The Case for Radically New IT Training

Terry Critchley

This blog presents the case for a radical new approach to basic information technology (IT) education. This conclusion is based on a study of courses and other forms of IT education which purport to cover IT "fundamentals." It is based on my own decades of IT experience and dogma-free research into current IT literature and media.

Information technology training occurs in numerous forms from computer science (CS) courses, as taught in schools and universities, to other eclectic ones and PC-oriented versions of the computing world. I maintain that these courses, especially CS ones, do not stack up to the needs of the fluid, modern IT as practiced in the workplace, especially the enterprise. My reasoning is as follows:

1. There is, and has been for over two decades, an IT skills shortage which is at its peak today (any day).

2. Practically the only source of CS skills are the schools and universities and, of the CS graduates, over half do not stay in the IT job they were hired for. CS is grossly understaffed with females and a survey I created for the CAS (computing at school) group unearthed major reasons for this female reluctance as: too geekish and theoretical, boring and needs great maths skills. Neither is true of the IT world I inhabited and which I observe and write about today.

3. CS and other curricula, many of which I have studied, do not match even the keywords which typify modern IT as practiced in the workplace. This can be shown by comparing any existing curriculum with the attached keyword list which typifies modern IT. This list has been verified as representative of modern IT by four of my peers in IT.

4. Fully 70% of IT projects fail in degrees from not quite what I wanted to total disaster. This failure rate applies to the more specific area of digital transformation and legacy modernization. In short, nearly every IT activity.

As a result, most businesses are reliant on computers (digital) in a range of ways from their being necessary for us to function to mission critical. This reliance is badly hampered by the drawbacks in skills available, as discussed above.

A Solution to This Dilemma

There are a few possible solutions:

1. Do nothing and carry on as usual — the it'll be alright on the night solution

2. Soldier on as usual but get more and more people to study CS and undertake other versions of IT training — the bang your head against the wall solution

3. Devise new IT training, along with an IT apprenticeship, which is apposite the current IT demanded in the workplace; make it accessible by means other than expensive 3- or 4-year university courses; make it easily updated as technology changes; and to widen the demography, age-independent, of new IT training entrants. These needs mandate an online course(s).

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The Case for Radically New IT Training

Terry Critchley

This blog presents the case for a radical new approach to basic information technology (IT) education. This conclusion is based on a study of courses and other forms of IT education which purport to cover IT "fundamentals." It is based on my own decades of IT experience and dogma-free research into current IT literature and media.

Information technology training occurs in numerous forms from computer science (CS) courses, as taught in schools and universities, to other eclectic ones and PC-oriented versions of the computing world. I maintain that these courses, especially CS ones, do not stack up to the needs of the fluid, modern IT as practiced in the workplace, especially the enterprise. My reasoning is as follows:

1. There is, and has been for over two decades, an IT skills shortage which is at its peak today (any day).

2. Practically the only source of CS skills are the schools and universities and, of the CS graduates, over half do not stay in the IT job they were hired for. CS is grossly understaffed with females and a survey I created for the CAS (computing at school) group unearthed major reasons for this female reluctance as: too geekish and theoretical, boring and needs great maths skills. Neither is true of the IT world I inhabited and which I observe and write about today.

3. CS and other curricula, many of which I have studied, do not match even the keywords which typify modern IT as practiced in the workplace. This can be shown by comparing any existing curriculum with the attached keyword list which typifies modern IT. This list has been verified as representative of modern IT by four of my peers in IT.

4. Fully 70% of IT projects fail in degrees from not quite what I wanted to total disaster. This failure rate applies to the more specific area of digital transformation and legacy modernization. In short, nearly every IT activity.

As a result, most businesses are reliant on computers (digital) in a range of ways from their being necessary for us to function to mission critical. This reliance is badly hampered by the drawbacks in skills available, as discussed above.

A Solution to This Dilemma

There are a few possible solutions:

1. Do nothing and carry on as usual — the it'll be alright on the night solution

2. Soldier on as usual but get more and more people to study CS and undertake other versions of IT training — the bang your head against the wall solution

3. Devise new IT training, along with an IT apprenticeship, which is apposite the current IT demanded in the workplace; make it accessible by means other than expensive 3- or 4-year university courses; make it easily updated as technology changes; and to widen the demography, age-independent, of new IT training entrants. These needs mandate an online course(s).

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While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

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Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

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Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

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Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

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