Dice Career Advice Blog

Wondering how the tech sector is fairing in the Windy City, or how the financial services industry is shaping up post 9/11 in the Big Apple? Over on Dice.com we've assembled 20 local market reports for the top cities in the U.S. to help job seekers better understand the marketplace dynamics.

Keeping up-to-date on your local market can help maximize your job search opportunities and keep you ahead of the competition. These reports are published on a quarterly basis, with Q3 2006 reports now available! Here are some direct links for reports on the biggest cities:

Revived financial services keep IT humming in the Big Apple

Silicon Valley has high-paying jobs…but keep an eye on the cost of living

Skilled IT workers are finding more money in Chicago’s tech sector

An abundance of IT jobs has recruiters looking beyond L.A.’s city limits

According to ZDNet's IT Facts blog (by the way, a great place to get your daily dose of data): "71% of top performers listed pay among the top three reasons they would consider leaving their employer. Only 45% of employers cited pay as a top-three reason workers leave. Instead, employers thought promotion and career-development opportunities were more important. Another oft-blamed culprit, relationship with a supervisor, was cited by 31% of employers but 8% of top performers."

The post pulls from an article on The WSJ Career Journal covering the survey results of multiple studies. The article states, "The results suggest employers don't fully understand the needs of their top employees, frustrating companies' efforts to battle turnover as the labor market improves." So while many employers think workers are leaving because of greener pastures or interpersonal conflict, the real reason is money, particularly as employers make cutbacks to health-care and pension plans. Cash is king once again.

The only way for employers to deal with turnover and retention is head on. They should reevaluate compensation policies and offer bigger raises to top performer before they are poached by competitors!

IT careers have an inherent element of risk in them. The technologies you work so hard to master today could be out the door tomorrow. If you stick with what you know it may feel like the safe thing to do, but not many are as lucky as those proficient in technologies that refuse to die, like mainframes or Cobol. So staying current with the latest IT advances is critical to ensuring your marketability.

One such advancement of interest today is Ruby on Rails, a Web application development framework that you should be familiar with, or may actually be considering to learn if you’re a developer. The lightweight scripting language is winning the hearts and minds of developers for enabling a quick and painless way to build applications. A new article on Dice.com does a great job of covering what it is and if it is right for you. It suggests giving it a test drive:

Is Rails right for you? To find out, give it a quick spin — it works with most Web servers (including Apache or lighttpd, running either FastCGI, SCGI, or Mongrel) and databases (including MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, and Firebird). Numerous Web-hosting sites also offer Rails capabilities. Finally, Apple users will have the ability to tap Ruby for Rails natively starting in spring 2007, when Apple releases Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), with Rails built in.

To truly master Ruby on Rails, however, you’ll have to sit down and learn a new programming language — a time-consuming task.

That said, for developers looking to bolster their resume, “I can think of no other language I would recommend higher than Ruby,” says Richard Monson-Haefel, a senior analyst at Burton Group. In particular, he lauds Ruby’s commercial-free development, noting it’s “a delight to work with.”

Adding new programming languages to your skill set boosts your technical expertise, but ensuring you long-term marketability doesn’t stop there. Actively manage your career and protect yourself from the hazards of shifting technologies by understanding your organization’s business needs, gaining industry-specific knowledge, and gaining management experience. This way, you will be recognized for more than your technical capability.

Feel like end-users don't know what you are talking about? There is a new article over on Dice that discusses the age-old issue of attempting to communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical personnel. The problem is getting harder with today's information technology explosion, and this is one aspect of your skill set that you will need to dial in if you want to move up the corporate ladder. The article has several great tips, reproduced in quick point-form here:

• Take a user to lunch and learn about the business

• Ask to be invited to staff meetings with business people

• IT executives should educate staffers on business speak, the business of their business, and speaking techniques

• IT executives should budget funds to train staffers, starting with how to make presentations to non-IT people.

• Avoid buzzwords when presenting complex issues

• Rely on analogies and simple diagrams

• Avoid jumping to conclusions and commit your full attention to what non-technical personnel have to say, even if the solution to the problem seems obvious

• Show empathy and make an effort to understand others’ points of view, schedule one-on-one and group meetings for planning and solution-oriented discussions (instead of relying on email or telephone), and be patient

The Labor Department has just released some figures worthy of a look. The number of Americans who quit their jobs fell for a fourth straight month in September to the lowest level in two years, Reuters reports. The number of U.S. employees who quit in September dropped to a seasonally adjusted 2.401 million — the lowest since September 2004 — from 2.597 million in August.

This news comes on the heels of the government’s report last week that unemployment sunk to 5-year low as the jobless rate dropped to 4.4% from 4.6% in September 2006.

Economic theorists we are not, but more people finding jobs and less leaving them must mean that the job market is humming along strongly and efficiently. And with less workers jumping ship for new jobs, those of you who are looking shouldn’t find it all that hard considering current job growth estimates.

The belief that you can flex your power and have more impact in smaller organizations doesn't ring true for IT professionals, according to a recent study.  Info-Tech Research Group's Indaba Division reports that in smaller enterprises, decisions on IT department acquisitions tend to rest in the hands of senior, non-IT executives. "In companies with more than 200 employees, the balance of power shifts and more than 50 per cent of purchase decisions are made by executives in the IT group," according to Ed Daugavietis, senior research analyst with Info-Tech. The takeaway is that if you are seeking a career with major impact on a business, you should focus on companies with 200 or more employees.  But small enterprises may offer an ideal experience for the IT professional who enjoys hands-on management of the IT infrastructure and does not aspire to management, said Daugavietis.

You can find out more about the Info-Tech study study at Tekrati.

Meanwhile, there is good news for you regardless of what size organization you work at. Robert Half Technology, a leading recruiter of both contract-based and full-time IT professionals, reports that IT professionals can expect starting salaries to increase an average of 2.8% next year. The Robert Half Technology 2007 Salary Guide also finds that software developers, web developers, and data warehouse managers will do best of all. Head over to Dice to read more.

Are you looking to move ahead in your career? While some spend hours thumbing through a myriad of career books at the local bookstore for tips, others turn to experienced pros that distill it all down to the core essentials. There is a great list on a recent TechRepublic blog with 25 things you can be doing today that'll eventually land you in the corner office on the top floor. As with most life improvements, the hard work belongs to you. Make a plan to prioritize and infuse all the career tips and advice you get into your work life and maintain the discipline to follow through. Need specific guidance? Head over to the resources section on Dice.com for services and advice.

Giving out your salary history to an inquiring prospective employer can thwart your efforts at landing a higher-paying job. Below are some great excerpts from the TechRepublic community in a discussion thread kicked off by a user seeking advice:

My questions to you all are… Is it appropriate and alright to decline to share one's salary history with a prospective employer? If so, how can you do it without creating an unnecessary issue out of it?.

Some responses:

If you're good, and you set a reasonable price, people do exactly that. They take it or leave it. People are like that. You get the bargain hunters, and then you get the value hunters.

Asking salary history is like a car salesman not telling you the price of the car until you tell him how much you make per year, and how much cash you have in your wallet. Its a terribly inappropriate question that helps them get around paying someone what they're worth.

Yes, there are risks in letting a prospective new employer know your wage history in advance. Still, I am more than willing to take those risks as I have seen far too many resumes go in the trash for not including salary history when it was specifically requested.

Putting in negotiable is not an incomplete application and it doesn't give up your negotiation position. I would decline to answer. Instead, ask about the salary being offered and be ready to discuss the salary/compensation rates for the position. You should also know the salary range for comparable positions in your area, factoring in your experience, education, background, etc.

Tapping the wisdom of communities is a great way to piece together the right advice you should take. For some, asking the experts is good enough. At Dice we provide in-depth answers to specific questions like these. Just shoot as an email at: AskDice@dice.com with your questions about resumes, interviews and negotiations, career moves, or other career-related issues.

If your dream is to work at Google, the road to landing a gig at the famous web search engine giant just got a lot easier. With its complex hiring process Google hasn't been able to add people fast enough to sustain its phenomenal growth rate in recent years. The Wall Street Journal reports that with a new head of human resources on board, former General Electric Co. executive Laszlo Bock, hiring changes are underway:

One initiative Google has already undertaken is reducing the number of interviews. Mr. Bock says each candidate offered a job by Google went through 5.1 in-person interviews on average in June, down from 6.2 at the beginning of the year. (A veteran tech recruiter says five to eight interviews is probably about average for Silicon Valley.) Google is also considering requiring staff members who interview candidates to submit their assessments within a week of the interview; right now, there's no strict deadline.

Additionally, Google is streamlining to add flexibility to the process…

So far, Google is experimenting with changes, such as additional short questionnaires for applicants and different interview formats. The company is also considering trying out an abbreviated hiring process, which would allow it to make an offer to some candidates after just two interviews.

Google is also moving from a format in which interviewers provided candidate feedback using free-form text and could give only one overall score to a format in which they offer targeted feedback grouped around four attributes (Google declines to name them) and multiple scores rating a candidate's knowledge, skills and abilities.

Every growing company with a stringent hiring process will need to streamline eventually, otherwise risk losing talent.

In Northern California, if you've ever tuned in to your local pubic radio station on Sunday mornings, you may have come across a program called Work with Marty Nemko. On the air in its 16th year, the bulk of the show is Marty answering phone-in questions about any job-related issue and offering guidance. Last Sunday he spoke about time management and offered up some great ideas that he personally uses. These are also covered succinctly in a new article.

Marty says that you need to be conscious about time, all the time, and find ways to trim waste, including things like declining meetings that don't need you, to hiring a personal assistant. You don't have to be rich these days to hire someone for a few hours a week, he argues, and the time saved picking up dry cleaning and running other meaningless errands is well-worth it. He may be on to something: Life outsourcing?

But the most valuable tip is less tactical and more strategic. He says that you need to embrace work. "If you recognize that the more you accomplish, the better you'll feel about yourself and your life, you'll get more done," he reasons. Also, write a personal mission statement which can help you prioritize your tasks. His is simply, "I want to be a beloved manager while allowing time for my kids and my hobby: acting."

For some, personal mission statements are hard to write because they are not sure what it is exactly that they want to do with their lives, or what they are currently doing is the point of it all. One great way to figure that out is to list the things you value, like your job, family, friends, politics, eco-responsibility, golf, and so on, and then figure out which ones are your governing values, those that define who you are. Then you are ready to write your mission statement and working backwards from there, you should be able to set yearly, monthly, and weekly personal and career goals. This can then followed further by prioritizing yuor daily tasks that help you reach your goals and align your life with your values.