Should IT workers have a union? A philosopher would reply, “Why not?” A pragmatist might have a different response. There are a few practical stumbling blocks on the road to unionism, For one, many of us in IT have mastered more than one trade in getting to where we are today. Trades in IT are the affinity groups that have developed around a specific vendor, o programming language, operating system, or network infrastructure. What’s more, we didn’t study Cisco 101 in college; we might have majored in computer science, electrical engineering, or art history (in my case). As I see it, the closest things we have to trade unions in high tech are called user groups or professional associations. Both user groups and professional associations help you get better jobs, but they don’t directly contribute to you getting better benefits or job security on your current job.

The fact is, technology skills are not monolithic—they are all over the place. Hence the difficulty in defining a career path for technology professionals. A good programmer has skills that transfer from one programming language to the next, but how much of a knowledge transfer there is “depends.” Network managers usually have proficiency in several vendors’ products and will need to master still more systems and black boxes in the course of their professional careers. Help desk was a career path for desktop technology specialists. Now that desktops have become a commodity, help desks are frequently outsourced to a help desk organization—a trade union of sorts. Data centers were on their way to becoming outsourced commodities, until innovations in storage and virtualization upended that market, giving predictable old data centers cachet and a new sort of glitz.

When it gets into the security professional arena, things start to get really interesting. You are at the top end of the food chain in an organization. While there are certifications galore, a job action by security workers would be untenable in a large enterprise. In fact, security professionals have to have the big picture in order to be effective, which means they are management tier by default. The people in an organization that are responsible for security are trusted employees, even if they have several trades or IT specialties under their belts. And if you are management, how can you be in a union?

Another way to look at the union idea is to say that it just doesn’t work in an industry, like high tech, that is in its infancy. Consider the rate of technology change--technology jobs are morphing so fast that to keep pace with technical innovation, job descriptions have almost become a thing of the past. What we are likely to see are the established unions within specific industries accepting IT workers into their ranks.

Return to my observation--that user groups and professional associations are the closest things we have to trade unions in high tech. Professional associations are like guilds--they map to the quasi-general-quasi specific nature of technology management. We gain specific expertise if we focus in one vendors product and we benefit from being able to tap the expertise of those implementing new and disruptive technologies in organizations similar to our own. We learn best practices.

Unions for IT workers is an intriquing idea, but at present they would provide little job security for a technology professional. The "keepers" in an organization are those that are proficient in many technologies and quick to adopt best practices. If you have ambitions, perhaps TechForum is for you.