Thus, policy recommendations from all parties—including this committee—are inevitably based on a mix of judgment and interpretation of whatever trends are visible in the existing data, however sketchy and incomplete those trends are.

If past trends continue, the IT sector and the use of IT in IT-intensive industries will likely grow significantly in the long run. However, it is certain that such growth will be interrupted or at least curbed during certain periods (e.g., economic recessions) that no one can predict. Such periods are likely to relieve then-current tightness in the IT labor market (though they may discourage new entrants from going into IT work shortly thereafter).

Because of the competitive premiums on speed within IT, employers want to be able to respond quickly to workforce needs that change as fast as new technology and/or applications emerge.

The universe of IT employers is highly heterogeneous, involving firms or organizations ranging from finance, manufacturing, and government to IT firms that sell IT products, services, and applications. However, stereotypes of IT work as involving workaholics, dot-com millionaires, and very long work hours and pressure appear to drive many public perceptions of such work, even though they likely reflect only a small segment of all firms employing IT workers.

The development side of the IT sector and of IT-intensive industries is particularly dependent on human talent, with the consequence that capital cannot easily be substituted for labor to increase productivity. Research continues on technology-based tools for improving the productivity of IT workers (and indeed, a number of such tools that have increased productivity are now in wide use—e.g., integrated development environments for software engineering) and on different types of organization and management for software engineering that improve productivity. However, due in part to growth in demand for IT products and services, it is unlikely that the use of tools or management techniques for increasing productivity will have a significant impact on tightness in the IT labor market in the current decade.

For the development of business-specific or company-specific IT applications, knowledge specific to the business dimensions of the application is as necessary as IT-specific skills.