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Data Processing Technicians

Outlook

As computers, software, and programming techniques are refined, many programming tasks become routine and automated, handled by artificial intelligence (AI) or large language models (LLMs), or are eliminated altogether. This trend is significantly reducing opportunities for workers with two-year degrees in the data processing field. In addition, competition for jobs among graduates of technical programs is increasing as more beginning programmers enter the job market with four-year degrees. As a result, technicians with only two years of formal training may find relatively fewer satisfactory jobs open to them in the future. The U.S. Department of Labor predicts that employment for computer programmers is expected to decline by 10 percent through 2033, which may also provide some insight on the outlook for the closely related job of data processing technicians.

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