Despite the bursting of the information technology (IT) bubble that played a key role in the recession of the early 2000s, information technology is still the fastest growing sector in the United States economy [source: Luftman]. That's because the information technology sector isn't confined to so-called tech companies. Every mid-size to large company relies heavily on information technology to get business done.
If your business handles large amounts of data, for example, then you'll need databases to store that information, networks to share it among employees and software to make sense of it all. This creates a huge demand not only for the companies that create these products, but for the in-house tech experts that implement and maintain them.
The biggest growth areas for IT jobs are in software design and development, networking and systems administration, software implementation analysis, testing and QA, and database administration [source: Schmeiser]. Systems analysts and administrators appear to have some of the greatest job prospects, since the nature of the work is more collaborative and more difficult to outsource overseas [source: Kiviat].
One of the reasons information technology will continue to be an in-demand job sector is because there's an overall lack of qualified workers. As older IT workers retire, there simply aren't enough younger workers to take their place. The number of U.S. college freshmen majoring in computer science dropped 70 percent from 2000 to 2005 [source: All]. That trend has led some analysts to predict a 15 percent decrease in the supply of IT workers over the next 30 years [source: Luftman].
