Do you remember the times when mobile phones were like bricks in our pockets, had black-and-white displays and we actually used them to make calls? If you do, you are probably at least fifteen years old.

These days our lives are stored inside our phones; we read the news, look up the weather, take pictures, update our social media statuses, look for locations on maps, do our banking, sort out our dating life and sometimes even call people.

The fact that this technology has developed so quickly is extraordinary, but most people take it as a given.

An average consumer expects fresh new technology updates on monthly basis, which pushes IT companies into developing greater and better products at astronomical speeds.

But where does all this leave the developers? With new concepts developed and new scripts coming out on monthly basis, being a programmer becomes one of the fastest changing job descriptions in the world.

“2 months for someone in IT is like a year for someone in a different job,” says Miles Tran, a co-owner of a well-known IT recruitment agency, Milestone IT.

This puts a lot of pressure on educational institutions, teaching disciplines such as software engineering and programming. An average degree in these fields takes three years to complete and some would argue that by the time students finish their curriculums, their knowledge is at least three years old.

“They're quite simply not being taught the right languages, methodologies, processes and problem solving concepts,” writes Mitchell Harper, a co-founder of an e-commerce platform Bigcommerce,in one of his opinion pieces in Sydney Morning Herald.

“Australian universities have long been behind the eight ball in the computer science department. There remains an ongoing trend in teaching programming languages and engineering concepts that are up to 25 years old.”

Some would argue that old languages are fundamental to understanding programming and to an extent they would be right. However it is also insane to ignore the new developments in the IT sector.

“We are bombarded with job opportunities for people using HTML5, Magento, Sencha, and Hack. The unfortunate truth is that there is a very limited number of people who are actually really good at using those technologies,” confirms Mr Tran.

Most of the training available for those languages is done directly through the companies that developed them and not through universities or any other educational institutions.

Does this then mean that having a university degree in Software Development is useless? Not quite. Most employers will appreciate the fact that someone stuck to a discipline for an X number of years and graduating with a certain degree will show the ability to learn and adapt to new things. However, the important thing to understand is that having a degree is no longer a free pass to entering the career space within software development. Moreover, most work places would value 3 years of industry experience over a 3-year degree.

While having a degree is still seen as noble, developers do have to constantly re-educate themselves on the new technological advancements and update their skills in coding, in order to compete in the programming world. So if you like studying, a career in IT is a perfect choice.