Practical Guide To Gain Knowledge & Acceptance in IT Community.

Onno W. Purbo

Rapid advances in Information Technology (IT) may revolutionize ways in gaining knowledge & acceptance in IT professional world. Shift in mind-set, education curriculum should be made in a short time, as one may radically left behind. Rapid advances in the technology open up huge IT job opportunities.  Those who wish to find IT jobs in Indonesia, one simply subscribes to various “lowongan” mailing lists in yahoogroups.com or lowongan.net to be flooded by 10-20 IT “lowongan” opportunities daily. Not to mention, the daily huge ads in the various newspapers in Jakarta, Singapore, Malaysia seeking for IT professionals. Thus, there are too many IT job opportunities with unfortunately very little supply of qualified human resource to fill it.

Unfortunately, most computer science teachers as well as the national curriculum seem to be gentle in responding these rapid advances in IT world. By simple check list, is there any formal education for those who wish to learn on PHP? Java Script? WML? C++? SQL? ASP? BGP Routing? The answer would unfortunately be NO. An awful condition, simply due to lack of motivation within the educational institutions to keep up with the new advances in Information Technology as well as constrains by the Indonesian Ministry of Education to follow the ancient national IT curriculum else received lower accreditation levels. Thus, to be frank, no one may rely on the formal scheme in gaining knowledge & acceptance in IT community & to survive in IT real world. In other words, one may unfortunately gain nothing from the expensive formal IT education. It forces one to seek the knowledge from other sources to survive. In reality, most of IT knowledge is informally obtained among IT practitioners thru either discussions, open source CD-ROMs or various types of Internet delivery media.

Having IT knowledge would open up a gateway into a vast poll of job & opportunities. It is common in various web sites to place a link on job opportunity available in their companies. Professional C++, web, SQL programmers & network security expert (also known as hacker) may be the most wanted professionals in IT world. Sadly, none of their knowledge was gain in formal schools.

Those professionals are mostly mobile with laptop at hand and other electronic gadgets   would receive monthly earnings of at least US$500-1000. An income level that can be reached by those who strive to their best in specialized IT skill in 2-4 years time, based on my observation of my students. The real pro may get away with a couple of US$ tenth thousand project based fee.

Those students who seek for high marks in their class would not gain much in reality world. The successful ones are those who strive to unlock IT knowledge beyond their university / Indonesian national IT curriculum; beyond the understanding of their Indonesian IT professors. IT & Internet really help in open up the gateway towards vast pool of applicable new knowledge; those who manages to learn these  knowledge during their school years would easily past the US$75 monthly salary set for the fresh graduate.

GNU Public License (GPL) at http://www.gnu.org is the key in IT knowledge dissemination in the world today. GNU type licensing enable ones to put the whole source code in public and let other learns how other do the art of computing. Copyleft movement is characterized by these sort of movement; rather than relying on the copyright scheme. Linux is one of the best examples on impact of open source & open knowledge towards the advances of IT development by IT communities worldwide. Open source & open knowledge enables one to tap the state of the art development of the code as well as learn how the coding done in real time. All the code can be downloaded from various sites, such as, www.redhat.com, www.mandrake.com, www.freshmeat.org and many other sites.

Knowledge on open source is written & openly put in public Internet network, such as, www.linuxdoc.org, http://pandu.dhs.org, to enable others to tap to the state of the arts knowledge on Linux & open source. Open lecture & distance learning seems to be much more open in IT world, a real example is the MIT’s lecture note at http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/org/a/acs/www/acaduces2.html or the OpenCourseware initiative at http://web.mit.edu/ocw/. One who wish updates on various e-courses via e-mail can be obtained from http://virtual.net.uy/netfree.html. In addition to the openly distributed explicit  IT knowledge in e-papers & e-books form, one may gain knowledge by actively engage in various open IT discussion groups in the Internet. www.yahoogroups.com might be the highest hit mailing list server on the Internet, one can freely participate in vast pool of e-mail discussion groups to discuss and solve problems with other experts in distances. The Indonesian Linux community groups can be easily found in various mailing lists hosted by linux.or.id machine & can be seen at http://www.linux.or.id. Tacit knowledge is distributed through these mailing list discussion groups. Thus, having these knowledge easily accessible at hand, it is only be a question of time to see one becoming an expert in IT world for those persist in reading & working on the code.

Getting an IT knowledge is not enough to survive. In the old days, university certificate & degree from prestigious schools would assure one to gain public acceptance & consequently good jobs. Having an aged national IT curriculum at hand, one should go thru a harder way & is an art in itself to get community acknowledgement & acceptance. In other words, one needs to prove to the community regarding one’s specialty skill. One of the expensive ways to gain public acceptance is thru industrial certificates such as Microsoft’s MCP, MCSE, MCT; Cisco CCNA. Some IT industrial grade certificates can be obtained  online at, http://www.brainbench.com, http://www.cert21.com, http://www.examsimulators.com. Normally, a US$100 is needed to get one of these certificates. Well, it is a good investment considering a couple of thousand US$ monthly income is at hand.

Fortunately, there are alternative inexpensive ways to gain acknowledgement & acceptance from the communities. One of the easiest ways is actively answer questions raise in various open Internet mailing lists. Only those who have the knowledge could persistently answer many of these questions. Ability to answer questions should be complemented by actively writing in various IT magazine and if possible published books. Gradually, one would receive the acknowledgement from their community. The larger the dissemination of their answers, articles and books, the larger community acceptance will be received. A consensus among the community is build regarding one’s expertise. At that point, one need not to worry on seeking for jobs as jobs will find itself to the best of the best.

It seems easy to be performed. In a rapid advances information technology, getting the knowledge & acceptance from the community is an art of processes in itself. Unfortunately, in the actual real life, it may take years (at least 3-4 years), consistently sitting in front of the computer connected to the Internet and actively engaged in various Internet based activities & virtual discussions. Ones who persistence & have huge self-determination in a long period of time would gain the knowledge and in the end survive. However, survive is not enough, only those who produce & give knowledge to others will sit in higher places. Fortunately, IT, Internet & other electronic means will enable anyone to efficiently share their knowledge at low cost to others based on copyleft movement. A snowball effect which in turn rapidly speeds up knowledge cycle.

In all, old & ancient paradigm in knowledge cycle based on aged national curriculum will be replaced by the more efficient knowledge cycle based on copyleft movement driven by the existence of IT, Internet & other electronics means. Community acknowledgement will replace the old university degree & certificate. Only those able to produce & share knowledge will sit in the highest place in the knowledge-based society. A society that should be ideally put together for our next generations.