December 30th, 2008

How to be a better techie in 2009

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 3:55 pm

Categories: Business Technology, Cubicle Culture, IT Skills, Job Hunting, Work-Life Balance

Tags: Hiring, Information Technology, Professional Development, Recruitment & Selection, Strategy, Career, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Management, Deb Perelman

In 2009, this could be you.

… Cure cancer, run that three-minute mile, save the whales… remember when your New Years Resolutions were downright triumphant? These days, they sound a whole lot more sober: “I hope I’ll have a job in January,” said one reader. “Contract work with no benefits is all I see out there,” commented another. World peace, anyone?

Yet the Web is full of advice for IT professionals on how they can be become better, more hireable pros. Not all of it is realistic, though it sure beats “cross your fingers and hope your job is still there after vacation”. Here are some of my favorites, and the things I would bank on getting you the furthest in the new year.

1. Pay attention to where the hiring is.

We all get caught up in our work. We all bear down for months and even years at a time on one all-encompassing project or another — this is a good thing — but the danger is in looking up and seeing that the field around you has changed. Keeping your eye on the “prize” so to speak — where the hiring is still taking place, even in a downturn — is essential for continued career success.

So where is this mythical hiring surge? It depends on who you ask, of course. Some people, such as Read Write Web’s Jobwire, point to the growing use of community managers and new media specialists and that developers are still being hired at twice the pace of sales and marketing folks. Others put their money on SAP, .Net and help desk support. But all agree that even in a downturn, there will be small pockets of growth.

2. Keep your skills current.

Advising tech pros to keep their skills current may be advice as old as time, but it doesn’t change the fact that if you’re still boasting skills at the top of your IT resume that haven’t been a central focus of enterprise organizations in years, or worse, a decade, you’re going to have a harder time selling yourself for a promotion or to a new company.

It’s not something to put off, either. “Any IT Pro knows that keeping up with the latest technology is a career key. Make it easy on yourself by reading technology news and subscribing to various newsletters and technology magazines. If you keep up consistently, you can’t be overwhelmed by falling behind,” explained Kristin Clifford at CompTIA.

3. Be a documenting fiend.

Most IT departments are a place where the cowboys still roam — the “cowboy” being the guy that everyone in the department depends on because he or she knows how to run things. Productivity can hinge on them, and dangerously so.

But this is now an age of standardized processes — things like CMMI and ITIL are more popular than ever — and documentation is at the core of this. Being someone who is organized and keeps track of what they’ve done, even if your boss doesn’t require it, will mean that you can always reference your work so that your successes can be repeatable. If this is where IT is going, you want to be there first. Heck, you might even like it.

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October 8th, 2008

How to job hunt during a recession

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 11:21 am

Categories: Economy, IT Skills, Job Hunting

Tags: Job, Network, Recession, Information Technology, Recruitment & Selection, Strategy, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Management, Deb Perelman

Hopefully, it won’t come to this.

Between rounds and rounds of layoffs and further devaluation of retirement portfolios, you don’t need to look far to find dismal employment news out there these days. The job market outlook isn’t much better, as slumped job growth is affecting skilled workers in- and outside of the credit sector. It is no wonder that many who were interested in finding a new job this fall have put their search on hold until more of the dust settles.

But is this really necessary? A recession doesn’t mean that you’ll never, ever get a new job, say hiring experts, only that it may take longer and require you to sell yourself differently. Here are some of their tips:

Don’t assume the worst about the IT job market.

Curt Sterling, partner at The Cydio Group in San Diego, an IT Staffing firm says that IT growth has actually increased in the past couple quarters, despite what the overall markets might reflect.

“A lot of industries are upgrading their IT infrastructure, and IT budgets should actually grow into 1st quarter of 2009. So in short, I would advise people in IT to keep their nose to the grindstone and push for the position they are seeking because the opportunities are out there,” said Sterling.

Get back to basics.

Stuart McGill, Chief Technology Officer, Micro Focus, a provider of enterprise application management tells IT job-seekers that the demand for COBOL skills is rising, not declining.

“This underlines the importance of maintaining and modernizing core IT systems in enterprises worldwide. Especially in light of the current economic climate, enterprises must extend the value of their existing IT assets. Successful organizations will be those able to hire graduates familiar with key programming languages at the heart of today’s enterprise systems, such as COBOL,” said McGill.

Change your focus.

Job seekers should start by shifting their question from “What’s in it for me?” to “What’s in it for them?” explains Joe Turner for the Vault, a job board geared to students and young professionals.

“Especially in an economic downturn, you’ll want to stay focused on what you can accomplish for your next employer. Show them that you understand the macroeconomic “bigger picture” of the role you play in moving the company forward,” explains Turner.

Don’t rule out part-time or freelance work.

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September 15th, 2008

Is it "reasonable" to ask IT job candidates to prove their skills?

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 4:25 pm

Categories: IT Skills, Job Hunting, Recruiting

Tags: Job, Information Technology, Job Interview, Slashdot, Job Candidate, Recruitment & Selection, Strategy, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Management

Did your last job interview give you flashbacks to this?

Consider your workplace: When a in-house council gets hired, are they tested on their familiarity with those thick law books that line their offices? Are HR professionals required to show evidence that they have never embarrassed their former company? Do accountants have to provide the scores from their back-in-the-day CPA exams?

Yet increasingly, IT professionals are asked to take some sort of test when they go for a job interview, to prove they know the technology that’s on their resume. This is the subject of a long–and heated–discussion on Slashdot this week, wherein an IT job candidate says that even with more than one university degree, a couple of IT certifications, over ten years work experience in the industry with two to four years with each employer, working with a wide range of technologies, he’s not sure he finds it “reasonable” to take a test on a job interview.

This is, understandably, a sore subject among many commenters. “I won’t take them. I have turned down several jobs over it,” responds the first Slashdot commenter, banbeans.

But it also might be a sore subject among those who hire IT pros, or enough that nearly every IT professional that has been featured on this blog to date has warned tech job candidates not to embellish or outright lie about their skill sets on their resume. Clearly, many had been burned before.

“Don’t ever pad your resume unless you’re able to back it up. I’ve interviewed candidates and if they had kept to what they really knew they’d have been better off… there is nothing worse than someone nixing their chances because they have overextended themselves,” explained Michael Donohoe, a developer for the New York Times.

Some blame these resume-embellishers for causing interviewers to distrust IT candidates.

“We only have ourselves to blame. Why do you think the interviewers want a test? Because somewhere along the line, in some capacity, they were burned by an unscrupulous IT person who lied about their level of competency,” writes Slashdot commenter multimediavt.

Others feel that the job-seeker is wrong to be offended.

“Actually it does happen in other fields… I’m a statistician/epidemiologist and every post I’ve ever applied for has had some kind of technical test. Some have been more formal than others. Anyway if I was applying for a post that needed a high level of technical knowledge I would expect to be tested on it,” retorts another Slashdot commenter.

How about you? Do you think employers are right to ask IT pros to prove their skills, so to speak? Have you been asked to take a test of any sort when you’ve gone on an IT job interview? Was is a deal-breaker, or did you not care because you wanted the job?

August 18th, 2008

Data architects: You're "hot"

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 4:01 pm

Categories: Business Technology, IT Skills, Job Hunting

Tags: Role, Forrester Research Inc., Recruitment & Selection, Professional Development, Operational Planning, Training And Certification, Strategy, Security, Human Resources, Workforce Management

Yes you are.

Information and data architects and information security experts, here’s some good news: You’re the hottest.

Fear not, data and content-oriented business analysts, business and enterprise architects and vendor management experts: You’re extremely hot as well. Enterprise application strategists, IT planners, network architects and enterprise project managers, you’re not doing so badly either. And account managers, desktop/virtualization experts, mobile operations and device experts, service managers and business process analysts? They want to keep you around as well.

So what’s all this about? I mean, surely it’s not every day that you’re called hot on the basis of your IT job alone, yet in a new Forrester report, these 16 roles are called out as being what CIOs need right now. And if you’re already doing them?

Hot.

According to Forrester, the need for these workers is being driven by a mixture of factors, including changes in technology, a greater emphasis on risk-management and a limited supply of key roles. But they had some themes in common, as well.

The “hottest” ones, such as information and data architects, emphasized policy-making and oversight for data and security. Others, such as enterprise architects, emphasized information and process management, as well as vendor oversight. Roles such as enterprise project managers and IT planners were considered key because they coordinated business units and complex projects.

However, even if you’re not in one of these roles already, there’s still time to change this. Forrester vice president and principal analyst Marc Cecere encourages CIOs without the right mix of these people in their departments to find ways to rectify this, by tailoring career paths and incentives to these roles and by cultivating them from within their departments.

“Many of the hot roles required breadth, influence without formal power and knowledge of company culture,” explains Cecere. “Rather than hiring these from the outside, source roles (like account managers or business process analysts) from within. This can be done by recruiting from the business functions and units, or through job rotation, training, and management of individual career paths.”

In other words, even if you’re not the “hottest” right now, there’s still hope.

August 1st, 2008

Gartner's grim IT hiring outlook

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 9:12 am

Categories: Business Technology, Economy, IT Skills, Job Hunting

Tags: Hiring, Information Technology, Gartner Inc., Recruitment & Selection, Strategy, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Management, Deb Perelman

IT professionals are seeing signs like this.

Gartner released its 2008 IT market compensation study this week and the news was anything but upbeat. Projecting that IT organizations would be cautious about their 2008 and 2009 hiring plans due to IT budget cuts, a decline in IT hiring is anticipated.

Though nearly 58 percent of U.S.-based IT organizations projected an increase in their IT staff levels, including full-time employees and contractors, this was a notable drop from the 66 percent who reported the same in the 2007 study. Furthermore, the percentage of organizations that projected that they’d be increasing their headcount by more than 10 percent in the coming year slipped more than three percentage points from the year prior.

So what will this mean if you were hoping to land a new gig or full-time job in the coming year? Diane Berry, managing vice president for Gartner’s CIO workforce group and a coauthor on of the study, says that the best way for IT professionals to improve their marketability to pick up as much business experience and competence as possible.

“The HR leaders and CIOs I talk to are having a hard time finding the talent that they need,” Berry explained. “They’re looking for some people with business expertise or competence, who are keeping their skills relevant. They’re hungry for good talent, and it would be best to learn as much of the business as you can. It increases your value tenfold.”

What this means for IT workers that would like to stay entrenched in technology is less clear.

“You’re going to need to have that business expertise, so if I was an 18-year old going into college I would be marrying my CS degree with a business degree,” said Berry.

Do you agree? Do you think pure tech players are going to have a rougher time in the coming year than those that hone their business skills?

July 30th, 2008

Signs you might not be IT management material

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 2:41 pm

Categories: Cubicle Culture, IT Skills, Leadership

Tags: IT Administration, Information Technology, Manager, Professional Development, Team Management, Recruitment & Selection, Strategy, Career, Management, Human Resources

In theory, everyone wants to climb the corporate ladder. With promotions come steps up that eventually land an employee in the coveted management echelon, with the opportunity to increase both their pay grade and influence.

Yet in practice–as anyone who has ever had a lousy boss or manager can tell you–not everyone is actually cut out to be a manager. Perhaps they’re happiest buried in thick lines of code or have little patience for the schmoozing or interest in the visibility that come with more pivotal roles. Perhaps they’re better suited for other things.

Though the fault is rarely with the individuals–all too often companies reward employees they don’t want to lose with inflated titles and promotions, whether they’re ready for prime time visibility or not–many could save themselves headaches further down their career path by understanding their own limitations and finding more suitable paths.

Here are eight telltale signs:

You hate bureaucracy

Fact is, managerial roles are rife with all the fixings of a bureaucracy–meetings and reports and reviews and pow-wows–and this will be what you spend the bulk of your time on.

“If you cringe when you go into a meeting with more than one person or you feel you would rather pluck out your eyeballs rather than go into a performance review of a subordinate, those are the very first signs that you should not become a manager,” said Jim Lanzalotto, vice president of strategy and marketing at Yoh, a Philadelphia-based provider of IT staffing services.

You need a lot of support

Not all employees are the independent type. They might need to know that someone is looking out for them or checking their work; they might work best on teams. Though there is no detriment in having this approach to work, it’s usually a bad fit in the management space.

“Managers get very little support, much less coaching from their boss,” says Alam Allard, an executive coach based in Lawrenceville, Ga. “You’re probably not cut out for management if you’re not ready to take on more stress, challenges and headaches…without getting much support from above. Most managers are promoted, then realize they have to do all the work they’ve been doing all along…and then take on the extra work of managing a team, often without much of a raise.”

You’re in it for the title

There is no question that a title that connotes that you are within the upper ranks of your company can be impressive on a business card or slipped into a casual introduction.

“In our world, we value external titles and visible things. If you meet someone who is a director or manager of something, you think ‘look at that guy. He’s really successful.’” said Lanzalotto.

But if this is the reason you want it, or–even worse–you’re unclear on your personal motives for accepting such a position, you could be in for a rough haul.

“You’re probably not ready for management if you’re not clear on your motivation for accepting the role: Is it for ego gratification, self-esteem boost, because you think it won’t be that challenging, so, heck, why not?…or does it fit in your clearly thought out career acceleration plan?” said Allard.

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July 10th, 2008

IT pros: Choose a side

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 6:56 am

Categories: Business Technology, IT Skills, Leadership, Offshore Outsourcing

Tags: Information Technology, Strategy, Management, Deb Perelman

One of the biggest aggravations I hear vented from the mouths and keyboards of IT professionals is that someone, someone keeps moving their cheese.

What they’re talking about is IT benchmarks, and the fact that they’re constantly shifting. First you’re told to know a single technology like the back of your hand and then you’re told that being too entrenched in a technology can be a career-limiting move. You’ve been told to stock up on certifications to justify your piece of an organization’s payroll and then learned that some of the letters after your names weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. One year you’re assigned a desk in the dark room at the end of the hall and another you’re told to put on a suit and get an MBA if you want a job destined to stay on this continent.

Constantly re-marketing oneself as the IT professional du jour can be exhausting, to say the least.

“I’ve seen a lot of different flavors of The Solution. There’s training, certifications, new skills, new roles… The process of shifting gears every 18 months turns us into puppets,” a consultant in Southern California with nearly three decades of IT experience told me.

“Whenever Manager Bill decides to change his paradigm, we end up going through six to nine months of redoing our work and then bridging two very different environments, and very few people want to talk about standards so we’re not always reinventing the wheel.”

Well, here’s one more to add to the pile: In a recent conversation with Forrester vice president and research director, Alex Cullen, he told me that they believe it is the IT organization that going to go through a drastic change in the next decade, with some splitting off from the departments we recognize today to become what he calls “renegades.” And not surprisingly, IT pros will have to figure out where and how they want to fit in.

“You have to pick,” said Cullen. “The traditional IT organizations will stay in the traditional IT mindset–they’re all about IT excellence. IT is a factory, and they’re running it that way. The people who know Java and databases and configurations will go to this one.”

But at the fork in the road, some IT leaders will take a risk and aim for full integration with business by becoming all about peer relationships, product insight and service innovation. The department heads will be top company executives, and the people within the organizations will barely touch technology.

“The MBAs will ultimately go here. They’re in their own separate organization and they’ll spend all of their time on business stuff, and thinking about customer loyalty. They’ll have a team in India that does all of their development work,” said Cullen.

In some ways, Cullen’s views about the new direction of some IT departments could be a relief for techies who have been perplexed as to why they would need to be DBAs and MBAs and IT project managers–i.e. everything under the sun. But there’s going to be little left for pure techies among the IT renegades.

So does this mean that some IT professionals should drop everything and become pure business technology players?

Read the rest of this entry »

July 3rd, 2008

Why tech jobs are beating the employment odds

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 10:35 am

Categories: Economy, Education, Employment Reports, IT Skills

Tags: Job, Worker, Recruitment & Selection, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Deb Perelman

Just in time for U.S. workers to flee to the shores to celebrate the birth of our great nation with the requisite three-day weekend packed with backyard barbecues and impressively choreographed fireworks displays, we’re capping off one of the most depressing weeks for employment reports in the better half of a decade.

The number of employees on private-sector payrolls fell by 79,000 in June, the steepest fall in six years and nearly four times what economists had estimated, according to the ADP National Employment Report released Wednesday. Today the Labor Department announced that 62,000 non-farm jobs were lost last month, bringing the number of jobs shed in 2008 so far up to nearly half a million. Meanwhile, new applications for jobless benefits hurdled to 404,000 last week.

Yet as Larry Dignan noted this morning, tech employment is holding up amid this ugly jobs outlook.

The tech sector and its related functions aren’t growing jobs, but aren’t hemorrhaging them either. And in some spots there’s even growth–management and technology consultants as well as information systems architects are actually adding jobs compared to a year ago.

So why is the tech sector beating the odds? The experts I have spoken to had three salient points:

1. It’s not 2001, and this isn’t a tech-driven slowdown. Even though the U.S. economy is clearly hovering on the brink of a full-blown recession, the initial culprit has not been overvalued tech stocks, but the subprime mortgage crisis. Any effects tech feels are secondary ripples; this is not to say that no tech jobs will be lost, but that they’re not the in eye of the storm.

“Traditionally, tech is much more immune than other sectors because it tends to deliver to people products that over time grow in value,” said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for The NPD Group, a global provider of consumer and retail market research. “If the boat is sinking, we’re kind of moving along at the top not bouncing up the way we have been in the past. Clearly things are better here than they are in other categories but not without challenges as well. We’re certainly not immune, certainly feeling the effects of the economy that are holding down growth in the hardware business.”

2. If you’re in the right areas, you’re still needed. Whether you’re consulting or a salaried employee, if you’re in the areas that businesses deem essential–such as cost savings, virtualization and green technologies–this isn’t going to change because of some belt-tightening.

“It’s a very different job market than it has been in previous economic slowdowns,” said Jim Lanzalotto, vice president of services and marketing for Yoh, an IT services and recruitment company. “High-impact skills are showing a really strong demand. For example, there is a gap of 30,000 workers between SAP need and SAP supply. This is just one area where we can’t find enough people fast enough.”

3. A diminished pipeline is piquing demand. Though the state of technology and engineering education in this country is nothing to cheer about–a study by the Computing Research Association released in March found that there were half as many computer science majors in 2007 as there were in 2000–the shortage of people in the IT pipeline can translate to better job security for those already in the field.

“American students get to college and they’re not prepared for science and technology careers and the pipeline for skilled workers is drying up. We don’t have enough American kids going into those fields,” said Josh James, a senior research analyst with the AeA, a high-tech trade association.

July 1st, 2008

In lean times, a tale of two IT contractors

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 7:04 am

Categories: Economy, IT Consulting, IT Skills, Project Management

Tags: Contractor, Information Technology, Strategy, Management, Deb Perelman

For IT contractors, a recession can be either the best or worst of times. On the positive end of the spectrum, when businesses get nervous about making new IT investments they often bring in freelance techies to sidestep hiring permanent staff, hoping these individuals can provide a buffer against shedding full-time staff should they have to put the quick brakes on a project.

But on the flipside, freelance workers are often the first thrown off a ship struggling to maintain its weight. In a new study, by giant, a UK consultancy, IT contractors said that they were getting nervous, with 56.9 percent saying they were not getting all the work they would like to have. Others, too, have seen good reason for IT contractors to be nervous as the economy heads into lean times.

Like most IT employment outlooks, the fate of IT contractors in this recession is likely to come down to skills, and whether they have the ones companies want to pay up for. In many ways, economic uncertainty can expedite momentum that was already in place, such as the outsourcing or elimination of support roles.

Yet IT contractors working on projects that help companies run more leanly are finding no shortage of work. Organizations trying to reduce costs need people that can help, whether through consolidation or green technologies.

“For Sysadmin people and developers, this slowdown is a bad thing,” said a contractor for a large IT services firm. “But for those who help businesses consolidate, with heavy SOA or virtualization skills, there’s a lot of money to be made in consolidation gigs and strategic outsourcing–all of those things that mean reducing hardware.”

In many ways, what happens in a slowdown is all part of the double-edged sword that is the freelance life–having to go with the flow of business confidence.

“We’ve seen companies say they’ll get rid of contractors first because that’s an expense or overhead they can’t handle,” said vice president Robert Half Technology, an IT recruiting firm, John Estes, though underscoring that he’s seen just as many step up their use of contract employees.

“Other companies say they’d like to use contractors because they say they don’t have the FTE headcount budget. Right now, we’re seeing steady hiring across the board, both contractors and IT staff.”

Consultants that have been in the game long enough have come to expect workflow swings as the economy sputters along.

“Contractors are generally the first to feel the pinch when times get tough, but they are also the first to benefit when things begin to turn around,” said Scott Duffy, a Toronto-based software development consultant. “Certainly when business owners begin to get nervous about where the economy is heading, they stop hiring full-time employees and begin to simply use contract resources until there’s confidence there is enough work to keep someone busy all day every day.”

June 27th, 2008

Essential IT skills: Manage your time and carry your weight

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 10:00 am

Categories: IT Skills, Project Management

Tags: Team, Information Technology, Team Management, Strategy, Management, Deb Perelman

Everyone loves a neat list summarizing who and what they need to be, and not just in IT careers articles. There are innumerable business books that promise to school readers on “The Five Things Everyone Needs to Know” and “Eight Secrets to Success” and so on. And while the interest in them is a well-intentioned hope that the listicle will provide a useful framework for getting one where they want to be, the reality is that the steps to get there are too complex to be reduced to one-size-fits-all solutions.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some good ones out there. InfoWorld has a new article about the 30 skills every IT person should have, and it contains more than a few gems, three of my favorites being that if you have to go to your boss with a problem, “make sure you have at least one solution,” “learn how to speak without using acronyms” and “document.”

The first demands that an employee with a problem isn’t allow to dissolve into helplessness, and it could apply to any job. The second and third address two of the biggest complaints I hear about IT–that non-techies barely understand what IT folks are talking about half the time and that each project must reinvent the wheel, rather than rely on a standard process that has proven successful.

But I don’t agree with everything. Working all night on a team project shows poor time management, and nothing else. No matter how useful it is for “camaraderie,” everyone being up the creek together is a backward way to get there. I believe it is this all-night, rah-rah atmosphere that also makes IT especially repellent for people with families to attend to.

People who work well on a team but not so effectively on their own (number 30) are weak links. If they’re better at teams than anything else, they might look into a project management role. But teams are made up of strong, effective individuals and if one person isn’t carrying their weight, everyone else is forced to compensate–and likely resents them.

What would you add to or remove from the list?