Posts Tagged ‘it careers’

Newer Entries »

How Should IT Leaders Use Outplacement Services?

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
Outplacement Services Can Help The Laid Off IT Leader

Outplacement Services Can Help The Laid Off IT Leader

Dang it, you’ve been let go. It really doesn’t matter the reason why – just the fact that your (former) employer decided that they could get along without your services can really sting. However, before the door swings close behind you for the last time, the ball is in still in your court and you need to know what to do with it.

As IT Leaders, we are a pretty arrogant bunch.  A recent survey by the global outsourcing firm Right Management found that seven out of 10 job seekers thought that they knew exactly what they needed to do in order to land their next job. However, once they went through the outplacement service, that number dropped down to two.

At most firms, when a layoff sweeps through and you get caught up in it, you will be offered the services of an outplacement firm. Many of us poo-poo this because for one reason or another we think that it won’t be of any help to us. That’s where you’d be wrong.

If you find yourself in this position, here’s what you need to do in order to make the most of the outplacement service that has been offered to you:

  • Don’t Drag Your Feet: You’ve been let go, get over it and don’t delay starting to use your outplacement service. The longer you wait, the more competition you will face.
  • Pick Your Consultant Carefully: You can always ask to meet with a different consultant so make sure that the one that you’ve got is the right one for you. Consider things like track record, background, experience in your industry, and of course their current workload.
  • Do Your Homework: You’ll probably be asked to complete personality tests and career assignments. Do them! This is the time for you to make sure that the next job that you get is really the right one for you.
  • Stuff Yourself: The outplacement firm probably offers many different types of classes, workshops, seminars, and networking events. This is your best chance to find out if things have changed and if your type of job is now located in different parts of other firms.
  • Don’t Work Remotely: Although in this day and age it is possible to work with your counselor online, try not to. Instead go into the office and meet with them face-to-face. This will help to build a stronger relationship with them and who knows what other professionals you’ll meet there.

Nothing can make the initial pain of being let go from your IT job hurt less. However, as with so many things in life, the pain fades over time. You need to make sure that you get moving right off the bat so that by the time your pain has faded, you are already in your next job.

Have you ever used outplacement services that were offered by your former employer? Did you have a good counselor? Did you choose to meet with them face-to-face or did you do most of it online? How did it all turn out for you? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in career | No Comments »

How An IT Leader Does A Performance Review

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

IT Leaders Need To Find A Way To Make Performance Reviews Work

IT Leaders Need To Find A Way To Make Performance Reviews Work

I hate performance reviews. I hate getting them and I hate giving them. In my mind they are a waste of time for both the IT Leader who’s giving them and the IT staffer who is getting them. I’m not sure who dreamed these things up, but they remind me of a 19th century factory environment when the guy working on the assembly line would be called up to the big boss’ office once a year and given his pay raise. Look, it’s the 21st Century, don’t you think that we could do things better?

My main gripe with performance reviews is that I believe that the two parties that are participating in the review are not really talking about the same thing. The manager is using this mandatory meeting as a once-a-year opportunity to try to remember who this person is and what they’ve been doing over the past year. The manager will have filled in mandatory text as answers to questions like “Where is improvement needed?” The expectation  is that this will be a backward looking discussion to talk about how the employee has been performing.

On the other hand, the employee shows up for the meeting with the hope that he / she will have an opportunity to talk about getting a pay raise or even a promotion. The expectation is that this will be an opportunity to have a forward looking discussion about how to advance the employee’s career.

Sorta looks like a train wreck in the making doesn’t it?

I’m a big fan of having four separate meeting each year (at the start of each quarter). The purpose should be to talk about how things have gone, what is expected for the quarter, and a review of the employee’s career situation and goals. It should be quick and it should be positive – “here’s what you need to be doing” type of theme. Now that would be a performance review worth attending!

Do you get anything out of your annual performance review? Do you give performance reviews? Do you try to make them more meaningful? How has this worked out for you? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in review | 1 Comment »

Simple Steps To Becoming A Better IT Manager

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
Becoming A Better IT Leader Requires Hard Work

Becoming A Better IT Leader Requires Hard Work

A question that I often get asked by both new and old IT leaders is “how can I become a better manger?” The question is a simple one that has complex answers. What all IT leaders want is to become one of those leaders who has the ability to get all of our employees to light up when we show up. We want to be able to get them excited about us and about their jobs. How hard could that be?

Bad news here, it’s actually fairly difficult to transform yourself into one of those very charismatic leaders if you are not already one. If you can’t cause staff to naturally respond to you, then sometimes we try to make self-conscious efforts to display leadership traits. This can backfire on you and it can come across as forced. This is not going to get you where you want to be.

Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis have written an article in the Harvard Business Review in which they report that if you really want to become a better IT leader, then you are going to have to undertake the hard work of actually changing your behavior.

What these researchers are really talking about is that to really break through what is holding you back as an IT manager, you are going to have to become socially smarter. We’re not talking about MBA book knowledge here, but rather learning to interact with people better.

As an example of this, consider the case of a manager who just didn’t know when to back off on an issue. She received feedback that this was her problem and she made several social changes. First she started anticipating how people would react to her. Next, she came up with different ways to present her opinion or information in a way that would not be so aggressive. Finally, she came up with a program that would allow her to change.

Another good way to develop the social skills that you need as an IT manger is to spend time with an IT leader who does a good job of managing. What will happen is that your brain will start to mirror what this leader is doing and this will allow you to become a better leader.

It’s important for you to realize that your brain is constantly creating new neural networks. This means that the way you are is not the way that you will be. You are not a prisoner of your genes or previous management experiences. You can change and improve if you are willing to put the time and energy in to do so.

One final note, developing the social skills that you need to be a great IT leader is especially important when a crisis situation arises. Business conditions like a take over, merger, or even layoffs can create a great deal of stress among IT workers. IT Leaders who have good social skills can keep the team together and get high performance out of them even during times like this.

Do you feel that you have the social skills needed to be a great IT leader? What skills are you still lacking? Do you have a plan for developing these needed skills? Do You have an IT leader who has the skills that you need and can you work with them to find out how they use them? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in IT manager | 3 Comments »

Should An IT Manger Be A “Secret Shopper” When Looking For A New Job?

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
IT Leaders Need To Check Out Both Their Next Job And The Company That's Offering It

IT Leaders Need To Check Out Both Their Next Job And The Company That's Offering It

So let’s pretend for a moment that you are NOT fabulously satisfied with your current job as an IT Leader. You’ve decided that global recession or not, you really, really need to find yourself a new IT job. How do you plan on going about doing this? There is nothing new that I can tell you about Monster.com or Dice.com, writing the perfect resume, or even how to leverage social networks like LinkedIn in order to get an offer. Instead, let’s talk about what you need to do AFTER you get the offer.

When you were just out of school, or when a job that you had suddenly went away, you probably went searching for the first job that would start providing you with a paycheck. However, times have changed. You now actually have a bit of a career going and, assuming that you currently have a job, you’d prefer to not muck it up.

What this means is that your search for you next IT Leader job needs to include a few additional steps that just might strike you as strange – but could very well save your career. Interested? Let’s see what you need to do next.

Once you have an offer from a company, STOP! Don’t accept it right off the bat. Tell the company that you need some time to consider their offer. Two days would be perfect, but you can even accomplish what you need to get done in a single day if you move quickly.

We all know that job descriptions are generally junk – originally created too long ago by someone who thought that they knew what they needed and then transformed into junk by caring members of the HR and legal teams so that nobody would be offended or even know what the job was about. This means that you need to make sure that you can get along with your potential new boss (hopefully you have already talked with him/her). Now you’ve got to find out if this COMPANY is the right company for you.

In a nutshell, if the company makes a lousy product / service and all of their customers are ticked off at them, then this is probably not the best place for you to take your career to. This is the new angle that you need to add to your job search: not just checking out the new job, but also checking out the company that you are considering joining.

How do you do this for an IT job? If the company that you are thinking about joining has retail stores or distributors that carry their products, then this part is easy – it’s time to go shopping. If you were considering joining Bose’s IT department, then you’d want to visit your local Best Buy and check out their home theater section.

Even more important than confirming that Bose products are still available (proof that they aren’t going out of business), would be what you learned by talking to the sales associates. What do they think about Bose products? Do people return them? Are they selling well? Although these are not IT questions, they are critical to making sure that you are joining a growing thriving company instead of a stalling, shrinking one.

If the company that you are thinking about joining does not have their products in retail stores, then you’re going to have to be a bit more creative. Almost all firms have some sort of help / support line. Play the role of a customer and give it a call – how do they treat you? Do some on-line searching for reviews of the company and their products. Look for legal actions against the company – discrimination lawsuits are never a good thing.

At this stage in your IT career, you need to adopt a bigger view of the world when you go looking for your next job. It’s no longer just about the job, but now it’s also about the company that you might be working for…

Did you take the time to check out the company that you are currently working for? How did you go about checking them out? Was the information that you found accurate? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in jobs in information technology | 1 Comment »

How Can An IT Manager Get Ahead At Your Company?

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
Is Getting Ahead At Work Due To Genetics Or Is There Another Way?

Is Getting Ahead At Work Due To Genetics Or Is There Another Way?

If we agree to take a step back from the world of IT for just a moment, how about if we spend just a bit of time talking about your career. How’s it going?  Are you where you’d like to be right now? Perhaps more importantly, have you been seeing your peers do better than you lately? Us IT Managers are generally pretty good at the technical side of doing our jobs; however, when it comes to managing our careers we are all too often just a bit clueless. Good news, some smart folks have been thinking about this problem and they have some suggestions to help us…

Geoff Colvin has written a great book called Talent Is Overrated in which he talks about just what it takes to be successful. He’s got some good news for us and some bad news. Which would you like first? Let’s start with the good news. All too often we tend to think that genetics plays a large role in somebody’s success. In sports we have Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Lance Armstrong and in business we have Jack Welsh, Richard Branson, and even Warren Buffet. Clearly all of these folks must have come from amazing genetic stock, right?

Colvin throws this idea out the door. Yes, sports superstars probably do have some natural talents that help them during their career; however, that’s not what made them a superstar. In business, if you’ve ever seen pictures of the really BIG names, then you’d quickly understand that they don’t LOOK like they are anything special. However, Colvin says that great performance (from which comes great success) basically rests on one specific action more than anything else: deliberate practice.

Let’s be real clear what is meant by practice here. We’re not talking about going out and hitting 2,000 golf balls on a practice tee and then declaring that you are as good as Tiger Woods. We’re not talking about hosting and running 1,000 business meetings and then telling the world that you have Sir Richard Branson’s leadership skills. Nope, what we are really talking about is practicing with a focus. This means that you hit a ball / run a meeting and at the end you sit back and ask yourself “…what could I have done better?” You then make a change in how you hit a ball / run a meeting and then you do it again. You ask the same question at the end of the activity and repeat it over and over again. Just in case you are missing this subtle point: this is no fun to do whatsoever. However it is necessary if you want to be better.

Colvin pointed out two great examples of people who have done just exactly this and gone on to greatness. The first is Jerry Rice who was an NFL wide receiver who wasn’t really all that big nor was he really all that fast (in comparison to the other wide receivers on the field with him). However, Jerry noticed that by the end of a football game, all of the players on the other team were totally exhausted. Jerry spent the time focused on one thing: building up his endurance. What this meant is that when everyone else had nothing left to give, he had an extraordinary advantage over them during the final 15 minutes in the game. He used this advantage to score, score, score. Colvin also talks about the comedian Chris Rock. Chris is a huge star and puts on shows in large stadiums. However, long before those shows, he spends months going from small comedy club to smaller comedy club in order to practice new material and refine, refine, refine his act.

Here’s some of the bad news: Colvin believes in something called the “10-year rule”. What this means is that he believes that it can take 10-years to achieve a high level of excellence in just about any field. However, you can still do it. What it will take is deliberate practice. Two key activities are called for here: over practicing and getting feedback from others. One final point: Colvin says that if your job feels easy, then you are unlikey to ever become a star. Words to think about…

How do you feel about your career right now: are you on track or falling off track? Are you currently working on improving any parts of your job that you have difficulty with? Are you willing to work at getting better for 10 years in order to reach the top? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in career | No Comments »

Newer Entries »