Career perceptions

This year, for the first time, we asked leaders and professionals about career attractors. To analyse two sides of the same coin, we asked digital professionals directly what they assess when going for a new job or looking at a new career opportunity – and we asked IT leaders what they thought digital professionals might assess.

The top three considerations for digital professionals:

1. Work/life balance
2. Salary
3. Home working

IT leaders’ assessment of top three considerations:

1. Salary
2. Work/life balance
3. Career progression opportunities

These are quite different – and this disconnect continued further down the list. For example, one option was being given the ‘opportunity to contribute to public good’. Whilst 20% of digital professionals list this option in their top three, only 4% of leaders thought it would be in the top three. There is clearly a greater interest in working for public benefit amongst digital professionals than leaders recognise.

Digital professionals also take the organisation’s ethical policy and reputation into more account than IT leaders think they do: 16% of professionals listed this in their top three requirements, but only 6% of leaders thought they would.

In the verbatims, some IT leaders had a good feel for stating the basic principle: ‘interesting stuff to work on’; and ‘interesting and challenging day-to-day work’. This dovetailed well with the digital professionals’ comments – who also mentioned a holistic view of benefits packages, including pensions, expenses and travel potential and simply ‘a pleasant working place’.

These are the details in full for each group:

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With the aim of ascertaining what digital professionals may view as future career opportunities we asked them a verbatim question on what they would like to know more about in 2023 (and this also helps BCS to provide resources, of course).

As you might expect we had a lot of AI, cloud, cybersecurity and vendor-specific answers to this question. We also had some replies that went a bit deeper, reflecting some good BCS tenets on the way, for example:

‘Any tools that encourage ethical usage. Not ChatGPT with its inbuilt racism, sexism etc. Not crypto that's ruining people's lives and using huge amounts of energy in a climate crisis. Real, tangible, useful tech. Monitoring weather to know when to grit roads, apps to help blind people access things that were previously visual-only, automation of mundane processes to free up employee time (but not replace them – we deserve leisure time not endlessly increased productivity).’

‘Everything! We are never too old or young to learn.’

‘I work in the public sector so we’re pretty behind with using new technologies – it would be great to see how B2C businesses are implementing the tech mentioned to improve user journeys and satisfaction rates.’

‘Technologies developed with a view to reducing the carbon footprint of data centres, as well as innovations in using AI-assistance in technical and medical fields. On a similar note, I will be keeping an eye on developments in the areas of AI-assisted programming.’

The following chart gives an idea of the balance of answers we received.

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