I am taking classes at Tulane University in New Orleans, I have to declare a major by spring. My degree choice are listed here http://www.scs.tulane.edu/degrees/degrees.html. I was thinking about Digital Design / Website Development or Applied Computing (network design, computer programming etc)
I am 42, and a little worried about age discrimination , and wondering which of these degrees would provide the best income, secure job, and which of these degree’s might be best for starting my own consulting company in the future?
This is a hard question to answer. First, I’m clueless about what the high-tech job market is like around New Orleans. Second, age discrimination does start creeping into play once you hit your 40’s. It can be overcome if you’re great at what you do, but I’d be worried about someone in their 40’s who has entry-level skills.
The Digital Design/Website Development degree would probably be less susceptible to age discrimination, as lots of people who do that type of work do it remotely and never meet their clients face to face. Also, you’d be judged more on your portfolio and examples of work than from an interview where you find yourself being interviewed by someone the age of your son or daughter. The downside of the Digital Design degree is that there are lots of people competing for that type of work, so pay isn’t quite as good as for jobs like software engineer or database administrator.
There’s definitely demand for people who know the skills taught in the Applied Computing program. Again, I’m just worried about age discrimination. The good thing is that I’ve found that the ages of those who do the IT-type work that the program trains you for do skew a little older than typical software engineers. My guess is that you might have a hard time getting that first job, but once you do and you have a two or three years of work experience under your belt, you should be set for the next 20 years as long as you keep your skills up.
BTW - I was just reading a newspaper article on age discrimination among Silicon Valley/San Francisco tech companies, and it was saying that younger companies tend to have younger workers than older, more established companies. From my observations, that’s sounds about right, so you may want to gear your job search towards those more established companies.
Finally, don’t take what I’m saying as gospel. It could very well be that you’d have a good job lined up and waiting before you even graduated. While age discrimination is an issue across the industry, there are plenty of individual companies where it won’t be a problem.