Differences in characteristics between IT professionals and other selected professionals in Sri Lanka

Abstract

To most of the hundred millions of computer users around the world, the inner workings of a computer are an utter mystery. Users expect information technology professionals to help them with their needs for designing, locating, retrieving, using, configuring, programming, maintaining and understanding computers, networks, applications and digital objects. In short, everyone has become dependent on IT Professionals as much as on the information technologies themselves. Hence, it is worth identifying, Who are the IT Professionals?, since they have become a vital asset for the technological development in a country. This research is an attempt to identify the differences in characteristics of IT Professionals and other selected professionals in Sri Lankan context by validating the past researches done in other countries in relation to this area of concern. The significance of this research would be that production of high quality software and the efficiency of the software development process are key issues faced by the industry practitioners whilst this leads to the importance of understanding the characteristics of IS personnel to make sound decisions with regard to hiring, training, job assignments, promotion and change management. Accordingly, in order to distinguish the different characteristics of IT Professionals, this research takes into consideration of characteristics of other professionals from Accounting, Marketing and Engineering disciplines, to be the benchmark for the comparison. The differences are verified against different dimensions, namely: personality traits, economic & financial behavior and career aspirations & organizational behavior. The personality traits dimension was further classified in to four categories as per Meyer Briggs Type Indicator method, namely; extrovert/introvert, sensing/intuitive, thinking/feeling and judging/perceiving behavior. Economic & financial behavior was further classified as saving patterns, spending patterns and investment behavior whilst organizational behavior was further categorized as career aspirations, peer/superior relationship and career satisfaction. These sub classified elements were considered " as the hypotheses of this research which WqS tested using ANOVA statistical method to comprehend the statistical/scientific output of the research context. It was evident that there is a difference of IT Professionals from other professionals in terms of their extrovert/introvert and thinking/feeling behavior in the personality trait dimension whilst there was a difference in terms of investment behavior in the economic & financial behavior dimension. It was also identified that in terms of peer/superior relationship too there was a considerable difference depicted by the results of the hypotheses testing. Accordingly, the identified differences in characteristics of the IT Professionals in relation to the above dimensions would be vital information for the respective HR management personnel in the IT industry in order to adjust their style of HR management in terms of recruiting, managing and retaining IT personnel in the organization upon their characteristics.