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).

Related Links

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For fifteen years, observability lived downstream of everything else. Code shipped, something broke, an engineer went to the dashboards. The job was forensic. The pillars we built, such as logs, metrics, and traces, were designed for that role: tell a human what just happened, fast enough that they can make it stop. That role has quietly ended ...

Hybrid IT Dominates Enterprise Architecture, with Colocation Anchoring Critical Workloads

Hybrid IT has become the standard operating model for enterprises — but that companies are still looking for the right hybrid IT mix, according to the 2026 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite. After years of cloud migration and hybrid adoption, organizations are shifting their focus from deciding whether to use cloud, colocation or on-premises infrastructure to determining which workloads belong in each environment ...

AI is Moving Fast, and Enterprise File Data Is Not Ready

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Move Fast Without the Usual Quality Penalty

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

When the Observability Bill Arrives for Agentic AI

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

AI is Breaking Enterprise Log Management

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

How Edge Intelligence Will Redefine Secure Connectivity

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Production Inference Shifts Decisively to Private Cloud

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

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44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Why Cloud Reliability Comes Down to People and How to Improve It

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...