Dice Career Advice Blog

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.

A huge concern for today's CIO is developing and retaining information technology talent. For those who are beginners or a mid-career technology professional, this means you should be taking steps now to ensure you'll be on the short-list of people the CIO will need in the days ahead. These qualified people will have the ability to mash tech smarts with solid business acumen and posses virtues like a creative flair to solve various problems, or strong ability to lead.

There are several approaches to consider for future-proofing your career. One of the best is to speak with your manager or human resources department about opportunities for cross-functional career development. This can involve training or special assignments that give you a close look at how the other half lives. This experience not only gives you insights into how IT projects are viewed by the business organization, but also helps you build valuable relationships. (A previous post covers more tips for how IT managers can better understand the business side of the house). Other avenues for skill development include finding a mentor who is willing and interested in your progress, and properly nurturing that relationship for mutual benefit. For those who are time-challenged, taking e-learning courses in areas that address weaknesses can be a flexible and convenient way to stay ahead.

If you haven't checked it out yet, BNET (a property of CNET Networks) is a great resource for business people, and it has a great career development section with content that addresses skill development and leadership among many other things. Lastly, make sure you review your resume annually and update it with new skills.

The point is, unless you are a baby boomer on the brink of retirement, you can't rest on your laurels if you are looking to get ahead in information technology. But there is a bright side. No matter where you are in your career, if you continue to develop them, your technology and business skills and talents will set you further away from the pack with the expected shortfall of IT graduates and the shrinking workforce as baby boomers retire.

One of the biggest pitfalls of being a techie and a jobseeker is the temptation to put your faith in the Internet as the job search tool and forget that it's just one aid in an entire toolbox of strategies. At the extreme end, job searching for some becomes a matter of updating resumes, posting them to some online databases, and then sitting back and waiting for an employer to call as they fire up a round of Warcraft III.

Savvy jobseekers know how to combine the Internet and technologies like email and IM along with old school methods that still have a place in the world today, such as pounding the pavement and unsolicited cold calling.This holistic approach actually means starting at square one to be most effective.

If you haven't done so, take time for a candid self-assessment of who you are, what you have done, and what you want to do, and then make sure that is translated into a well-crafted resume. After this step comes researching and contacting employers to arrange interviews, including checking job boards and posting resumes. And if you are using multiple communication tools (including cold calls, faxes, mailed cover letters and resumes) your job leads should filter in from many sources and in more numbers than if you rely heavily on any single method.

In her blog on TechRepublic, Shannon Kalver makes a great point about how you can easily trick yourself into thinking that sending an email and checking it off your job searching to-do list is some great accomplishment when it is not. Check out her useful trick: "I open the communication task on my list when I send the email. I only close the task when I hear back from the other person. This prevents me from thinking of the task as 'complete' when it really just began. It also gives me a handy list of outstanding communications to track."

Tactics like Kalver's make sure progress is realized and not just an illusion. If you are a serious jobseeker check out this Dice article for essential tips. The job market favors job hunters, so get out there!