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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December 22nd, 2008

The sweet lure of tomorrow

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 4:20 pm

Categories: Work-Life Balance

Tags: Task, Recruitment & Selection, Corporate Communications, E-mail, Cyberthreats, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Marketing, Online Communications, Security

Do you feel like this when you get back from a holiday break?

Just sending out your holiday cards today? Rushing to get gifts you’ll need to distribute in 48 hours? Frantically filing your 2008 expense reports, due last Friday? Don’t worry, you’re in good company. Because I meant to discuss this topic with you last week, and then earlier this week, and then yesterday but you see, if there were a Patron Saint of Procrastination, I may indeed be deified.

Procrastination rarely fits a learning curve — even if putting things off has gotten you in trouble at work, killed your productivity or caused all sorts of harried messes, odds are, you haven’t learned your lesson or sworn off the phrase “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

Creating this psychological distance is at the heart of procrastination but what is less understood is why — why put off starting a diet or workout regime until January 2? Why let the inbox pile up only to feel overwhelmed every time you look at it? Why bear down on your job responsibilities and start pushing for that promotion after your vacation?

An international team of psychologists began exploring these questions, wanting to see if there was a link between how we think about a task and our tendency to postpone it, and their preliminary findings were reported in the December issue of Psychological Science. What they found was that people who were primed to think about tasks in a concrete manner (i.e. “First I’ll delete spam and newsletters, then respond to yes or no questions first…” versus “How did this inbox get so bad? How will I ever get through this?”), were much less likely to put them off. Those primed to think in vague terms about the tasks they had ahead rarely got to them.

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October 24th, 2008

No rest for the weary techie

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 10:09 am

Categories: Economy, IT Management, Work-Life Balance

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

Does your workload make you want to do this?

The state of the economy, and the job market that it is dragging down with it, may or may not have affected you yet. Your company may be mired in whatever language they use for layoffs, cutbacks, downsizings, rollbacks or “how about we all use a few less paper clips this month?” or it may be skirting by, fingers crossed, hoping the credit crisis doesn’t swoop down and make an example of it. (And if you’re in that camp, let us all hope that it stays that way)

But one thing that is abundantly clear is that whether your employment situation makes it out of this recession intact, your nerves may not. A little-discussed sobering truth about surving a round of layoffs is that your workload can often double or triple, leaving the consolation prize of “But at least you still have a job!” that much harder of a pill to swallow.

A new survey of CIOs illustrates this point, wherein more than one-third (36 percent) said rising workloads were the greatest source of stress for their teams. And although “too much work to do” may sounds like a relatively good problem in light of the current economy, “overstressed IT workers are unlikely to perform at their best. The pressure of mounting workloads, combined with ever-evolving technologies and office politics, can quickly erode morale and adversely affect productivity,” explained Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director of Robert Half Technology, the IT staffing firm that published the study.

Of course, these results should be little surprise to IT workers feeling the brunt of the rising workloads, especially in light of dialed-back IT budgets and frozen hiring plans. Let us only hope that stress will not be so much that we’ll have a whole ‘nother batch of cracked technology professionals…

How about you? Have you been stressed by an increased workload as a result of money problems at your company?

September 29th, 2008

Wired workers never catch a break

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 3:25 pm

Categories: Wireless Workplace, Work-Life Balance, Workplace Technology

Tags: Hour, Wired Inc., RIM BlackBerry, Worker, Handhelds, Recruitment & Selection, Hardware, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Deb Perelman

It’s not news that BlackBerrys and other handheld devices are mixed blessings for workers, as most find themselves torn between enjoying their technology-addled freedom from their cubicle confines but also feel like they pretty much never stop working.

A new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project evidences that this ambivalence is going nowhere. Looking at the way people use their workplace technologies and how they affect their lives, the report found workers expressing mixed views about technology’s impact. Though they liked the benefits of increased connectivity and the flexibility that these wireless gagets afforded them at work, they were working from home more than ever before. Some 45 percent of employed Americans reported doing at least some work from home and 18 percent said they did job-related tasks at home almost daily.

However, it is not only BlackBerrys and other handheld devices that are to blame. The Pew report points to the growing population of workers who are “wired and ready”. 86 percent of employed Americans use the internet or email at least occasionally, 81 percent have some sort of email account and 89 percent have cell phones. And 73 percent have all three of the technological tools that can keep them connected outside their regular working hours.

With these technological tools in place, nearly half felt that that their job’s demands on their free time had intensified. The more hours they already worked (those in the 50 hours per week and more category), the higher they felt the expectation was that they’d be “on” all of the time.

So what gives? Will everyone be working from everywhere all of the time in the future? This remains to be seen. What is clear is that the once-clear boundary between work and non-work hours has long since begun eroding, and those of you on your PDAs, right now, today, are very much the guinea pigs as to its long term effects.

Tell us, if you had the option today of retiring your BlackBerry forever in exchange for five hours extra at the office each week, would you? What if it was ten hours?

August 28th, 2008

Things you've probably done this summer instead of work

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 9:39 am

Categories: Cubicle Culture, Job Hunting, Work-Life Balance

Tags: Hour, Worker, Odds, July, Deb Perelman

Found yourself a little distracted this summer? You weren’t alone.

The seasonal patterns we learn as kids–fall, winter and spring are for school, summer equals freedom–tend to stay internalized even as we grow up and join the work worlds (and are doubly reinforced if you have children) all adding up to one little fact that likely drives your boss batty: Everyone slacks off a little in the summer.

Though fewer people are around, making it harder to get work done even if you wished to be a go-getter, it is all the more likely that the nice weather has gotten you daydreaming at your desk about taking long beach weekends, you taking long beach weekends and your own vacations.

Before you get “back to school” next week, here are some of this summer’s greatest distractions:

• Watched the Olympics: NBC proclaimed this week that Olympic Games were the most-watched TV event in history, with an estimated 214 million viewing at least a portion of the Summer Olympics over the 17 days.Two billion people watched the opening ceremonies alone–or nearly a third of the earth’s population, and one in ten said outright they’d be doing so from their desks. Odds are, you were one of them.
• Worked longer hours, but didn’t get more done: According to the Bureau of Economic Research, in 1983 the lowest-paid workers were more likely to work long hours. 20 years later, the trend reversed itself and now the most highly paid workers are twice more likely to work long hours. But you don’t need statistics to tell you that you’re likely working more hours than ever before, and getting less from them. More hours at the office do not always mean more productivity, and in many cases it is the opposite, where worn-out employees are not performing at their peak. They’re also not as healthy, as it can be almost impossible for workers to maintain a healthy lifestyle when work and commuting might consume 60 or more hours a week. It’s no surprise that 45 percent of workers in a May Career Builder survey said they’d gained weight at their current jobs.
• Took a staycation: “Staycation” is the buzzword du jour this summer as rising airfares, fees for such “luxuries” as blankets and pillows, surging (but now leveling off) gasoline prices and more delays than ever on our nation’s runways has convinced many-an-already-exhausted worker that they needn’t leave the comforts of their lounge chairs, patio grills, and backyard sprinklers to take a vacation this summer. In fact, 51 percent of the respondents in one poll said they plan to take one or more staycations this summer, that is, once they had the term explained to them—including 24 percent who are changing their traditional summer vacations to include a staycation this year.

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August 25th, 2008

5 ways to unwire your holiday weekend

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 3:52 pm

Categories: Cubicle Culture, Wireless Workplace, Work-Life Balance

Tags: Vacation, Phone, E-mail, PDAs, Telecom & Utilities, Handhelds, Online Communications, Hardware, Deb Perelman

This doesn’t have to be your weekend.

There are people who don’t mind being lightly tethered to their work worlds while they’re on vacation, be it via email, cell phones or PDAs. They’ll tell you that they enjoy checking in and making sure there are no fires waiting for them when they get back and can even relax better knowing everything is running smoothly.

And, well, good for them.

But the vast majority of U.S. workers wonder if the notion of a disconnected vacation that is a decisive break, however brief, from their daily grinds has gone the way of the rotary phone.

It’s not always their fault. Much blame lies in the blurred line between work and downtime that comes with the proliferation of both wireless technology and perks such as flexible scheduling and working from home. Some toil in workaholic environments with coworkers and bosses who so frequently check in from the beach, they threaten to make them look bad if they do not. Others have actually been instructed to keep their Blackberrys on them, so they can keep tabs on a project or release. Yet a good lot of these employees had great intentions when they set out on vacation to do nothing but sleep, play, eat and drink for seven days but fell prey to free wireless and checking email out of a nervous habit or a blinking phone they couldn’t bring themselves to turn off.

The good news is, there’s hope for everyone. The Web is full of innumerable tips on how to avoid being chained to your laptop while you should be hiking. Here are some of the best ones:

1. Schedule your vacation at the right time: Though a well-scheduled vacation to some is to find one that spans the two most hectic workweeks of the year, an IT professional looking to increase the odds that they will not be bugged by the office will pick a period of time either before a project really ramps up, after a big release or in the brief downtime between two projects.

2. Reduce the need to be contacted: In the weeks leading up to your vacation, you should do everything in your power to make sure that your bosses, managers, coworkers and clients have no reason to need you while you’re gone. Let your coworkers know far in advance when you will be going away, so to limit the “Where’s Bob? We need him!” the first Monday you are out. Leave them with copies of important emails and phone numbers, and set an Out of the Office Auto-Reply that reminds people where to go with their concerns in your absence. Warn coworkers of anything that might come up while you are away.

Being a tad paranoid and trying to think of everything doesn’t mean you’ll never get called by a needy boss, but it certainly reduces the legitimacy of the interruption.

3. If you must call in, schedule it: For some people, checking in once, and only once, during a week’s vacation can be exactly what they need to help them relax better. If you’re one of these people, or your job requires you to call in, it’s worth it to actually put your phone call on a schedule viewable by managers and coworkers, so you can get the maximum out this sunbathing interruption.

This could be applied to email as well. John Halamka, a healthcare CIO, says that when he goes on vacation, he only checks his email before his family wakes up and after they go to sleep.

“When I return to the office, there is nothing waiting for me,” explains Halamka. “A great vacation is one that is easy to return from.”

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August 20th, 2008

Oh, really? Report says techies don't care much about salary.

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 8:04 am

Categories: Job Hunting, Recruiting, Salaries, Work-Life Balance

Tags: Job, Techie, Training, Salary, Recruitment & Selection, Workforce Management, Training And Certification, Human Resources, Deb Perelman

‘That’s nice,’ say techies, ‘but we’d rather be challenged.’

HR departments and executives throw the word “retention” around a lot, but in theory at least, it’s a good thing for everyone involved, especially you. Workplaces want to find the magic blend of perks and incentives that will keep you from hopping over to the competition; they want to keep you happy.

But mostly they want to do these thing because employee turnover is costly and, in the words of a new report on the topic, “it is generally less expensive to retain good employees than find new ones” thus slowing the pace of employee departures is the best strategy to reduce personnel costs.

And here you thought it was you they really cared about…

Unfortunately, on their road to figuring out why employees leave, organizations sometimes miss their mark. Based on a survey of 200 U.S. and Candian IT executives, a new report by Computer Electronics found that the most effective means of reducing turnover were not improving salary or bonuses. In fact, the report finds that “non-financial incentives, such as enriching education and training opportunities or introducing quality-of-life factors such as flexible scheduling, can have a greater impact on retention than raising pay scales.”

In essence, this report finds that IT workers care more about perks such as training or flexible schedules than they do about the size of their paycheck, and you’ll have to excuse this writer’s jadedness because my first reaction was, “Oh really? Money doesn’t count?”

Well, I posed this question to a bunch of techies and–fancy that!–at least according to this sample size of 12, my gut was 100 percent wrong. What was the biggest reason they said they left their jobs? Boredom, in the form of a lack of challenges and no new technologies to work on.

A software developer in San Diego says he leaves jobs because he’s bored. “Keep challenging the technical folks, so we are engaged and learning, and we’ll generally be happy,” he said, a sentiment echoed by a product manager in Israel, who said that if there was no new or interesting challenge, he’d be “out the door.”

A network administrator in San Francisco agreed as well, saying he “cant work for the same company anymore than two years, unless the equipment or topology changes all the time.”

Another techie, a web developer in Philadelphia, says that people don’t go into technology for the money. “They do it because they love what they do. They truly enjoy the challenges and achievements of working in this field,” he explained and considers his field “fortunate that we are also able to make a living at this.”

So what do you think? Do you agree with these techies that they care more about being challenged than dollar signs when choosing a job, or have I just managed to poll across a particularly earnest group of IT pros? Why did you quit your last job?

August 7th, 2008

The shine is off another apple

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 2:14 pm

Categories: Apple, Lawsuits, Work-Life Balance

Tags: job, overtime, apple inc., recruitment & selection, human resources, workforce management, deb perelman

Techies to Apple: You treat us like indentured servants.

In a lawsuit filed Monday that the plaintiff hopes to turn into class-action that could include all staff at retail stores, an Apple employee alleges that the company denied technical staffers overtime pay and other compensations required by state law. The network engineer employed by Apple from 1995 until 2007, David Walsh, says that he spent innumerable evenings and entire weekend on call without any overtime pay, fielding tech support calls that came after 11 p.m.

Furthermore, Walsh says that Apple “intentionally and deliberately created numerous job levels and a multitude of job titles to create the superficial appearance of hundreds of unique jobs, when in fact, these jobs are substantially similar and can be easily grouped together for the purpose of determining whether they are exempt from overtime wages,” reads the complaint.

Now raise your hand if you’ve ever worked in a tech support job that stiffed you on overtime or had you on call at absurd hours. Oh wait, all of you have? Then this means that it probably doesn’t surprise you that techies at Sun Microsystems, Electronic Arts, IBM and Dell have pursued similar suits with varying degrees of success.

But what stands out here–to this writer at least–is Apple’s name on it. No, this isn’t being in the RDF that precludes one from seeing or hearing any evil about shiny Mac products, but about the fact that Apple is such a coveted place to work, it is described in different accounts as “cool,” “a dream job,” “the holy grail of aesthetic accolade” as well as “a great way to meet chicks.” (And these were just the top of search results.)

It sounds instead like another case of employment realities at Workplace Wonderlands–it seems the cooler a workplace is perceived to be, the less hard it has to fight to fill openings, and fewer it has to bait them with–even the legal guarantees of overtime pay and the promise of a few hours off each week.

July 15th, 2008

What your boss hates about telecommuting

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 7:17 am

Categories: Cubicle Culture, Telecommuting, Remote Work, Work-Life Balance

Tags: Telecommuting, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Deb Perelman

Your boss probably stands between you and this.

In theory, everyone wants telecommuting to work. It is hard to argue against the goodness of companies saving on office space, managers landing happier and more productive workers who have more hours a day to work because they’re not in traffic, or drained from it; HR departments and recruiters pitching work-life balance to recruits, a priceless tactic to lure workers, young or old, who crave more flexibility than the confines of most office arrangement provide, and employees getting to spend less at the pump.

Yes, saving on gas. With the price of a gallon of gas higher than it has ever been in U.S. history, offering cash-strapped employees the option to telecommute for all or part of the workweek is the perk du jour this summer.

But in practice, remote work is struggling on its way to the workplace cure-all it was once hoped to be. It’s been associated with career stagnancy, those left in the office feeling dumped on and telecommuters getting the short end of the stick, as those out of sight are often the first ones getting pink slips during a downsizing.

Plus, odds are, your boss or manager is just not crazy about it, and not just because they might be a curmudgeon. In fact, you might even agree he or she has a few points:

1. Telecommuting is often poorly defined.

Most managers will tell you that they think there is a misunderstanding as to what working from home is and is not–working “anywhere” versus working “anytime.” When a boss or organization enables employees to work from home, it’s not so that the employee can schedule their day as they wish, running errands, watching the kids or otherwise “flexing” away from the computer for a spell–they’re simply giving you the option to not drive into the office.

“Smart employers have learned they actually do need to be flexible in working out schedules with employees that respect and embrace family obligations and extra-office activities,” explains Ken Hardin at IT Business Edge’s Bullet Point’s blog. “… But there still has to be a predictable schedule, and employees have to stick with it, predictably.”

2. Not every company, or job role or individual is cut out for remote work.

The fact is, not every corporate culture meshes well with the flexible nature of telecommuting. You may play all of your cards right, but still feel resented when you’re back in the office, and there’s little you can do to change this.

There are also positions for which remote work is all but impossible, such as many in the IT department.

“To be fair, not every position can telecommute, and upgrading systems for remote workers can be costly. Technical support can be awkward. IT has never made a house call to my house,” writes Susan Harkins at Tech Republic’s Tech of All Trades blog.

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July 3rd, 2008

Beaches and BBQs vs. Blackberrys: Holiday weekends of the IT set

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 12:48 pm

Categories: Work-Life Balance

Tags: Holiday, Consultant, Information Technology, RIM BlackBerry, Software Upgrade, Productivity, Recruitment & Selection, Handhelds, Enterprise Software, Software

For all of the talk these days about this about the pie-in-the-sky hope that all of the wage-earners in this land can achieve some semblance of work-life balance, you hear a lot less about those jobs for which the notion of guaranteed days, evenings or holiday weekends off are, quite honestly, a joke.

“Umm… weekend? What’s a weekend?” a New York IT and services consultant told me today.

He wasn’t alone in admitting that as the rest of the country are escaping their offices for a leisurely weekend, he could end up back there at the beep of a Blackberry.

“I won’t be ‘on-the-clock’ but who knows what’ll happen this weekend since I’m on call. I’ve got a history of jinxed on-call weekends, so my hopes are not high,” said a Houston-based systems analyst.

Though most IT professionals understand that it is the nature of the enterprise technology beast that they are present to toil over switchboards and software upgrades when the rest of an organization’s employees are absent, their work undisrupted, it doesn’t make them any less likely to cross their fingers and hope their number doesn’t come up in the queue.

“I myself will be on call, but I am third in the list so hopefully–knock on wood–nothing goes wrong,” a Microsoft engineer in Tampa told me.

In fact, the difference between manning the grill between rounds of Marco-Polo in the pool with the kids can come down to something as little as what system takes a nosedive.

“… Of course, if it is an Exchange problem, I get bumped right to the top of the list,” the Tampa engineer explained.

Self-employed consultants often say that there is no such thing as a day off when you’re a one man show.

“I am not only a tech, but a business owners, and in some ways this means that no, the ’shop’ per se is never actually fully closed,” said the New York IT and services consultant.

Furthermore, if managing project teams overseas where July 4th is most certainly not a holiday, it’s unlikely to be a quiet day off.

This is not to say that all holiday weekends are filled with dread if you work in IT.

“If you like computers, it doesn’t matter much if you’re stuck working on them over the weekend,” a Sacramento-based software CEO weighed in.

In fact, many even choose to work on personal or business technology projects on the weekend, in part to stay ahead of the game but also because they’re so passionate about it.

“It’s not required for my job, but I’ll be prepping over the weekend for the MCTS: SQL Server 2005 exam,” Jerry Hammond, an operations manager at a computer learning center in Las Vegas told me. “I have some time to do this during my regular work week, but this is once again quickly becoming a competitive market.”