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Short-term Affair or Long-term Commitment?: An Investigation of Employees without IT Background in IT Jobs

Published: 19 June 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The IT profession is constantly changing. The rapid development of technology and the high demand for IT specialists has led to a broader and more diverse profile of IT professionals with fewer boundaries regarding organizations and occupations. As a result, companies have encouraged the migration of employees with different backgrounds into the IT sector. Drawing on the theory of the boundaryless profession, we explore this transformation in IT careers. By studying 355 career sequences of IT professionals in Germany, we investigate the career mobility of employees without an IT background working in IT jobs. Our results show that only around one-third of employees without an IT background remained in IT for the long-term. The majority of the sample, however, either returned to their original sector or moved to another after a few years in IT. Our study contributes to a better understanding of the boundaryless IT profession and sheds light on the role of employees without an IT background in IT jobs.

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  • (2022)Identification and Analysis of Factors Influencing Turnover Intention of Pakistan IT Professionals: An Empirical StudyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2022.318175310(64234-64256)Online publication date: 2022

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGMIS-CPR '20: Proceedings of the 2020 Computers and People Research Conference
June 2020
180 pages
ISBN:9781450371308
DOI:10.1145/3378539
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 19 June 2020

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  1. boundaryless career
  2. career transition
  3. it experience
  4. it professionals
  5. it workforce

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View all
  • (2024)A Job Satisfaction Scale for Tech Workers: Development and Validation in the Global ContextHuman Behavior and Emerging Technologies10.1155/2024/88737432024:1Online publication date: 10-Oct-2024
  • (2023)Challenges of IT freelancers on digital labor platforms: A topic model approachElectronic Markets10.1007/s12525-023-00675-y33:1Online publication date: 23-Oct-2023
  • (2022)Identification and Analysis of Factors Influencing Turnover Intention of Pakistan IT Professionals: An Empirical StudyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2022.318175310(64234-64256)Online publication date: 2022
  • (2021)Understanding Boundaryless IT Professionals: An Investigation of Personal Characteristics, Career Mobility, and Career SuccessProceedings of the 2021 on Computers and People Research Conference10.1145/3458026.3462162(51-59)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2021

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