By Dan Ilett, 27 July 2006 15:50
NEWS
Jobs in IT and telecoms are the fifth-most boring professions graduates can choose, according to research from a teacher training organisation.
Administration, secretarial and sales work were top of the "Workforce Boredom Index", respectively, while unsurprisingly teaching was deemed to be the least boring career a university leaver can go into.
The research comes from the government-owned Training and Development Agency for Schools, which claims that science research and media jobs are also more boring than teaching.
A spokesman for employment analyst Consult GEE told silicon.com: "Teachers could be more satisfied with their jobs because they are more vocational - they chose to be teachers. They are not necessarily in it for the money."
When asked why they find their job interesting, 81 per cent of teacher respondents said it is the challenge of the role.
Other people surveyed (61 per cent) said they are bored because of the lack of challenge in their jobs and are not using their skills or knowledge.
The jobs in the "Workforce Boredom Index" ranked as follows - (on a scale of 10):
1 - Administrative/secretarial 10
2 - Manufacturing 8.1
3 - Sales 7.8
4 - Marketing/advertising 7.7
5 - IT/telecommunications 7.5
6 - Science research/development 7.3
7 - Media 7.1
8 - Law 6.9
8 - Engineering 6.9
10 - Banking/finance 6.6
10 - Human resources 6.6
12 - Accountancy 6.3
13 - Hospitality/travel 5.3
14 - Healthcare 5.1
15 - Teaching 4.0
Comments
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1. anonymous
You'd have to be a moron to think that the Healthcare Industry is anything but a tedious bore. What are these people thinking?
Reading silicon.com is one of the most boring things I have ever done. Where do they get the dinosaurs to write this rag? IT a boring job? Sure, if you let others tell you so. Sure if you let it become so. Sure, if you have no ambition and aren't a self-starter. (Ed note. do you really think we'd be working in this industry if we thought it was boring? It should be fairly obvious we're covering somebody else's findings here, which looks like an issue that needs to be addressed if we're to bring future generations into the industry.)
2. Eur Ing Christopher Thoday
I have worked in IT since 1959 and see it as a vocation. I enjoy designing and constructing well engineered software and solving system administration problems.
It is many years since I had any involvement in education but looking through some books in a bookshop I was shocked to find how the exam system is so closely integrated with the products of one supplier that is clearly abusing its monopoly position. There was no sense in any of the text books that computing could be fun. Instead of coverage of free software there were lectures about not copying licenced software. A book with "New" in the title contained information about Fortran and Cobol and repeatedly stated that C++ was inefficient. There was no mention of any of the powerful scripting languages such as Python. It appears that the teaching of IT requires a total rethink.
3. anonymous
Keep these surveys coming, the more we can put off people coming into IT the less of us there will be, the greater the job security and the bigger the salaries we will be able to command.
4. Mohan
Interesting headline...
Do check out my blog on this
http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/emergingtech/technocrat
5. Fred
It depends--if you're a game designer, I bet that is fun. If you're in help desk or administration, IT is boring as hell. Actually, I wouldn't even classify help desk/pc support/administrator as really being IT. I think people who work those jobs are the ones who think IT is boring.