IT Job News – No. 1 Place to Work in IT: USAA

In February, Michael Lonigro, an IT technical manager at USAA, received a record-breaking performance bonus equal to 18.8% of his annual salary. So did every other USAA employee, thanks to the San Antonio-based financial services company’s stellar 2009 performance. The big payout came less than 90 days after USAA staffers received their regular holiday bonuses, which have been awarded to every worker every year since 1930 and equalled two weeks’ base pay.

All 2,087 IT workers — and every other full-time employee — also receive a generous benefits package that includes health insurance subsidized at the rate of 87.5% and an additional $3,000 per year for out-of-pocket medical expenses. On top of that, USAA offers a variety of free health screenings, free access to three on-campus gyms, 24 days of vacation after a year on the job, and a tuition reimbursement benefit of $10,000 annually. Yes, that’s $10,000 with a ten and three zeroes. Little wonder USAA hit the No. 1 spot on Computerworld’s Best Places to Work in IT list, after making the list for 11 consecutive years.

"The benefits are just wonderful. The health care plan is outstanding. We are very, very well taken care of," says Lonigro.

All told, USAA spends more than $400 million annually on employee benefits programs. Other perks include subsidized child care, a $5-an-hour errand service, and dollar-for-dollar matches of employees’ 401(k) contributions up to 8%, plus an additional retirement contribution of up to 9% of an employee’s pay.

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Tags: IT Jobs, IT Technical Manager, IT Workers

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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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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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IT Staffing – CIOs Finally Ready to Start Hiring Again

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.

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Tags: IT Jobs, IT Hiring, IT departments, IT Budgets, IT Workers, IT Talent, IT departments, CIO, IT leaders

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IT News – How to Build IT-Business Alignment

The first practical guide to building IT-business alignment.

Year after year, IT survey results inevitably state that one of the top priorities for the coming year will be to align IT with the business. It is as if alignment is some unattainable and mysterious process and IT leaders prefer to avoid it in fear of failure – or perhaps in fear of receiving more work as a result. The topic certainly gets a lot of attention and is often the source of many articles – such as this one, as well as presentations at IT conferences. After requisite googling task, I found 3,300,000 results on the topic!

To make this article standout and ascend above the rest of the chatter, I will describe what alignment is and precisely how to build it for your organization. That’s right, the first practical guide to achieving in your business!

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Job Tips and Job News – Does working in IT bring its own extra stress factor?

Due to organisational position of the IT department, some IT staff can experience higher stress levels

Recently I watched a TV show “Stress – Portrait of a killer” on Australia’s ABC. It explained, based upon research by Robert Sapolsky and others, that people lower in the corporate hierarchy, in general, have a higher level of stress.

Bashir Mamdani reports in “The social hierarchy of health”

Two different models have replaced the old idea that managers at the top of the hierarchy are under more stress than people below them. The demand control model posits that stress at work is not caused by how much demand there is, but how much control there is in relation to demand. The second model suggests that imbalance between efforts and rewards are the determinant of chronic stress.

This made me think. Since IT in most organizations is a service department and does not have a purpose by itself, would that make IT staff feel to be lower in the ‘hierarchy’. And if so, would that induce more stress with IT staff?

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IT Staffing – Increased IT Hiring on Horizon, Survey Suggests

Although companies such as HP may be slashing their workforce, a survey finds the majority of HR heads are planning on making IT hires in the next six months.

Although companies such as HP may be slashing their workforce, a survey finds the majority of HR heads are planning on making IT hires in the next six months.

More than three-quarters (78 percent) of human resources managers or recruiters who have responsibility in recruiting technology positions are looking to hire IT workers in the next six months, according to the 2010 IT Hire Intelligence Survey conducted by Monster.com, an online career and recruitment resource on behalf of technology services provider Technisource. In addition, the majority of survey respondents said they are confident that their company’s performance will improve across the same time period.

Among the key findings, 76 percent of respondents have confidence that their company’s performance will improve in the next six months, while 78 percent of respondents plan to hire IT staff in the next six months. When asked what technology-oriented positions IT hiring managers were looking to fill, applications and infrastructure positions took the lead.  

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Job Tips and Job News – Forrester’s IT Forum: Business Technology (BT) Will Be Driven By CEO-CIO Partnership

Many future chief executive officers (CEOs) will come from the ranks of 21st century business-minded chief information officers, Xerox Chairman and CEO Ursula Burns told more than 1,100 attendees at Forrester’s IT Forum, Forrester’s flagship IT event spanning 12 roles across IT and technology marketing professionals.

Burns was among the senior business leaders — including CIOs from JetBlue, Nike, Sony, and Starbucks — that demonstrated how technology can transform the business.

“For too long, the emphasis in information technology has been on the technology — the latest and the greatest — with all too little attention on the information our businesses need to run more efficiently and effectively,” Burns said. “Forrester has taken the notion one huge step forward — putting the emphasis not on information but on business.”

George F. Colony, Forrester’s chairman and CEO, told the audience that the CEO is essential to the success of business technology (BT). For BT to succeed, according to Colony, the CEO must provide a clear high-level direction for the company, be a catalyst for bringing the business and technology together, and keep business and technology focused on strategic initiatives that drive the business forward. For their part, it is essential that CIOs be proactive, bring best practices and develop a point of view on priorities.

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