Posts Tagged ‘jobs in information technology’

Newer Entries »

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.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in IT jobs | No Comments »

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.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 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 »

Newer Entries »