On March 19th, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published a document that should have surprised absolutely nobody in our field but that felt, in a strange way, like vindication. CISA’s guidance on essential critical infrastructure workers included IT and operational technology professionals by name, listing everyone from data center operators and system administrators to cybersecurity engineers and helpdesk staff. By mid-April, 33 states had adopted or referenced that guidance to define which workers could continue operating during lockdowns. For the first time in most of our careers, the federal government was saying, in writing, what we’ve always known: you cannot run a modern organization without the people who keep the technology running.

I realize this might sound like I’m gloating, and I want to be clear that I’m not. There’s nothing satisfying about a global health crisis proving your professional worth. But I’ve spent years writing and talking about IT careers, encouraging people to take this field seriously, and pushing back against the perception that IT is just the department that fixes printers and resets passwords. The last two months have done more to change that perception than a decade of advocacy ever could, and I think it’s worth examining what that shift actually looks like on the ground.

The Numbers Tell a Stark Story

The U.S. economy lost more than 24 million jobs between February and April of 2020. Unemployment hit 14.7% in April, the worst figure since the Great Depression. Entire industries, hospitality, travel, food service, retail, effectively shut down overnight. And in the middle of all of that, computer and engineering occupations experienced a decline of just 1.7%, or roughly 175,000 positions. To put that in perspective, the services sector lost 31% of its jobs during the same period. IT didn’t just survive the initial shock of the pandemic; it was one of the very few sectors that remained functionally intact.

That resilience wasn’t an accident. It was the direct result of something IT professionals have been building for years: the infrastructure that makes remote work, digital commerce, cloud computing, and online communication possible. When the economy needed to pivot overnight from in-person to remote, the only reason it could was that IT teams had already built the foundation. The pandemic didn’t create that foundation. It just made it visible to everyone who had been taking it for granted.

From Cost Center to Survival Infrastructure

Before March, IT was a cost center in most organizations. I don’t mean that as an insult; it’s just the way most companies have historically thought about technology spending. The budget reviews I’ve sat through over the years almost always frame IT as an expense to be managed rather than an investment that generates value. How much can we cut from the infrastructure budget this quarter? Do we really need to upgrade those servers? Can we push that security project to next year?

The pandemic answered all of those questions simultaneously and loudly. Only about 12% of organizations had robust remote working arrangements before COVID. By May, that number had jumped to 75%. The companies that had invested in cloud infrastructure, modern collaboration tools, and scalable VPN capacity were the ones that transitioned smoothly. The ones that had treated IT as a line item to be minimized scrambled, and some of them are still scrambling.

What’s interesting is how this shift is playing out at the executive level. I’m hearing from peers across the industry that CIOs and IT directors are, for the first time, being brought into strategic conversations that used to happen without them. The question is no longer “how much does IT cost?” but “what happens if IT fails?” And that’s a very different question, one that fundamentally changes how the profession is valued, even if the budget numbers haven’t caught up yet. Gartner is projecting an 8% decline in global IT spending for 2020, but the spending that remains is being redirected toward what they’re calling “mission-critical” initiatives, which is another way of saying that companies are finally funding the things IT has been asking to fund for years.

The Invisible Essential Worker

I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase “essential worker” and how unevenly it gets applied. Healthcare workers are essential, visibly and heroically so. Grocery store employees are essential. Delivery drivers, sanitation workers, first responders, all essential, all bearing real physical risk, and all deserving of every bit of recognition and support they receive.

IT workers are essential too, but in a fundamentally different way. We’re essential in the way that electricity is essential: everyone depends on it, nobody thinks about it when it’s working, and everyone panics when it stops. The IT teams that moved entire companies home in two weeks did so largely invisibly. There were no parades for the network engineers who kept the VPN running at 3 a.m., no nightly news segments about the helpdesk technician who walked 200 employees through setting up their home offices over the phone. The recognition was structural, CISA put us on a list, but it was rarely personal.

And I want to be careful here, because I don’t think IT workers should be compared directly to healthcare workers or grocery store employees who are putting their physical health at risk every day. The sacrifices are different in kind, not just degree. But the burnout is real. Surveys from the last two months show that 54% of technologists report feeling exhausted, and remote workers are experiencing burnout at higher rates than their on-site counterparts, not lower. Working from home didn’t mean working less; for most IT professionals, it meant being available around the clock, handling a surge of tickets and infrastructure emergencies with no clear boundary between the workday and everything else. The average remote worker is logging three additional hours per week compared to pre-pandemic levels, and 65% report working more hours than they did in the office.

What This Means for Your Career

If you’re already in IT, you probably don’t need me to tell you that the profession just proved its value in the most dramatic way imaginable. But what I do want to tell you is this: don’t let that validation go to waste. The next twelve months are going to be a window where companies are uniquely aware of how much they depend on technology, and that awareness creates opportunities, for promotions, for new roles, for conversations about compensation that might not have been possible six months ago. If your organization just asked you to do the impossible and you delivered, that’s not something to be modest about.

If you’re considering an IT career, the pandemic has made the case more clearly than I ever could. While other sectors shed millions of jobs, IT remained standing. The certifications and skills that were in demand before COVID are even more critical now, particularly in cloud computing, cybersecurity, and remote infrastructure management. Job applications for IT roles have more than doubled compared to this time last year, which means competition is increasing, but the demand is increasing faster. Companies that laid off other staff are now realizing they need more IT capacity, not less, and the organizations that froze their IT hiring in March are already starting to thaw as they come to terms with the fact that remote work isn’t going away when the virus does.

I’ve seen a surge of interest from people in hospitality, retail, and food service who are looking at IT as a career change, and I think that’s a smart move for many of them. The skills that make someone good in a customer-facing service role, patience, communication, the ability to troubleshoot under pressure, translate remarkably well to helpdesk and technical support positions. The barrier to entry is lower than most people think, especially if you’re willing to invest in a foundational certification and put in the hours learning on your own.

The Recognition We Actually Need

I’ll close with this thought. The recognition that matters most isn’t a CISA designation or a “thank you” email from the CEO, though both of those are nice. The recognition that matters is structural: fair compensation, adequate staffing, realistic expectations, and a seat at the table when strategic decisions are being made. If the pandemic taught executives that IT is essential, then the budgets, the headcounts, and the org charts should reflect that going forward. If they don’t, then the word “essential” was just something companies said during a crisis before going back to asking why the printer isn’t working.

The conversations I’m having with IT leaders across the industry right now give me cautious hope. Many are using this moment to push for changes they’ve been advocating for years: better disaster recovery planning, real investment in cloud infrastructure, security budgets that reflect actual risk rather than what’s left over after everyone else has been funded. Whether those conversations lead to lasting change or fade once the crisis passes will tell us a lot about whether companies actually learned anything from this experience.

IT was always essential. The pandemic just made it impossible to pretend otherwise. What we do with that visibility now is up to us, and it’s up to the organizations that depend on us to decide whether they meant it.