Look Abroad for Greater IT Experience

“The single most penetrating arrow you can add to your quiver as an IT professional is international experience.” That’s the opinion of Romi Mahajan president of India-based KKM Group, who writes at Microsoft TechNet Magazine that IT growth is most dramatic in developing countries where talent is at a premium and the challenges are exciting.

Let’s look at how the world of business and the world of IT have evolved and continue to evolve: In 2006, a market study indicated there were approximately 23 million IT professionals in the world. Slightly less than one-third of those workers lived in the United States. The numbers for large developing countries like Brazil, India and China were in the several hundreds of thousands. Recent estimates suggest that the share of IT professionals in developing countries has increased by 100 percent — doubling from five years ago. As companies based in the developing world mature, they’ll turn to IT as a key ingredient of their evolution at a pace faster than companies in the developed world.

Urging you to “go where the action is,” Mahajan points out that doing more with less– the norm for IT here– is standard operating procedure in the developing world and therefore a great training ground to learn how to be creative.

It certainly makes sense to strive for “an internationalization of IT, a community of like-minded and similarly skilled practitioners and thinkers working on complex problems,” but it’s impossible to gloss over the practiIs cal realities of launching an international career. It may work when you’re young and unattached, but people who own homes or have families will obviously have tough decisions to make before they simply pack up and fly off to Rio or Hyderabad.