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IT Staffing – 8 Trends Driving IT Job Growth, Salaries

June 12, 2010/0 Comments/in Information Technology, Information Technology Field, Information Technology Organizations, Information Technology Projects, IT, IT Budgets, IT Candidates, IT Consulting, IT Hiring, IT Industry, IT Job Growth, IT Job News, IT Jobs, IT Professionals, IT Projects, IT Spending, IT Staff, IT Staffing, IT talent, IT Workers/by admin

Will job prospects for U.S. IT professionals fare better or worse for the rest of 2010? It’s hard to tell from the latest economic and employment data being released by IT career experts.

Network World — Will job prospects for U.S. IT professionals fare better or worse for the rest of 2010? It’s hard to tell from the latest economic and employment data being released by IT career experts.

Reports issued in the first week of June provide conflicting information about IT hiring, compensation and outsourcing trends. On the plus side, these reports say IT hiring will increase during the second half of 2010, and CIOs are more optimistic about their budgets and staffing levels than they were a year ago. However, IT salaries and benefits are still being squeezed from all sides, and it’s difficult to tell which IT skills are most in demand on a month-to-month basis.

“There’s more volatility in the market than at any point in time since we started tracking IT pay data in 1999,” says David Foote, CEO of Foote Partners, a consulting firm.

As evidence of the volatility, Foote points to the May 2010 U.S. Department of Labor National Employment Report, which showed a net loss of 100 IT-related jobs in May, following a gain of 8,800 jobs in April. Foote has been tracking ups and downs in employment in five key job categories – IT services, computer systems design, data processing, computer/peripheral equipment, and communications equipment – for the past six months.

Get your free report, “5 things you need to know before hiring a Dallas IT Consulting or Dallas IT Staffing company

June 12, 2010/in Dallas IT Consulting, Dallas IT Recruiting, Dallas IT Staffing, Information Technology, IT, Technology, Uncategorized/by admin

Mike Hanes of ProVisionTech reveals practices of local Dallas IT Consulting and Dallas IT Recruiting firms that could be wasting your time and costing you money as a Dallas IT Manager or Dallas IT Director.

Information Technology – 10 Myths about Data Warehousing

June 11, 2010/0 Comments/in Information Technology/by admin

Debunking some common myths about data warehousing to bring the focus back to business

There are several reasons why data warehousing projects are expensive and fail to produce sufficient value for the business. I consider following 10 myths to be the main cause of the problem:

Myth #1 – A data Warehouse can create competitive advantage

Myth #2 – A data Warehouse is required for business intelligence

Myth #3 – Data Warehousing starting point is an enterprise data model

Myth #4 – You need both an Operational Data Store and a Data Warehouse to cover the entire spectrum of business reporting

Myth #5 – Data Warehousing requires an engineering approach

Myth #6 – Data Warehousing fails due to problems with transaction-processing systems

Myth #7 – We can’t predict what questions will be asked from a data warehouse

Myth #8 – Data Warehousing improves decision-making

Myth #9 – Data Warehousing empowers front-line and business staff to do their own analysis

Myth #10 – Data Warehousing reduces overall cost of reporting on business performance and opportunities

I’m sure that this will come as a sacrilege to those who have spent a career building their knowledge and practice of data warehousing. I’ve examined this topic in a lot more detail at A Myth Buster Anthology of Data Warehousing.

Job Tips and Job News – Resumes – Content That Grabs Attention and Builds Interest

June 11, 2010/0 Comments/in job search, Job Seekers, Job Tips, Resume Tips/by admin

Your resume has two main purposes:

1. To represent you and your career in a way that keeps you in the running for a job opportunity when you aren’t there in person. Therefore, it’s important that it gets enough attention that it actually gets read.

2. To build enough interest in the mind of the Hiring Manager that he or she invites you for a job interview. Your resume needs to position you as the uniquely qualified job candidate that can be a hero in their job.

Here’s how you grab attention with a first-rate Career Story. Tell a brief, interesting story that links you directly to the Hiring Manager’s needs.

Use descriptive words that show energy, action, and tell a winning story of a successful person. (Describe yourself as the hero!)

Include skills and experiences that match what the job requirements and qualifications.

In other words, present your career in a way that grabs the Hiring Manager’s attention. If you don’t, you’ve lost them for good.

For example, turn this Career Summary…

IT Staffing – CIOs Finally Ready to Start Hiring Again

June 11, 2010/0 Comments/in IT Consultant, IT Consulting, IT Department, IT Field, IT Hiring, IT Industry, IT Job Growth, IT Job News, IT Jobs, IT project manager, IT Projects, IT Staffing, IT talent, IT Workers/by admin

After years of penny pinching and putting off key software and hardware implementations, IT executives now say they’re ready to start hiring again.

It was the worst of times these past three, four years and IT workers suffered as much as more as most. While companies across all industries were busy pink-slipping millions of workers, shuttering facilities and abandoning all non-essentially IT projects, it was the networking, software and security specialists who were out of work and largely out of luck.

But as CIO Update found, those days appear to be over as the vast majority of some 1,400 CIOs surveyed say they’re adding headcount and are feeling far more optimistic about their company’s future than they have in years.

According to survey by headhunter Robert Half International, 64 percent of CIOs blamed understaffing in their company’s IT department for impairing their ability to implement innovative or emerging technologies.

To turn things around and build out computing environments in the cloud or to update ancient installed hardware and software platforms, CIOs will have to not only begin hiring more networking and cloud-computing specialists, but pay them handsomely to keep competitors from luring them away.

It’s not the exactly 1999 again, but CIOs are starting to see some blue sky on the horizon and that means good things for IT workers across the board.

IT Security – Gartner: IT security spending to remain steady, but not a top CIO priority

June 10, 2010/0 Comments/in Information Security, Information Technology, Information Technology Field, IT, IT Budgets, IT Spending, Uncategorized/by admin

A top research firm predicts that IT security spending will remain steady through 2011 with identity management as the top focus, but also suggests that CIOs still don’t rank security projects among their high-priority initiatives.

Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. will announce Thursday that during the next 12 months, it expects that enterprises will spend approximately 5% of their total IT budgets on information security technology. While that percentage is down slightly from 6% last year, Gartner forecasts that overall IT budgets will increase by nearly 2%, meaning security spending will largely hold its ground.

My concern is this treading water… spending the same amount as last year, and hoping they attack someone else.
Mark Kadrich
President and CEO, The Security Consortium

Gartner this week is previewing its latest security spending data — compiled via a host of recent research efforts — in advance of its Security and Risk Management Summit, which takes place near Washington D.C. June 21-23.