The Tragedy of a Career in Information Technology (IT) in Nepal
IT is a growing sector in Nepal, probably one of the most speeding up careers; but all the emerging job opportunities are not sufficient to provide employment to the large number of students who are graduating every year in the IT sector. Even in the upcoming few years, we can’t hope for a drastic change. This imposes a serious challenge to you - the IT students, to start thinking about your future by yourself.
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Are you academically so good that you can stand out of others and get settled into a Government Job or a Telecom?
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Are you technically so very resourceful that you are sure you can make your place in one of the software companies?
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Will you get a job of a system engineer in the IT Department of any corporate?
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Will you start as an instructor instead?
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Or are you leaving it up to going abroad and let it decide where you are going to land?
We can make a rough estimate that all total there are not more than 300 job vacancies in the IT sector of Nepal every year, and even most of them are replacement job vacancies. Even if you are so good and you get a job, how much is the chance that you landed into the job that you dreamt of? Are you getting enough salary to survive in this expensive environment? Well, a serious question to seek an answer to, and you are the one who needs to find the answer for yourself.
Every Cloud has a Silver Lining : IT Does have One Too
Microsoft Innovation Centre, Nepal presented a documentary – CTRL+ALT+COMPETE, a documentary about new struggling IT Startups at US so that we could learn a possible solution to the problem we talked about. It says that the beauty of IT lies in the fact that all we need today for success, is a spark of an idea, and the strength to bring that idea to life. In the IT sector, we can startup a new company with a minimum of investment. Website hosting is cheap, and with it, we can take our idea to a global level. And if you are looking for the next big thing like Facebook, you would need to start with a small storage space, but you will never know when you have to expand it, needing a whole Data Centre and High Performance Servers. Well, don’t worry, cloud computing is there as a solution for you – giving exactly the cost and the level of flexibility you desire.
Before we ‘START’, we ‘COMPLAIN’..
Usually IT students complain. “I have a enthusiasm to do something, but don’t have an idea worth giving for.” Hey, is it really so easy to stand out of hundreds and thousands of other people just like you? Here is a list of what you’d need:
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You need to understand the unspoken and unrealized needs of people.
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You need to find an idea that can fulfill these needs.
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You need to be Detective Sherlock Holmes, bringing all the haziest of clues together, and finding answers to all the fingers that can be pointed out against your idea.
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You need to build up skills to bring your imagination to the perfect shape of technical reality.
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And you need to be a leader, with the magical convincing capacity to show your potential investors and your targeted groups the same dream that you dreamt and help them envision your solution the same way you’ve designed.
You should have already started thinking that you hardly have any of these good skills. Right?? Well, it’s because you haven’t started yet. Look at the brightest student of your class and try to compare him with yourself in this. He might be good in his academics. He may have some good technical skills. But does he have that world changing idea? Perhaps not. He has still not completed the very first step to Entrepreneurship. So, you are not very far behind after all. Hey, it’s still not too late, OK! Start today, start now !!
A Wrong Decision..
We bring up some ideas which really drive us passionate and determine to start working on it. We start from scratch, and on the way, we need to make a lot of choices. Mistakes do happen, as we are very young in this business. We make wrong team mates, we set wrong goals, we get over-ambitious, we miss to realize what the audience really want. And we fail. It requires that perfect combination of your vision, team, discipline, management and the public acceptance for your idea to succeed, and it’s definitely very hard. Statistics says it, more than 90% of the startups have failed within 3 years.
So, why take risk? Because your passion is worth living for, worth striving for, worth taking a risk for. There would be ups and downs. There would be times when you feel you let your team down, and it’s all your fault. In such cases, take a short break. Share yourself, have someone to comfort you. Forget everything for sometime and start up again. Correct the course that you had misjudged. Bring it all together. After all, it’s not the path that matters; it’s the finishing line that does – your goal. Make sure you grab it no matter what it takes.
And when our Hard Work Starts Paying..
Let’s say that your idea is slowly becoming popular. It’s starting to generate some revenue and investors are starting to get interested. So, should we sell the concept if someone wants to own it? Or should we grow on our own? Yahoo offered to purchase Facebook for 1 billion dollars. Zukerberg denied. Now his business is more than 6 billion. A few startups sold their concepts to corporate giants like Microsoft and Oracle. Their purity of idea was smashed. They were being bought merely because these ideas were a potential threat to these bigger companies. So, after the copyright was owned, the emerging solutions were brutally killed. So, at times, you need to be more cautious. You need to give a bit more effort to try and peek what could be beyond the horizon. Sometimes, we need to choose to strive a little longer. So, discuss with others too, take suggestions. Participate in Business Incubation Programs, events about Startup Companies if any is happening near you. Gain knowledge from the experienced ones. But be sure that at last, you should be the one who makes decisions. Don’t be scared to take the right decision, and don’t be too late in taking decisions.
Final Words..
The world of Information Technology is the most challenging sector of all. So, if you are a student of IT and you think academics is your problem, well start thinking again. You will realize very soon that more problems are going to come to you soon. So, start becoming more futuristic, more innovative. Start learning the reality of tomorrow and prepare yourself for it. Don’t wait to start in your final years, start in the first year of your academics. The final year is when you give it a finishing touch. You are an IT Rock Star. You should be the one solving others’ problems, not the one stuck up in yours. Happy Innovation !