Full Careers

Computer Career Paper Help?

I go to a highschool but I was told I will have to do a paper for homework on what career I want and I have to talk about two issues with that occupation (or field)), but the only thing is I need help finding issues. I decided to talk about beign a computer analyst. So can anyone provide me any links to help me out?

Public Comments

1. Be informed that a Computer Analyst is not an entry level position ... you need to have several years, if not several decades experience in various areas of computer work ... operations, security, data base administration, programming, help desk, testing, before you can get a job that combines all these different disciplines, which is what a Computer Analyst needs to be able to do. It is like being a Business Analyst ... to do that job, a person needs to have a good understanding of a wide range of business activities (accounting, quality control, customer service, manufacturing, costing, etc.) at a diversity of industries (trucking, retail, publishing, etc.) obviously a job for someone with both an MBA and a lot of experience. Since you are still in high school, and will need several years of college and somewhat entry level jobs in computing before you can get to Computer Analyst, which is one top of the profession (Computer Security Auditor is another top), the challenges of today, from the perspective of the people in the field, may be irrelevant by the time you get there. Perhaps you'd be interested in more generic issues, from the perspective of the customers of what computer professionals do. A long standing and recurring issue is what I call "islands of computing" Different departments in a company tend to get software packages that are relevant to their needs * Payroll * General Ledger * Engineering Drawings * Product Design Components * Invventory * Quality Control * Customer Relationships Some of these may be integrated into a larger package, but invariably some department of a company, or some manager, needs to buy something that does not fit into the whole, then a later manager wants the different stuff, that was never designed to talk to each other, to do so, without throwing anything out. For example, there are tons of good ERP out there. There are also several great systems for computerized engineering drawings. None of the ERP talk to the engineering drawing software's or vica versa. Every industry has this kind of problem. An emerging topic is the rising cost of electricity, and the degree to which some data centers are consuming lots of it. The solution to this is a combination of hardware, and how redundancy is organized in an operating system. For example RAID is a type of disk storage where everything is replicated on more than one disk drive ... if one disk drive fails, it can be replaced without shutting down the overall system, then afterwards, the other drives rebalance the replication. This ties into the notion that for many companies, computer support is a 24 hour need. They can't afford to have their computer system go down for even a few minutes. Terminology "Mission Critical" is no longer used, but reality is many places have it. Some airports have had to shut down for a whole day, because something went wrong with access to computers with information related to Airport security. You probably have seen in the news how millions of people's credit card account details went from some major retailer to some Russian Mafia person marketing identity theft. The credit card insustry has come up with what they call PCI standard to protect against this, but darn few companies have implemented it. So what is needed to get companies to have good security on their customer identities? http://www.protegrity.com/payment-card-industry-dss.htm In fact national security is a huge collection of computer security issues these days. Congress has an annual review of how well some government agencies are doing on being prepared for computer security ... you may have seen in the news that the Veteran's Administration has (a) had a whole series of computer breaches (b) got a grade of F (flunk) for a whole string of years It is kind of scary when you match up the government agencies getting low grades, and what they are supposed to be doing to protect the people http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:udzf8O1Cmt0J:republicans.oversight.house.gov/Media/PDFs/FY06FISMA.pdf+computer+score+card+gov&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us Computer Security and Quality of Operations ... when something goes haywire, it is not simple for the average joe or jane to figure out what happened ... Did I get hit by a virus? Has a piece of hardware gone flakey? Did a hacker mess me up? You have to be a computer geek to make heads or tails of the clues on the computer. I think what everyone needs is a security dashboard, like the instrument panel on an automobile, that has an indicator showing how well we are protected from various threats, where there are holes in our security, and when you click on one instrument, there is a list of the most recent security breaches in that area. Many major computer companies have annual stock holder reports showing the various areas of business they have been active making profits in ... you can get at these reports from their web sites, even if you are not a stock holder. As for the names of the major computer companies, Gartner, Forester, and many other research companies show lists of all the companies involved in different areas of technology. They have reports showing challenges for the computer industry, how the different computer manufacturers are doing in competition with each other. Once you have the names of major computer companies like IBM SUN and have their annual reports so you can see the names of their operating systems ... various kinds of UNIX for example ... you can then go to the discussion groups by work area ... brand name computer, operating system, model line ... to see the kinds of problems and challenges facing people in those fields. For example, I work on IBM midrange computer systems & many discussion lists for the hundreds of thousands of computer nerds working in that area are hosted by http://www.midrange.com/ but there are many many other host sites for people who work in other computing realities Here is a collection of computer security issues for the midrange computing field. Many of these topics are also important issues for other computing fields http://www.unbeatenpathintl.com/ITsecure/source/1.html