Archive for February, 2010

IT Leaders Need To Know What Their Company’s Goals Are

Thursday, February 25th, 2010
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You Can’t Score If You Don’t Know What The Goals Are

You Can’t Score If You Don’t Know What The Goals Are

As an IT leader you’ve got a lot to do. As though it wasn’t enough to stay on top of your staff keeping them happy, engaged, and productive, you are also constantly working to stay on top of all of that changing technology (can anyone say “new release”?) It turns out that you have an additional task that you might not be taking the time to do: figuring out where your company is trying to get to.

Why Knowing The Goals Is Important

How many of those “corporate” emails have arrived in your inbox this week so far? You know the ones that I’m talking about: they talk about the quarterly profits, some clever words that your CEO / COO / CFO / CIO said that got quoted in some trade journal, etc. Did you take the time to read it? Probably not – your too busy doing real IT work.

It turns out that you should take the time to read these emails. The reason is because this is how the company is telling you where they are trying to go as a company. Sure you might be working shoveling coal down in the IT boiler room of the company, but you have a vested interest in where the ship is sailing to because at the very least if it hits a rock, you’ll be affected too.

The leaders of your company work for the people who own the company. This means that the company has to make money or else the leaders will be replaced. How they plan on going about making that money is what you really care about. In order to hold on to their jobs, your management needs to be successful at almost any cost. This means that their goals need to be your goals.

How To Find Out What Your Company’s Goals Are

If we can all agree that knowing what your company is trying to do is important, then we can move on to trying to answer the really big question: just how can an IT Leader go about getting your hands on this type of information? It turns out that it is both easy and hard to do.

The easy part of this is to do some reading. Depending on whether your company is a public company or is privately held, there will be either more or less written information available to you. Things like quarterly reports and annual reports, although dry at times, do make for great reading if you are an IT Leader who wants to know where your company is headed.

Now about those emails that you’ve been getting. Sure, any one of the corporate emails that we all get probably isn’t all that important by itself. However, when you take them all together they can tell you a very interesting story.

Your senior management can’t actually accomplish any of the goals that they set for the company by themselves. They need your help. I tend to look upon those corporate emails as a desperate plea for assistance by management. The tricky part is that they generally can’t come out and say that their jobs depend on you helping them accomplish the company’s goals, instead they have to use clever wording that hides their pleas.

What To Do With This Knowledge

Once you’ve done your reading, listened to any speeches that your senior management has given, and generally come to an understanding of just what the company is trying to accomplish and where they are trying to get to, the big question is what now?

In order to move your career forward, you need to actually use the information that you’ve uncovered. The trick here is that you need to use it in a visible way. As you work on IT projects and participate in IT meetings, you’d like to become known as the person who is always asking the question “how does this help us to reach our company goals?” Sure, it might get to be a bit redundant over time, but the word will get out that you actually know what the company is trying to do and this can be a great career booster.

Just keeping everyone else on track is not enough, you’ve got to do more. Specifically those high-level company goals won’t exactly translate into specific IT project actions. This means that you need to step up and help to interpret the goals into specific IT actions that people on your team need to take. Depending on the goal, the actions may relate to reducing or avoiding costs, improving efficiency, etc.

What All Of This Means For You

We all feel that we are drowning in too much information already; however, it turns out that we still have one additional job that we need to be doing. The company that we work for has goals and it turns out that IT Leaders can play a big role in seeing that these goals happen.

In order to help the company, IT Leaders need to first make sure that they understand just exactly what the company’s goals are. Next they need to make sure that they let everyone else know that the goals are important. Finally, within an IT Leader’s team, real actions need to be taken in order to translate high-level company goals into specific IT tasks.

If we can view company goals as not being a bothersome distraction, and instead start to view them as a request for assistance that only we can provide, then change can happen. Your career is tied to how successful your company is and helping the company to achieve its goals is one way to be successful.

Question for you: where would you go to learn what your company’s real goals for this year are?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

What do you think the mood of your IT team is right now? Poor? Downright bad? If your workplace is like most businesses out there right now, your team is still reeling from all of the layoffs, hiring freezes, pay cuts, etc. If nothing else, there has been a lingering sense of dread that has been in the air for the better part of two years. What do you need to be doing?

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Posted in goals | 2 Comments »

Oh, Oh – What To Do When You Don’t Get That Promotion

Thursday, February 18th, 2010
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What Should You Do If You Fall Off The Career Ladder?

What Should You Do If You Fall Off The Career Ladder?

Things are tough all over. If you were counting on getting a promotion this year, you might want to scale your hopes back just a bit. A lot of IT Leaders are discovering that their career plans are having to be put on hold. Maybe we should spend some time talking about what you should do now…

The Root Of The Problem

Have you noticed just how far down the U.S. stock market has dropped over the last couple of years? Since most of the baby boomer generation that is currently working in IT has their retirement funds tied up in stocks, they’ve seen their dreams of a well funded retirement take a hit. What this means is that they won’t be retiring any time soon.

What this means for all other IT Leaders is that the normal process of IT staff retiring each year and opening up senior management positions that are then filled by junior IT staff won’t be happening this year. Dang!

The folks over at Watson Wyatt Worldwide Inc. have done a survey of more than 2,200 U.S. employees and they’ve found that 44% of workers who are over 50 plan on postponing their retirement. Just to make things even worse, about half of these folks are now planning on working at least three years longer than they had originally planned on.

The Promotion Problem

So let’s talk frankly here: no matter what level your IT career is currently at, you are going to be blocked. Just to make things even worse, the experts are telling us that we shouldn’t expect promotions to come back any time soon.

So what should you do? Quit? In this economy? I don’t think so. Instead we should take a look and see if we can come up with a different solution.

As always, if you are expecting a promotion and you don’t get it, you need to take a look at the underlying reasons for you not getting the promotion. If you determine that your promotion was postponed because of either the company’s economic situation is poor or because there is a human logjam before you, then you still have hope.

Now you’ve got to plot your next step.

Solutions

The easiest way to solve this problem is if you are willing to accept an alternative to a promotion – like money. This is sometimes called a “retention reward” and it’s a bonus that is paid to employees when they deserve a promotion but one is not currently possible.

Once you realize that your deserved promotion may be delayed, you need to start to take steps to boost your value to the company. What you really want to do is to make it very easy for the company to slide you into the promotion once it becomes available. This means having a talk with your boss in order to find out if there are ways to get some of the experience that goes along with the promotion position even if you can’t get the title right now.

As with all requests like this, you do need to be careful. You don’t want the company to get too comfortable with you doing the work of the higher level position while being paid at your current lower rate.

What All Of This Means For You

The world is working against you – just when you are expecting a promotion, everything gets flipped upside down and you find your way up the career ladder blocked. These things happen and you need to find ways to deal with it.

Quitting is always an option; however, unless you have another job already lined up it’s probably not the way to go right now. Instead, ask if you can get a bonus to replace the promotion that you won’t be getting right now. At the same time see if there is any way that you can gain more experience doing the type of work that you will be doing when the promotions free up once again.

Promotions will eventually return. As a top-notch IT Leader you need to use this delay to build the skills that will ensure that you will be one of the first to get promoted once things start moving again. Take these actions now and you’ll be ready for the big day whenever it finally comes…

If your next promotion gets delayed, what steps would you take?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As an IT leader you’ve got a lot to do. As though it wasn’t enough to stay on top of your staff keeping them happy, engaged, and productive, you are also constantly working to stay on top of all of that changing technology. It turns out that you have an additional task that you might not be taking the time to do: figuring out where your company is trying to get to.

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Posted in promotion | 6 Comments »

What An IT Leader Needs To Have On Their Resume

Thursday, February 11th, 2010
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What You Put In Your Resume Just May Get You Your Next Job

What You Put In Your Resume Just May Get You Your Next Job

As the global recession starts to fade away, IT Leaders who are searching for a new job are starting to feel some new hope and IT Leaders who still have jobs are starting to get the itch to take a look around at what other opportunities there might be out there. Sounds like it’s time to get some resumes in order…

Overall Format

A quick search of the Internet will reveal suggestions for a large number of different formats for resumes: classic, modern, etc. What is the right format for you? Sure, if you are applying to a progressive firm, a novel formatted resume might be eye catching, but since you can never tell what they are really looking for I’m going to suggest that you stick with the classic format.

This means that you should start out with your contact information and follow it up with a summary statement. After this you should list out your career in reverse chronological order (what you’ve done most recently is always the most interesting). Each job needs to be described by a list of bullet points. Wrap things up by listing your educational accomplishments.

Things That Need To Be In Your Resume

Ok, so clearly your resume needs to be both well-organized and easy to read. The person who will be reading it will probably be moving quickly and if your resume is hard to read, they won’t read it. Depending on how long you’ve been working, a three page resume is just fine – you’ve probably done a lot and so there’s a lot for you to document.

We live in a world where more often than not resumes now get scanned by computers before a human ever lays eyes on them. What this means is you’ve got to write your resume in such a way that a computer can process it correctly. This means that you’ve got to load it with keywords that recruiters would be using when searching for candidates. You can figure out what these keywords are by taking a look at job descriptions for the types of jobs that you are looking for – work the words used to describe the job into your resume.

In the world of IT we use a lot of acronyms to describe technologies and certifications. Feel free to include the acronyms in your resume, but make sure that you also spell them out at least once.

Three Things To Avoid

It’s all too easy to get caught up in worrying about what font to use and how to cram everything that you’ve done into as small of a space as possible. However, spending too much time on things that don’t matter can easily let an IT Leader skip over three things that are important. Here they are:

  • Include Enough Detail: As we cut and trim the descriptions of what we’ve done in the past, we can accidently cut out too much information. You should view your resume as telling a story about how you’ve advanced in your career. The goal is to show a prospective employer that you have the ability to grow in any role. Make sure that your resume has enough details about what you’ve done in each position.
  • Don’t Be Ambiguous: The older an IT Leader gets, the more likely it is that we’ll start to fudge some of the information contained in our resume. Leaving off dates such as when we graduated from college is a common technique in order to obscure our age. Don’t do it, if the company decided to hire you they’ll verify your degree(s) and so you should include graduation dates to begin with.
  • Grammar Counts: Those squiggly red lines and green lines that show up as you are typing up your resume in Microsoft Word really do mean something. No matter how impressive your past accomplishments are, if your resume is littered with misspelled words or poorly constructed sentences then that will take away from how you are perceived.

What All Of This Means For You

In this age of Internet everything, IT Leaders might think that all that it will take to get their next job is to have an account on every social networking site out there. It turns out that the old standby, your resume, is still an important communication tool.

Not only does it matter what work experiences you’ve had, but how you structure your resume and what information you put in it are what will make it work for you. Make sure that you include the essential details about your past jobs, eliminate any ambiguous information, and make sure that there are no spelling or grammatical errors.

Every job that you apply for ends up being a competition between you and other candidates. In order to give yourself the best possible advantage, you need to make sure that your resume does a good job of clearly telling your story. Follow these suggestions and you’ll be well on your way…

Do you think that it is worth while including old languages and skills on your resume (COBOL, Fortran, etc.)?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Things are tough all over. If you were counting on getting a promotion this year, you might want to scale your hopes back just a bit. A lot of IT Leaders are discovering that their career plans are having to be put on hold. Maybe we should spend some time talking about what you should do now…

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Posted in jobs | 1 Comment »

New Job, Same Company: What’s An IT Leader To Do?

Thursday, February 4th, 2010
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Moving From One Job To Another Can Be A Big Hassle

Moving From One Job To Another Can Be A Big Hassle

Changing To A New Job In The Same Company Can Be Difficult

Times of change can be difficult for everyone, including IT Leaders. We all know how hard it can be to lose your job – in fact I think that we’ve probably either experienced it or have friends who have gone through it. What this means is that we all have a basic understanding of what to do if it happens. But what if you don’t lose you job, it just changes on you. What do you do then?

When an IT department shrinks, there are suddenly fewer people to do all of the work that was being done before. If you were working on a project that all of a sudden becomes less important, then there’s a good chance that you may get “repurposed” to work on a new (to you) project. Got any skills to make that transition?

Ways To Make The Change Go More Smoothly

In my life I’ve moved residences a number of times. Sometimes they were big cross-county moves, and sometimes they were short across town moves. What I’ve found is that the big cross-county moves always went better. That’s because I took the time to sort things out, packed properly, and scheduled enough time to do things right. The cross-town moves were always a disaster – I’d throw things in the car and move them bit by bit losing things and never taking the time to put things where they really deserved to go.

Likewise, moving to a new IT job in the same company can be a disaster if you don’t do a good job of managing the move. Unlike going to work for a new company, a lot of the players and the rules are the same. However, it’s not the same job – there are differences. This is where things can trip you up.

In order to provide you with a little guidance on how best to manage this move, Jane Porter has gone out and talked with people who have lived through it in order to get their advice on what you need to do to make this a successful move:

  • Talk, Talk, Talk: When you get assigned to a new IT job, it’s sorta like being married to two people for awhile – your old boss and your new boss. Just like having two spouses, things can get awkward quickly if you aren’t careful. What you need to do is as soon as possible sit down with both bosses and review what they are expecting you to do. Instead of having you push back when they want you to do the work of two people, have them come to a mutual agreement on what and when you’ll be doing work for both of them.
  • Learn The Rules (Again): you used to know how things worked but you can no longer make that assumption. Silly little things like when your boss expects you to be available and if a weekly status report is still required are some of the details that you need to quickly get a handle on. Once again, communication is the key here: asking what is expected is the best way to make sure that nothing is missed.
  • Don’t Close Your Door: it’s not just your new boss that you need to be talking with, but also your new co-workers. If your job was just created, then nobody knows what you are supposed to be doing. If you are replacing someone who got let go, then you’ve got to help everyone work through their resentment of you. Either way, you’ve got to take the time to build bridges not only to people within your new department but also to those in other departments that you will now be working with.
  • Prepare To Leave (Again): nothing lasts forever, and your new job just might last for a very short time. All too often after a reorganization, something will happen that will require you to return to your old job for awhile in order to deal with a big issue. Although successfully solving problems is a good thing, you need to remember that your career no long lies with this old job. Keep your new boss updated while you are gone and make sure that your new tasks are being covered by someone.
  • Network: hopefully this goes without saying, but we’ll cover it again anyway. You need to start reaching out to everyone from your first day on the new job. Your old network is still there, but its value is now less. You need a new network that can support you in your new job and you are the one who is going to have to build it.

What All Of This Means For You

You can go to countless book stores and find books on how to start a new job at a new company. However, starting a new job within your existing company is a bit more difficult because the rules are not so clear.

Realizing that you need to treat this change of jobs as seriously as you would joining a new company is a good first step. Next you’re going to have to take the steps that we’ve outlined in order to quickly make yourself valuable and well connected in your new position.

Change happens and there’s not a lot that we can do about it. Savvy IT Leaders understand that developing the political skills needed to switch jobs within a company can go a long way in boosting their careers…

What do you think is the #1 skill that you need in order to do a good job when you suddenly find yourself in a new position?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As the global recession starts to fade away, IT Leaders who are searching for a new job are starting to feel some new hope and IT Leaders who still have jobs are starting to get the itch to take a look around at what other opportunities there might be out there. Sounds like it’s time to get some resumes in order…

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Posted in IT jobs | 3 Comments »