Posts Tagged ‘IT Staffing’

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Dealing With High Worker Expectations Requires Real IT Leadership

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

IT Leaders Need To Take A New Look At How They Hire<div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/23912576@N05/2962194797/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href=Can we talk frankly for just a moment? Who’s really in charge in IT departments when it comes to hiring and retaining new talent? You’d think that with the global recession, companies would have the upper hand. However, with the critical importance of IT solutions to existing company operations and increasing global competition, it’s possible that firms need IT workers more than IT workers need the firm. What’s an IT leader to do?

My, How Things Have Changed!

How did we get to where we are today? It wasn’t all that long ago that you could land a job in a company’s IT department right out of college and then expect to spend either your entire career there or at least the next 10 years if you chose to do so. Those days are now long gone.

Instead, what we are dealing with today is workers who view their current jobs (or job opportunities) as relatively short lived events. The experts tell us that everyone needs to expect to have between 10-12 different jobs during our IT careers. This new mindset makes it much harder for IT Leaders to recruit and retain the top IT talent that they need to move their teams forward faster.

New Solutions For IT Leaders

I’ve been hearing a lot IT managers lamenting the current state of recruiting top tier talent lately. To them I say “get over it“. Look, the world is the way that it is and there’s nothing that either you or I can do about it.

If new hires to your IT department are going to view their job as a temporary stop on their career journey, then fine – work with it. This simply means that you need to change how you manage your team.

In the past, IT managers were content to allow workers to “niche” and become experts in one particular area. No more. Cross-training of every member of your team should be among your highest priorities. This will benefit your team members because they will pick up new skills and won’t get bored doing the same job over and over again. You’ll benefit because when a team member decides to leave, the loss won’t be quite as painful as it could be.

IT Leaders also need to looking for tomorrow’s IT leaders. A benefit of having a great deal of turnover in your teams is that you’ll have a chance to evaluate a greater number of IT workers for future leadership positions. Those who have the necessary skills, are the ones that you need to give additional responsibilities to. By doing this, you just might convince them to stick around a bit longer…

Final Thoughts

The world has changed and IT Leaders need to change along with it. Coming to the realization that we can’t hope to keep team members for extended periods of time means that we need to change how we hand out assignments and how we search for tomorrow’s IT management talent. If you can adjust how your manage your teams to deal with they way that the world really is,  then you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Jeff Vance over at Sandstorm Media talked with me to get some inputs for an article that he was writing. Jeff did a very good job of capturing a lot of what makes our job so hard to do…

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Posted in recruiting | 1 Comment »

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.

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Why Are There So Few Women In IT?

Thursday, February 12th, 2009
Why Don't More Women Enter The IT Field?

Why Don't More Women Enter The IT Field?

Oh, oh – this is the kind of blog posting that can cause all sorts of folks to get angry. Before you build up a big head of steam and get ready to fire off an angry “women are just as capable as men” letter to me, wait just a minute. The question that we’re tacking here isn’t if women are better than men at IT, but rather why are there so many more men in IT departments?

With no scientific backing what so ever, I think that a lot of us have made up our own reasons why staff meetings and all hands gatherings sure seem more like a frat party than a balanced gathering of equal numbers of both genders. Some of the made up reasons for this include guessing that women have less interest in “hard” science that makes up parts of IT, women’s educational experience makes them not want to go into IT, or that women are just not comfortable working in the male environment that is today’s IT department.

As an IT Leader who wants to manage a balanced team of both men and women (the world is, after all, made up of roughly 50 / 50 of both), understanding why you don’t have more women on your team is a critical issue that you need to resolve.

Vicki McKinney is an organizational consultant who, along with a number of academic researchers, conducted a study of 815 IT workers back in 2003. They published their results in the Communications of the ACM and what they uncovered was quite interesting.

The first set of questions that they asked tried to answer why a man or a woman would enter the IT field in the first place. It turns out that men were more likely than women to cite “love of technology / computers” as their motive. Women cited “job security”, “ease of entry”, and “flexible work hours” as their motivators for entering IT. What this means to an IT Leader is that men are more driven by factors in an IT job itself. Women are more motivated by factors around the job. This is key knowledge when you are trying to motivate a team.

Another question that was asked dealt with role models. The ability to socialize is critical to advancing one’s IT career and role models can help greatly with this. The surprising answer that came back from the survey was that both men and women had a similar level of experience with role models. What this means is that women have had no problems finding men to act as their role models in IT.

You’re going to like the next set of questions that were asked. This batch was designed to discover if there are any gender related differences in a variety of work-related experiences. What’s interesting is that the answer is YES. Specifically, women reported that their supervisors provided them with greater support in the meeting of their career goals and improving their job performance.

The final set of survey questions centered on career satisfaction. The result of asking these questions was that the researchers found no significant differences between men and women’s level of satisfaction with their IT careers.

So what’s an IT Leader to make of all of this information? Basically two things can be learned. Once in IT, women seem to be just as happy and driven as men. They may have come to IT for different reasons, but once there they share many of the same experiences. However, IT has had and continues to have what the researchers call “an input problem”: too few girls are being attracted to IT as a career path.

If IT Leaders want tomorrow’s IT department to be gender balanced, then more work needs to be done to improve young girls’ knowledge of computer careers as well as making them aware of computer related education. We all need to play a role in getting the message out…!

Do you feel that your department is gender balanced? Do you feel that women have as good of an IT career as men? Do women in your department have a better relationship with their supervisors than men do? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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IT Management Challenge: Breaking In A New Boss

Friday, September 19th, 2008
IT Managers Need Tips On How To Handle A New Boss

IT Managers Need Tips On How To Handle A New Boss

A great deal has been written on how IT workers can deal with getting a new boss. For that matter, a lot has been written on what you need to do if you become the boss of a collection of IT workers. Shucks, I’ve even written a lot about how to find out what you’re CIO wants you to do. However, what’s been missing (up until now) is what an IT manager should do if he/she gets a new boss. The challenge here is that it’s not just you that will be evaluated by the new boss as they go about setting up shop, but rather it will be your team that the new boss will be evaluating. What’s an IT manager to do?

Let’s get something out of the way first. As an IT manager your new boss can broadly be placed into one of three categories: fantastic & almost god-like, average, and horriable tyrant. If your new boss falls into the fantastic / tyrant buckets, then you’ve got a whole other set of issues. However, since most bosses fall into the “average” bucket, let’s spent our time talking about what to do with just this type.

There are some interesting questions about why you have a new boss in the first place – what happened to your old boss? Oh, and by the way, why didn’t YOU get your old bosses job instead of this new person? Once again, just to keep things simple let’s push those items off to the side for now. Let’s assume that you’ve never met your new boss before – the hardest scenario.

It can appear to be a daunting task if you try to determine how to win you new boss’ favor before you meet them. In today’s era of a distributed workforce, there’s a good chance that you and your new boss may not be in the same town. This means that meeting them face-to-face should be one of your highest priorities. No matter how good you are at email or how engagaing you may be over the phone, there is no substiture for a face-to-face meeting in order to allow your new boss to size you up. Travel to meet them or have them come visit you.

When you meet them, what will you talk about? The key here is to let them do most of the talking. Your value to your new boss rests on the type and quantity of problems that you can make go away. It really is that simple. The worst situation that you can find yourself in is if your team is in charge of solving problems that your new boss doesn’t really view as being problems! This is why it’s critital for you to let your new boss tell you what he/she thinks their most critical problems are.

Remember the first day of school back in elementary school? Everyone in class was trying to show off for the teacher so that they would gain her affection from the get-go. Things are very similar when you get a new boss, everyone will be trying to get on his/her good side starting on day one. You can improve your odds of doing this if you take a moment and think like a chess master. Your new boss is dealing with exactly the same issues that you are – he/she despertatly wants to “look good” for their boss who put them in this new positon. Your long-term value will be in what you and your team can do to make your new boss look good to his/her boss.

So what DON’T you want to do when you have a new boss? Probably the worst thing in the world you can do is to overwhelm them. Email is easy to send and all too often IT managers start to CC their new boss on every email to show the boss how important the IT manager is. A much better approach is to show your value by creating a condensed summary of what your team is currently working on. Even here there are some dangers: us IT managers like to list each and every little accomplishment so much so that our summary often turns out to be equavalant to  “War & Peace” in length. Keep it short – one computer screen of information should do the trick. Write it in such a way that your new boss now has useful informtation that they could pass on to their boss.

The rough rule-of-thumb is that a new manager has about 90 days to show his/her stuff. You need to be tracking these first 90 days and doing everything that you and your team can to make your new boss shine in that time. Investing in your new boss now will result in a rich payout later on…

How did things go last time you got a new boss? Were you able to clearly communicate the value of both you and your team? Were there any misunderstandings? Did other IT managers steal your spotlight? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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