Climbing the IT Career Ladder » U.S.

Report Says IT Worker Confidence is at the Highest Level on Record

Robin "Roblimo" Miller — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:07:55 +0000

Even if you’re on a low-salt diet, you might want to take this much optimism with a grain or two. There’s even an optimistic chart, which you can see by reading the (PDF) report itself. But Randstad Technologies is a giant in the field of HR recruitment and consulting, and world-famous Harris Interactive did the survey, so who are we to question them?

We’re the nerdy kids who ask questions about everything.

That’s who.

So we rounded up Chris Mader, Managing Director at Randstad Technologies, and hit him with three follow-up questions:

IT Ladder: Is the optimism in your chart mainly in the U.S. or is it a worldwide phenomenon?

Chris Mader: There is a very high demand for talented IT professionals in both the U.S. and around the globe.

However, in the industry right now, Baby Boomers in IT are retiring and we simply do not have enough IT talent graduating from U.S. colleges and universities to fill this skills gap. This helps swing the supply and demand curve to favor IT talent, contributing to the optimism you see in our study. I have three young children and I wouldn’t hesitate to guide them down the path of a career in IT, or industries such as engineering or healthcare. That is where jobs demand continues to remain consistent.

Lastly, technology is usually one of the first places large companies will cut projects when the economy is in a down cycle. Now that we are recovering, we have seen that companies have been aggressively re-investing in their IT initiatives.

IT Ladder: What country would you move to if you were a young I.T. person looking for challenging work?

Chris Mader: If you are seeking something a little different but don’t want to go overseas, Canada offers a favorable work-life balance and IT jobs are in high demand in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. If you’ve never visited these cities, they are all spectacular places to live as a young professional. For one example, Toronto is one of the cleanest, friendliest, and most diverse cities I’ve ever visited. Canadians in Toronto enjoy all four seasons; have several major sports teams, museums with a rich history, fantastic restaurants and nightlife. And, it is only a one to four hour flight to almost every city in the US.

If you were seeking a European adventure, Germany is a beautiful country and would be a great place to consider, especially considering Germans are very well educated and fluently speak 3-4 languages including English. However, no one can match India right now when it comes to raw hiring numbers in IT. US based companies with a presence in India are oftentimes hiring four to five IT workers for every one hired in the US.

IT Ladder: Where would you move if your ambition was to start your own I.T.-oriented business?

Chris Mader: Many of the “BRICK” Countries (namely Brazil, China, India) and also the Philippines, Mexico, and Germany currently have high demand for IT workers. If I were to start up an IT company in another country it would depend if the business was based on innovation or support. If the focus was support, I would probably choose India. They have an educated and extraordinarily motivated talent base. Outsourcing revenues exceed $1 trillion worth of business now in India. IT is a top priority for the government, and India even has a special task force to make sure they stay competitive with the rest of the world.

However, if innovation was the key driver to my business, I’d keep it here in the US. This is the greatest country in the world when it comes to innovation in Information Technology.

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Thanks, Chris. We’re a little cynical about your company’s IT Employee Confidence Index. But reading it made us feel more confident than we felt earlier this morning — although the coffee we drank while reading it probably helped, too.

Taking Your Skills Overseas — or Up the Street

Robin "Roblimo" Miller — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 20:18:20 +0000

What brought this up was a job feeler I just got from someone I first met during a trip to New Delhi. There, and in other major Indian cities, especially Bangalore, IT talent and phone support people who speak “American English” competently are getting hard to find. So his proposal was that I come to India for at least several months out of every year and teach classes in written and spoken colloquial American English. Which led to the question of whether programmers and other IT professionals might be able to find similar opportunities.

My friend, who does not want his name used since he and I have discussed his business in confidence, realized some years ago that expenses in major Indian cities were soon going to equal those in smaller American cities, which would effectively eliminate the cost advantage Indian workers had over American workers. Therefore, he figured, why not find small cities that had adequate electrical grids and fast Internet access for his business needs, and move to one of them. Which is what he did, and ran into a major problem: the farther he got from major trading centers, the poorer the average English skills he found.

As an American himself, at first he did his own English training. But when he got beyond 25 employees, and had enough work coming in that he could add at least five new people (typically programmers) every month, he started talking to American friends about doing three month “paid sabbaticals” during which they’d spend four or five hours every day teaching his employees, and the rest of their time touring or hanging out or whatever they wanted.

In this case, we’re talking about personal contacts on both the job-seeking and recruiting sides of the coin, and there’s no doubt: “who you know” is still an important job-finding ingredient, even if you’re looking for a job (or an employee) halfway around the world. But what if you don’t know anyone in India?

G. Michael Schneider has written a book titled On The Other Guy’s Dime – A Professional’s Guide to Traveling Without Paying. His OtherGuy’sDime Blog is also a great resource for finding jobs hither and yon, and has lots of practical tips on how to arrange a short-term emplyoment trip, including notes on how to rent out your U.S. house, assuming you own one, while you’re gone.

Schneider is a computer science professor, but most of his advice is just as useful for a programmer or marketing person as for an academic. And he talks about opportunities far beyond India and China. Who would think about short-term job opportunities in Zimbabwe? Schneider did — and spent some time there and got paid for it. He says it’s easier to find work in places like Zimbabwe and Mongolia than in, say, Switzerland, because if you have hard-to-find skills — like in IT, for instance — there my not be another person in the whole world looking for a job in the less-traveled countries.

He’s also big on cold-calling. It costs nothing but a moment of your time to email a company or government ministry in a country that interests you to ask if they know of any openings for someone with your skills.

A Google search for “working overseas” brings up over 900,000 responses.

This is why I am going to end this article here; there is simply too much information to fit in a single column, so you might as well hit that Google link and look at the websites you find that speak most closely to your interests — including the part of the world that most interests you.

But before I go, I am going to leave you with one thought from Nicolia L. Wiles, a principal with Technisource in Austin, TX, who says her company, “…one of the largest US tech staffing and solutions firms, is seeing more jobs open in the US than actually going overseas. In fact, there are so many open job reqs right now that they firm is tirelessly seeking out top IT talent to fill their clients’ IT staff needs.”

In other words, the hiring worm seems to have turned, at least in IT. There are lots more IT jobs open in the U.S. (and elsewhere in the world) than there were last year or the year before. But if you want one of them, you’re going to have to go get it.

Six Web Pages That Will Help You Write an Effective Resume

Robin "Roblimo" Miller — Wed, 04 May 2011 14:28:06 +0000

In my most recent post, titled Why You Need ‘Social Media Versions’ of Your Resume, I promised to give you a list of links to online resume-writing guides. Here it is:

The iseek.org Resume Writing Tips page is a
succinct, bullet-point format list of basic resume ingredients. A good place to start your resume-writing research.

CollegeBoard.com’s Resume Writing 101
As you might expect, a resume-writing guide on a site called CollegBoard.com is going to be of most help to high school and college students looking for a first job or an internship. If that’s you, read this page. If not, you still might want to read it. There is no such thing as too much knowledge when it comes to writing resumes — or just about anything else.

How to Write a Masterpiece of a Resume
at RockportInstitute.com, is an excellent excerpt from their popular book, THE PATHFINDER: How To Choose or Change Your Career for a Lifetime of Satisfaction and Success. Great info here. And if you’re ready to choose or change your career, you might even want to buy their book.

Queen Associates has a Technical Resume Writing Tips
page primarily for job applicants in the “Queen City,” AKA Charlotte, N. Carolina. But the advice on this page applies to anyone, anywhere, so don’t pass this excellent guide by just because you live in S. Carolina. Or N. Dakota. Or (fill in here).

USAJobs.gov is the U.S. government’s recruiting site, and has a
Resume and Application Tips page specifically for federal job applicants. Don’t rule out the idea of “Working for America” if you’re thinking about a job change, either. The U.S. government has more IT resources than just about anyone else, and has research agencies that have developed all kinds of cool stuff — including the Internet itself.

Online recruiting giant Monster.com
has a How to Write a Resume page that leads you to seven sub-pages about different parts of your resume, from How to Write an Effective Resume Title to Round Out Your Resume with Additional Information. And, of course, a link to Monster’s online resume builder.

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So there you have it: six resume-writing help pages I believe are among the most useful ones out there. There are hundreds (possibly thousands) more, but these are some of the ones I believe are most useful for IT people who want to switch careers or get started in the job market right out of high school or college.