Job Development

Sought-after IT jobs — lawsuit-filing not among them

IT jobs are down this year. Mix that lack of employment opportunity with an exceptionally tough job market (the average national unemployment rate is up to 9.4% as of July 2009), and you get some pretty frustrated individuals. One such individual is taking her frustrations to the next level and suing her alma mater.

Trina Thompson graduated from New York’s Monroe College in April with a bachelor’s degree of business administration in information technology. As of July 24, the still-unemployed Thompson filed a lawsuit against the office of career advancement for not helping her find a job.

On top of full tuition reimbursement, Thompson is also suing for an additional $2,000, “for the stress I have been going through looking for a full-time job on my own,” she wrote in her lawsuit.

There are a lot of well-qualified professionals struggling to find a job, and if the IT business admin IT positions are few and far between (as in Thompson’s case) what are the positions IT managers are looking to fill? Continued »

Looking for layoff news? Social networking tools may have your answer

The troubled economy has led some companies to lay off employees, and this year they are approaching it in a whole new way. No more discreet, hush-hush conversations – company news is being spread rapidly through blogs and other social networking tools.

Those who have grown up using the Internet are changing the way everything is handled. The Web generation, the 25- to 34-year-olds who learned how to use the Internet in school and grew up alongside it, are approaching the Web in new ways – they are using it to manage their lives. Social networking connects us on a new level — blogs keep us in the know and Twittering (although obnoxious) spreads information in seconds.

Mix that amount of accessibility with a troubled economy and you get a lot of people nervous very quickly.

How? People are already concerned about the economy. You can’t open the business section without seeing something “in crisis” or words like recession and downturn. But what about when you start reading your friends status messages on Facebook.

During some routine Facebook-stalking of my 455 closest friends, I recently came across a disturbing status message: So-and-so has been laid off.

Then comes the panic.

Within minutes, there were comments to the update wondering where they had worked, how many people were laid off, what were they going to do??

What happens next? The person who was laid off feels worse and everyone who looks at the status message starts to think, “This is going to be me!”

OK, granted, this person didn’t have to share with the Facebook community this particular brand of bad luck – but he did and he didn’t think twice about it.

Is anything really private anymore? A company can’t even lay off 1,500 individuals without being recognized in the blog world. Jeeze…

And I will never live down my first college newspaper articles. Deal with it.

Fencing for recognition: Sword fight your way to the executive table

Normally, I’d take a pass on commenting on a report like the one EDS recently published entitled “CIO at the Table.” But today I feel like this could be a useful read for you, my midmarket CIOs.

As with most of the reports I come across, there isn’t anything entirely earthshaking or world changing about this. The main thrust of the article is about including CIOs at the decision-making table at any given company.

“In either case, technology isn’t something you can ignore in the 21^st century. No matter what your industry, IT is at the center of the action… Yet many organizations continue to misstep, not quite understanding the role of the CIO, the part that IT technicians should play in daily operations, how to make investment decisions, set sequence and priority, or even the best way to capitalize on the latest innovations to expand and change the products and services they are taking to market … What most senior leaders fail to grasp along the way is that making IT work has as much to do with business as it does with technology itself … But you have to do more than invest in good infrastructure and applications. You have to integrate and align IT with the enterprise’s overarching goals.”

I just went ahead and grabbed the most salient points of the article. But, by all means, you should read the whole report, even though it’s aimed more directly at your CEO than it is at you.

It does, however, provide some insight into the way your boss is trying to wrap his or her mind around what you do on a daily basis and why a good CIO is vital to the company.

Maybe I should say the way your CEO isn’t thinking about your job. EDS suggests an expanded role for the CIO with a more strategic vision for the whole company and IT governance in general. It’s a decent argument and could provide a few thrusts and ripostes for your next performance review.