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.