Career Change
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So if we look at IT in similar ways and look at the highest trained and paid 8%. I bet you find similar things. And unlike medicine where there are qualifications requires for nearly every level of the field, IT has none. So people "reporting" as working in IT is much larger than what there really is out there. Look at SW, for example. Read some threads. Tons of the people in the community are just buyers and not IT themselves, managers and not IT themselves, sales people, bench techs, part time IT, business people trying to not hire IT, etc.
We can only guess, but of people identifying as IT, what percentage are we likely to actually accept as being in IT? 50% 25%? I know people who don't even know what a computer is but claim to be programmers because they think "installing an application from disk" and "programming" are the same thing. What about Curtis, he used a microwave and claims that makes him a developer!
Medical filters people out. You can't claim to work in medicine without a license or a job. But in IT, it's accepted that you just make the claim.
So imagine filtering out the self-claiming pool. Suddenly I bet you find the numbers improving rapidly.
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Then the question obviously becomes - how do we compare SMB and enterprise to medicine? That's pretty simple. Obviously the SMB might attract "doctor level" IT people. This is basically the equivalent to choosing to be a small town general family doctor. Yeah, the pay is going to be way lower, but you accept that going in because you like the atmosphere or the people or the pace or the variety.
Enterprise and "IT location" cities pay the most and are similar to surgeons in major facilities like Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, or Johns Hopkins. Like any profession, there are hot spots and locations that pay better, and ones that pay less. But there are other factors that make those other things desirable. Maybe doing heart surgery all day would be depressing or gross or too much stress. Maybe helping kids stay healthy makes you happier at the end of the day.
Money is hardly the end all of a job. There are so many more things that really matter.
