After Pay Cuts, IT Workers May Seek Payback in New Job

A Harris Interactive survey found that IT workers see an improving economy — and an opportunity to start looking for a better job.

Cross posted from Computerworld

Computerworld — It may be matter of debate whether the IT job market is improving.

Certainly, for Eli Lilly and Co.’s (LLY) IT workers who are facing a layoff, the state of the job market is clear. The pharmaceutical company last week said it plans to cut 340 IT jobs on top of 140 positions cut earlier this year.

Eli Lilly employs some 1,250 IT workers in the U.S. and said the IT cuts are part of an overall restructuring of more than 5,000 workers nationwide, a company spokesman said, confirming a report in the Indianapolis Star , hometown newspaper in the city where Eli Lilly is based.

Despite the woes in the Eli Lilly IT operation, national IT hiring indexes have been showing fluttering month-to-month increases , and a new survey conducted by Harris (HRS) Interactive found that confidence among tech workers in the economy is on the rise.

Harris surveyed 4,367 employed tech workers, including 241 in IT operations, in the second quarter of 2010 and found that 38% of the IT workers believe the economy is getting stronger, compared to 32% in the first quarter.

The survey, dubbed the IT Employee Confidence Index, was conducted by Harris on behalf of Technisource Inc., a national staffing and recruiting firm.

The breakout data from the survey could portent trouble for IT managers and companies now relying on fewer IT employees.

For example, the survey results provides evidence that many IT workers may already be preparing to look for new jobs over the next year.

Harris said that 61% of IT workers earning between $35,000 and $50,000 a year are "likely" to start looking for a new job over the next 12 months. Meanwhile, 27% of IT workers now making between $50,000 and $75,000 annually and 36% of those whose salaries exceed $75,000 are "likely" to begin a job search.

"In some areas, salaries were cut or certainly salary increases were suspended," said Sean Ebner, a regional vice president at Technisource. And, he added, "as cuts were made in IT, the remaining staff was asked to do significantly more without additional compensation. It really did create some pent-up animosity."

Ebner said the survey found more interest in seeking new jobs than ever before.

The willingness to look for new jobs doesn’t yet mean the job will be there. For instance, only 27% of IT workers earning between $35,000 and $50,000 indicated that they expect more jobs will be available to them.

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How to Thrive in Today’s Job Market: Five Tips for IT Professionals

The days of the IT department existing in the back office and not communicating with the front of the business are gone. IT professionals need to take a leadership role, take initiative when making decisions and understand the business. Here, Knowledge Center contributor Rich Milgram outlines the skill sets IT professionals need in order to improve their career and thrive in today’s job market.

You’re an IT professional. So it’s time to become aware of the changes happening in your industry and understand how they could affect your job and your company. You’ve had it pretty good over the years, but it’s no longer enough to simply be a “ticket taker” for your next project, leaving the strategy and big picture company goals to management.

To succeed in your career, it is important to demonstrate consistent value to your employer and take initiative when making decisions for the best interest of the company. Employers are more likely to hire and retain workers who carry out multiple technical functions in the business. They value those who understand how to leverage their knowledge to deliver the right technology to achieve company goals.

While there may not be a universal skill or attribute that can guarantee job security, here are five tips on how to position yourself as the indispensible go-to IT professional in your company.

Tip No. 1: Understand and apply project management and people management skills to your job

One of the most powerful ways to increase your job security is to understand the strategic direction of your company and how it relates to your position so you can make the most impact on the bottom line. As an IT professional, you are much more desirable if you understand project management, business process reengineering, and can effectively work and communicate with the management team.

These skills allow you to be more self-directed and not only do your job, but make wise decisions on how to tailor your work efforts to directly affect the profitability and success of the company.

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IT Job Tips – Your Success as a IT Project Manager Lies in your Willingness to Make Decisions

Having the guts to go out and make decisions will enhance your career.

Back in December of last year I wrote how “Decision Making is Essential to Good Project Management.” I found that there are many articles already written on how to go about making decisions. One of the best of have read was pointed out in Preetham Nadig’s response to my blog last December. You can read that article, “The case for behavioral strategy” on the McKenzie Quarterly web site. Throughout my career I have been frustrated by slow decision making on my projects. Today I would like to elaborate more on the authority of project managers to make decisions.

Many experts on leadership point out that the worst decision is the decision not to make a decision. You can find this phrased in many different ways but the meaning is the same. What many people don’t realize is that avoiding a decision is a decision in itself. The ramifications of avoiding or delaying a decision must be analyzed against actually making a decision. In my previous blog I emphasized some of the problems that can occur if decisions are not made in a timely manner.

The lack of a decision can be quite detrimental to any project. To be successful, projects must continuously make forward progress. Since the project manager’s performance is measured by the success of their project(s) it is of utmost importance that project managers ensure that decisions are made effectively.

There are two categories of decisions that I will define here. The first is a decision that is out of the project manager’s control and the second is a decision that is within the project manager’s control. Yes, there is a lot of gray area in between and being able to decipher who has the authority to make decisions is not easy.

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IT Resumes: Think Twice About the Advice You’ve Been Given

A recruiting manager with an IT staffing firm warns IT professionals to use the resume advice they get from the local employment office, outplacement firms and professional resume writers at their own risk.

CIO — Recruiters, professional resume writers and other career experts give out tons of advice on how best to write a resume that will stand out from the competition. Their intentions are noble—they want to help people land jobs—but the problem with their advice is that it doesn’t always apply to IT professionals and the nature of the work they do, says Shana Westerman, a recruiting manager with IT staffing firm Sapphire Technologies.

“People go to the unemployment office or they go to outplacement resume writers who don’t give advice that is applicable to the IT field,” she says.

Westerman notes that IT resumes are different from resumes for professionals in other fields because IT workers have to capture a range of skills—both technical and functional—on their resumes. Because technology changes so rapidly and because so much IT work is project-based and involves “so many moving parts,” generic resume writing advice can do a great disservice to IT professionals, says Westerman.

Westerman sees first-hand how generic resume writing tips play out on IT professionals’ resumes. She screens, on average, 300 resumes per day searching for IT workers to place with her clients, who are IT line managers and executives at large and midsize companies looking for contract and permanent employees. Westerman says many of the IT resumes she gets from job seekers are too short on specifics for her and her clients’ needs. When she finds a candidate whom she thinks would be a good match for a client, she says she often has to ask the candidate to beef up his resume with more information about his skills and experience.

“You’re not going to meet with a [hiring] manager if your resume doesn’t get you the meeting. Your resume is the one and only tool that gets you an interview,” says Westerman.

She adds that even when she advocates for a particular candidate, the client still wants to see on the candidate’s resume all of the capabilities she’s mentioned. “If they don’t see what I say on the candidate’s resume, their interest will wane,” Westerman notes.

Here, she shares the generic resume advice IT professionals should run from.

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IT Job News – Slow Growth For IT Salaries

As the recovery struggles to take wing, IT salaries in 2010 are rising just slightly over last year’s. At the same time, a number of benefits are on the decline. Some benefits, though, such as flex-work schedules, are increasing in popularity as employers attempt to keep valuable IT staffers, according to a new survey from Janco.

Go here to see the slideshow at Baseline

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IT News – HP says IT pros need own social network

HP’s near-beta social network, dubbed 48Upper, is about solving tech issues, not dating

Computerworld – WASHINGTON — Despite the flood of existing social networking tools, Hewlett-Packard Co. will soon introduce its own social network, albeit specifically aimed at IT professionals.

It’s called 48Upper and it comes with its own "manifesto," which says this about IT pros: "We have lived with the stereotype of being introverted, pessimistic loners for too long."

There’s also video that shows IT workers laughing, smiling and working in cubicles with stuffed animals.

This anti-Dilbert version of IT aside, 48Upper (which gets its name from an HP building in Cupertino, Calif.), incorporates familiar social networking tools, collaborative, friend-based, knowledge sharing, but is clearly aimed at users of HP system management tools.

The product is being readied for beta testing, and HP officials discussed some aspects of it at its software conference here.

There are a number of elements that make 48Upper different from the mainstream social networks.

Ever since e-mail, IT pros have networked with people outside their companies and institutions for help. The designers of 48Upper still expect users to seek out help from external IT folk, but this tool will have a few steps to help them filter out information that might reveal what a company might otherwise want to keep quiet.

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IT Recruiting – The Changing Role of the IT Hero

Every IT organization relies on a handful of seriously talented technical artisans to take on the trickiest tasks in the data center. These folks are the script wranglers, the IT cowboys (and girls) who—through a brilliant infusion of intellect, competitive spirit and occasional subversion—make the data center work. They’re the heroes who make disproportionate contributions to the trade and we love them for it.

But times are changing and the role of the IT Hero is being reconsidered.

That is not to say that the IT Hero is any less loved or valued; in fact, the need for the IT Hero will persist ad infinitum. It’s just that circumstances are forcing IT leadership to look beyond the preternaturally gifted few to run the data center. As system scale and complexity compounds, change accelerates, and business lines demand more—faster—IT needs to clear this bottleneck.

Traditionally, the IT Hero wrote the scripts that made IT processes scale. But as software and deployment environments become ever more diverse and dynamic, these scripts grow like kudzu. What began as a way to economize IT has become a large cost center in its own right: Today, maintaining scripts is often as costly as maintaining IT systems themselves.

And guess who manages these scripts?

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Job Tips and Job News – HP says IT pros need own social network

HP’s near-beta social network, dubbed 48Upper, is about solving tech issues, not dating

Computerworld – WASHINGTON — Despite the flood of existing social networking tools, Hewlett-Packard Co. will soon introduce its own social network, albeit specifically aimed at IT professionals.

It’s called 48Upper and it comes with its own "manifesto," which says this about IT pros: "We have lived with the stereotype of being introverted, pessimistic loners for too long."

There’s also video that shows IT workers laughing, smiling and working in cubicles with stuffed animals.

This anti-Dilbert version of IT aside, 48Upper (which gets its name from an HP building in Cupertino, Calif.), incorporates familiar social networking tools, collaborative, friend-based, knowledge sharing, but is clearly aimed at users of HP system management tools.

The product is being readied for beta testing, and HP officials discussed some aspects of it at its software conference here.

There are a number of elements that make 48Upper different from the mainstream social networks.

Ever since e-mail, IT pros have networked with people outside their companies and institutions for help. The designers of 48Upper still expect users to seek out help from external IT folk, but this tool will have a few steps to help them filter out information that might reveal what a company might otherwise want to keep quiet.

Read more here

Mike Hanes
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IT Staffing – Permanent IT Jobs ‘Returning to Growth’

The IT jobs market is showing signs of recovery, particularly on the permanent side, according to Reed Specialist Recruitment.

Computerworld UK — The IT jobs market is showing signs of recovery, particularly on the permanent side, according to Reed Specialist Recruitment.

Andrew Gardner, senior divisional director of the technology division of Reed Specialist Recruitment, said that the number of available permanent jobs was picking up again particularly in SMEs, as well as in the financial services sector and in software houses.

“As part of the downturn, our permanent team took a mauling, but over the last five or six months, it has started to pick up again.

“We are now looking to build our permanent teams back up to meet the demand,” said Gardner.

Reed currently has a team of 25 in the permanent jobs division, and Gardner aims to recruit a further 20 in the next few months, which takes the total “slightly higher than we had before”.

Furthermore, Reed said its lead time between interviews and job offers has shortened to that of before the recession.

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IT Staffing – 8 Trends Driving IT Job Growth, Salaries

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.

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Tags: IT professionals, IT career, IT hiring, CIOs, IT salaries, IT skills, IT pay, IT services

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