...the smartphone and aerospace industries.
But as Forbes.com points out, although fourteen million new jobs is a significant number, "when compared against the size of the global workforce (more than 3 billion), it’s in the neighborhood of half a percent, a small drop in the bucket".
Moreover, only 1.17 million of these jobs will be in North America. A majority will be in emerging markets — with China, India and the Asia-Pacific region accounting for ten million such posts.
Forbes.com attributes this regional bias to the "immense size of these country’s workforces — 1.2 billion workers in China and India alone" — although it omits to factor-in the commercial appeal of sweatshop pay levels.
But as the study’s author, John Gantz, observes: “A common misperception is [that] cloud computing is a job eliminator, but in truth it will be a job creator — a major one. And job growth will occur across continents and throughout organizations of all sizes because emerging markets, small cities and small businesses have the same access to cloud benefits as large enterprises or developed nations.”
IDC points out that since jobs are being created as a result of increased business revenue from cloud, the jobs will be across the breadth of enterprises, in areas such as marketing, sales, finance and administration, production, and service.
As John Gantz opines: "We may not have even imagined yet what job titles may emerge. And many non-IT people may have the cloud to thank, at least indirectly, for their opportunities. I’ll bet it will be more than 14 million that have career opportunities tied to the cloud."
IDC also predicts revenues from cloud innovation could reach $1.1 trillion annually over the next three years. The analytics firm estimates that last year alone, IT cloud services helped organizations of all sizes and all vertical sectors around the world generate more than $400 billion in revenue and 1.5 million new jobs.
In the next four years, it predicts, the number of new jobs will surpass 8.8 million.