early 90s, couldn't call IT a profession or talk about IT professionals," he said, as it was seen as a craft or vocation. "That's changed now."

"There's been a lot of change in the past five years, since Y2K made people talk about the importance of IT," he added. "The biggest projects in the world aside from civil engineering are IT projects."

Sillars called for standards to regulate IT professionals the same way in which architects and engineers are regulated, as such regulation would show that a person has a certain level of skills, which they upgrade regularly, and that they are bound by a code of conduct.

He said BCS is well suited to be the regulator of such standards, not least because the body's membership is so large. Now at 63,000, it has jumped by 40 per cent in the last three and half years, a change he said reflects the industry's growing seriousness. "In the past, people said it didn't really matter, as IT was not serious profession, but that's changing," he said.

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