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How to Save U.S. IT Jobs

September 1, 2010/0 Comments/in Information Technology, Information technology jobs, Information Technology Staffing, IT Jobs/by admin

Most of the government activity related to creating or securing U.S. IT jobs, curbing offshore outsourcing, restoring America’s IT competitiveness, and limiting temporary visas for foreign tech workers has been more grandstanding than grand plans. Here, 10 outsourcing experts offer their proposals for restoring America’s IT labor force. CIO — While popular in the halls […]

7 Skills Every IT Manager Needs to Survive the 2010s

August 30, 2010/0 Comments/in IT Management, IT Managers, IT Skills/by admin

InfoWorld — As companies emerge from the recession, IT managers need to rethink their careers, especially as businesses recast IT’s role more as growing the business than running the operations. The old approaches to career growth won’t work. Instead, IT managers — and those who aspire to be managers — should focus on seven key […]

How to Save U.S. IT Jobs

September 1, 2010/0 Comments/in Information Technology, Information technology jobs, Information Technology Staffing, IT Jobs/by admin

7 Skills Every IT Manager Needs to Survive the 2010s

August 30, 2010/0 Comments/in IT Management, IT Managers, IT Skills/by admin

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How to Save U.S. IT Jobs

September 1, 2010/0 Comments/in Information Technology, Information technology jobs, Information Technology Staffing, IT Jobs/by admin

CIO — While popular in the halls of Congress, the additional H-1 B visa fees tacked on to the most recent immigration appropriations bill drew mostly criticism outside of Washington. Some critics say it went too far; others say it didn’t go far enough. Most agreed that the move would do little to protect or create U.S. IT jobs.

Meanwhile, the more substantial H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act of 2009, introduced by Senators Richard Durbin and Chuck Grassley, has been in committee since April 2009and is expected to stay put through the remainder of the year.

Phil Fersht, founder of outsourcing analyst firm Horses for Sources, views Congress’s recent efforts to curb offshore outsourcing as “merely political grandstanding from the protectionist lobby that will only encourage further offshoring.”

As Americans prepare to celebrate Labor Day, CIO.com asked some leading minds—academics and analysts, outsourcing consultants and IT services executives—what the federal government ought to do to help create IT jobs and maintain U.S. competitiveness in the global technology market. Here are their proposals.

Make the Domestic Workforce Priority One

7 Skills Every IT Manager Needs to Survive the 2010s

August 30, 2010/0 Comments/in IT Management, IT Managers, IT Skills/by admin

Although no single set of skills can bulletproof your career in this decade and beyond, the foremost of these seven is the ability to continuously learn and possess a broad range of valuable tech and leadership capabilities, according to IT experts interviewed by InfoWorld.com.

[ Keep your IT and business skills sharp: Read Bob Lewis’ IT management advice in InfoWorld’s Advice Line newsletter. | Discover the 30 skills every IT person should have and which tech jobs are recession-proof. ]

“The survival skill for an IT manager is the ability to think about where you develop your career,” contends Kathryn Ullrich, an executive IT recruiter and author of “Getting to the Top” (Silicon Valley Press, 2010). “How do you stay on the cutting edge of tech so you’re continuing to develop your skill set? And career resilience? If you’re developing into a manager, director, or VP, it is about adding leadership skills.”

Although IT managers can’t be proficient in everything, they are expected to have fluency in major business and technology issues. “Unless they want to be order-takers, [IT managers] should have a point of view on the business — its strategy, its operations, and how it can be improved,” says Hank Leingang, an IT strategy consultant and former CIO at Bechtel and Viacom.

Many IT managers focus solely on mastering new tech skills to increase their value to their employers — a strategy that makes perfect sense, but only up to a point. Once you reach that point, you can damage your career by becoming viewed as only technically proficient and being perceived as unskilled in business planning and learning how to communicate and collaborate well with customers, coworkers, and service providers. But if you have a balance of these “hard” technology skills and “soft” business and people skills, you can go a long way toward insulating your career from recessionary woes.