Posts Tagged ‘IT jobs’

Shh! How To Keep Your IT Job Search Secret…

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
IT Leaders Need To Always Be Searching For Their Next Job

IT Leaders Need To Always Be Searching For Their Next Job

Do you plan on working at your current IT job forever? Nope, I didn’t think so. In fact, there’s a very good chance that you won’t be working for the company that you are currently working at forever. What this means is that you’ve got to start that search for your next job now. Oh, and you’ve got to keep it a secret…

Sometimes we IT leaders get just a little bit too caught up in ourselves. This happens when we think that our technical skills or job experience will do the speaking for us when we next go looking for a job. Bad news, finding your next job won’t happen this way.

The key to a successful IT Leader’s job search is to prepare for your next job long before it becomes necessary to go looking for it. You know what I’m going to say next: you’ve got to keep up with what’s going on in your professional network. This network needs to include people both inside your current company as well as outside it. Keeping up with your network is important because you don’t want your networking activities to suddenly trigger suspicion among your coworkers.

It is possible to keep the search for your next job invisible. The key is to make sure that you are always meeting with professional contacts, attending industry gatherings, and (of course) being active on social networking sites.

This being said, you can overdo the social networking thing. For example, in LinkedIn updates on changes to your account are sent out to your contacts. Fellow workers may start to notice it if you all of a sudden start to gather new recommendations to your LinkedIn account. Not just social networking can be a tip off, if you dramatically improve how you dress in order to combine your current job with interviews, then your coworkers are certain to notice.

This all leads to the most delicate of questions: when should you tell your current boss that you are planning on leaving? I can answer this one for you: as late in the process as possible. Since you can never really be sure how your current employer is going to react to your announcement that you are leaving, it’s best to provide yourself with as much time to get your act together as possible. My suggestion here is to make it so that if after you make your announcement your boss blows his / her top and angerly orders you to leave the building, you are ready for it.

The second most delicate question has to do with what you should say if your company (or boss) conducts an exit interview with you. When I left my first job, I was young and naive. When they asked me what I would have changed in my old department, I opened up with both barrels. Not a good idea!

Only as I’ve grown older have I come to realize that the real purpose of an exit interview is to detect if the company is going to be facing any discrimination lawsuits. What you say about your boss / department / job might get written down, but in the end it probably won’t have much of an impact.

So there you go, IT Leaders should always be searching for their next job. This search should involve talking with real people as well as connecting online. You can keep this search a secret for as long as you want it to be, but make sure that you prepare to leave before you tell your boss that you are leaving!

How do you search for your next job when you are currently working for another company? When do you think that you should tell your current boss that you are leaving? How important do you think that online social networking will be in finding your next job? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in IT jobs | No Comments »

IT Leader Job Hunting Secrets

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
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You’ll Bag A New Job Quicker If You Know How To Hunt For One

You’ll Bag A New Job Quicker If You Know How To Hunt For One

It’s All About How You Use Your Time

So I like to talk about how to be a better IT Leader just as much as the next guy, but what are you supposed to do when your job has gone away? I’ve been getting a lot of email from IT managers who are finding themselves unintentionally “in-between jobs” for the first time in a long time. The first thing to realize is that no matter how long it takes to find the next job this is just temporary. The next thing to understand is that there are secrets to speeding up the finding of your next IT job…

The #1 problem that I see in IT managers that I’m working with who are searching for a new job after having lost their last one is that for the first time in a long time they don’t know what to do with their time. When they were working it seemed like they never had enough of the stuff. However, now that their job has gone away, they don’t know what to do with themselves.

The first thing that we all need to realize is that you’re going to need is some structure in your life if you want to hurry up the process of finding your next job. If you don’t have any structure to how you are spending your day, then you won’t be organized and you won’t be focused. This means that you won’t be able to get to where you want to go.

Job Hunting Is Like Having Another Job

When I’ve been between IT jobs, it took way too long for me to have this mental breakthrough: job hunting IS my job. When you have this understanding, a lot of other things start to fall into place. Just like any IT job that you’ve had in past, you need to structure you new job hunting job so that you have specific work hours and a schedule for getting things done along with deadlines.

The secret to making your job hunt a success is to treat it like a full-time job. This means that you’re going to have to do things like set aside some physical space for your job hunting work: that’s exactly what your home office was created for.

All too often immediately after having lost an IT job, we’ll sit down, sign onto Monster.com, and start applying for every job that we can find. Don’t do this.

Instead, go about starting your job search in the right way. The first thing that you are going to want to do is take some time to get well organized. This means that you’re going have to start off by taking the time to spend several days or even as long as a week to really get set up for your job search.

Getting set up means doing several things that are important to do, but not necessarily related to applying for any one specific job opening. Instead, you need to spend your time getting your resume in order, maybe creating some cover letter templates, even chasing down some good references would be time well spent.

The Three Bucket System

Face it, when you suddenly find yourself running a one person business in which you have to do everything, it’s pretty easy to reach a point where you just throw your hands up in the air and say “I give up!” Don’t do it. Julie Morgenstern a productivity author suggests that you view your day as being divided up into three separate compartments: preparation and research, meetings, and follow-up.

Her main point is that it is dangerous for us to spend too much time doing any one thing. What we need to do is to try to schedule a meeting every day (or at least five meetings a week). Instead of spending all of your time hunched over your laptop, this will help to keep you better connected to the outside world.

Julie also suggests that we end every day by planning the next one, plus the two days after that. This sets up a time horizon where we start to feel as though we know what’s coming up and so it’s not so scary. Face it, we are energized by getting things done and this will help us do that.

What All Of This Means For You

Losing an IT job is never good, losing an IT manager’s job is even worse. It’s all too easy to get lost in feeling bad for ourselves when this occurs.

The experts tell us that we need to sit ourselves down and realize that we have a new job: finding our next job. Getting organized and coming up with ways to divide up our days into productive segments will help us to get there.

The most important thing to remember when you are hunting for your next job is that you will find it. The only thing that you can’t control is how long it will take. Use these suggestions that we’ve discussed and that hunt will take less time!

Do you think that how well you are organized can reduce the amount of time that it takes to find your next job?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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Posted in jobs in information technology | 2 Comments »

What Should An IT Manager Look For When Hiring Employees?

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
CIOs Are Looking For Technicality Passionate Folks Who Are Enthusiastic

CIOs Are Looking For Technicality Passionate Folks Who Are Enthusiastic

Talk about confusing! IT managers are responsible for bringing the best and brightest into your organization. However, in the field of IT, just exactly what this means is difficult to pin down – we keep changing our minds! IT departments today look nothing like the IT departments of the 80’s, 90’s, and even early 2000. Once upon a time the best IT workers were those with the sharpest tech skills. Then they were told to become more like the business side of the business. Next IT certifications were all the rage (I blame Cisco for this), next they were told to get really good at one technology, oh, but don’t allow yourself to be pigeon-holed into just one technology. What’s a nerd to do?

In a recent set of interviews with CIOs that Deb Perelman over at eWeek did, she discovered that they weren’t really looking for specific skills such as SAP, Oracle Financials, or certain business skills when they did IT hiring. Rather they were looking for more of that touchy-feely stuff: enthusiasm, the ability to be flexible, and of course the ability to get things done.

What makes an IT worker different from workers in other departments at a company is that they need to be passionate about technology. Since technology is such a large part of the IT world, if an employee doesn’t love it and want to be constantly finding out more about what can be done with it, then there is a good chance that burnout will occur sooner than later. A love of technology does not mean that CIOs are looking for the classic “put ‘em in the closet” techie. The ability to relate to others and share information is now recognized as being just as important as technology skills.

If CIOs ran the world (and they don’t), then they’d be able to hire IT staffers who had lots of experience. What they are really looking for are folks who have done something over and over again so many times that it has become second nature to them. What would make such a person an even better find would be if they had good industry experience in the industries that a particular company works. A key marker of this type of IT employee is that they often move in and out of the IT department to other departments such as marketing.

We all know that IT departments at most companys have taken a number of hits over the past several years. Downsizing, offshoring, and other events have taken a toll on IT worker morale. CIOs realize this; however, they want / need their IT departments to be full of enthusiastic workers. It’s important to note here that this is not a discussion about having a more youthful department – young folks can be just as glum as older ones. Rather, CIOs want elements of flexibility and excitement to come back into their departments.

What about all those certifications that were supposed to be our ticket to lifetime employment? It turns out that CIOs don’t think that much of them these days. Instead, what they are looking for is experience and a history of executing projects successfully. These days it’s really all about your ability to get the job done.

CIOs realize that the job market for IT professionals will keep growing through 2016. Things are going to get tricky because the Baby Boomers are getting ready to leave the market and the Gen X/Y folks don’t have the numbers needed to make up for the exodus. What this means for CIOs is that they are going to have to start growing their own talent internally. All of a sudden that enthusiasm stuff starts to become a lot more important.

Do you feel that your department is filled with enthusiastic people? Do the people in your department have good IT instincts? Are you still thinking about getting more certifications? If so, what one? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in Uncategorized, career, it | No Comments »

IT Leaders Have Two Of These But Do They Use Them?

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
You Should Be Listening Twice As Much As You Talk!

You Should Be Listening Twice As Much As You Talk!

About a year ago I had a chance to sit down with a member of an IT team that was working for me in order to have a heart-to-heart with him. We’ll call him Tim. Tim was a project manager on one of my teams and so far he had been a steady performer. I’d say that he was strong on the analytical side and soft on the interpersonal side; however, he was doing a good job and I had really had no complaints on his performance. Recently, things had changed with Tim. His whole demeanor had been transformed as a deep depression seemed to both surround him and flow off of him and onto anyone that he interacted with. It had gotten so bad that nobody really wanted to have anything to do with him. Clearly this was having an impact on his ability to do his job. It was time for me to step in and see what I could do.

I took Tim with me down to the cafeteria in order to get him into a neutral location. I started my conversation with him by explaining that I had been pleased with his work up until recently. I told him that it sure seemed like something had changed and I needed to find out what it was because things couldn’t continue like they were. Tim initially said exactly what you’d expect a guy to say: “Nothing’s wrong.” I thought about opening up on him with both barrels – look, he was doing a lousy job and he was going to be out the door if he didn’t shape up. However, I knew better and so I kept gently probing. Finally, Tim got around to saying “I hate my Director.” Once again, my gut reaction was to tell him “Too bad, he’s not leaving so you had better make some changes.” However, somehow I was able to hold my tongue and instead said the three most important words that an IT Leader can say “Tell Me More…”

Tim started telling me the standard things that everyone says about their boss behind their backs “He doesn’t give clear instructions, he changes his mind too often, he’s never around when I need to talk to him, etc.” This is regular stuff – not enough to cause such a change in personality. So I went on and said “What else has happened lately?” This finally got Tim to confess everything. In a staff meeting, his boss had found some errors in some slides that Tim had prepared showing the status of the project and had called him out on it in front of the rest of the department. Given Tim’s personality, this was just about the worst thing that anyone could do to him. He was wounded and still sulking several weeks after the event. Bingo! We had our smoking gun.

This was a problem that I could (and did) fix rather easily. That’s not the point of this posting. Rather, my first reactions as Tim’s story unfolded would have been the wrong ones to act on and if I had, then I would have ended up doing a great deal of damage and not fixing the problem. I guess that’s why we all have two ears and just one mouth.

David Benzel is an author and a speaker and he points out that as IT Leaders we all have four main responsibilities when it comes to communicating with our IT teams:

  1. To listen
  2. To get the facts
  3. To determine the problem
  4. To help resolve the situation

As hard as it is to do, listening is both an art and a science that all of us IT Leaders need to get better at doing. Listening is hard to do because it requires you to focus your attention and use your full brain to process what is being said – no multi-tasking allowed! By keeping your mouth shut and your ears open, you allow your staff to do the talking and when they do that, you will learn amazing things.

Have you ever been in a situation in which you spoke too soon without doing enough listening? What happened when you did this? Have you ever seen someone who was a good listener at work? How did people respond to them? Were they more or less effective at their jobs than their peers? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in IT manager, soft skills | 3 Comments »