IT careers

MCITP Windows 7 Enterprise Desktop Support Tech Cert Takes Shape

Last week, Erwin Chan posted about this emerging Windows 7 certification to the Born to Learn blog. While the complete and final requirements have yet to be determined he does say that “Candidates wishing to pursue this certification can safely proceed to prepare for 680: Win7, Configuring and 685: Win7 EDST” (where EDST is eponymous with the certification’s own name).

Here’s what this utterance tells me:

• Exam 70-680 TS: Windows 7, Configuring will either be a pre-req or an outright requirement for this cert.
• Exam 70-685 PRO: Windows 7, Enterprise Desktop Support Technician (beta period ended on 10/16/2009, but the final version isn’t out yet–here’s the beta blurb) will be an outright requirement for this cert.
• It’s possible Microsoft might pull some kind of additional rabbit (another exam) or might also offer value/platform added versions as they did with HP exams for the Vista iteration of this exam.

My best guess, however, is that when the 70-685 goes into final form, the two preceding exams will constitute the requirements for the MCITP Win7 EDST certification and people will also be able to earn same. I think what Mr. Chan meant by his blog post was “Hey! We’re almost finished. You can take 70-680 right now and then 70-685 when it’s available to earn your MCITP Win7 EDST cert ASAP.”

Those who are interested can — and perhaps should — do exactly that!

Reverse Outsourcing? Hmmm….

As some of you probably know already, I make a sizable and even sometimes substantial part of my living writing computing books. Recently, I’ve been roped into contributing a book for a series of titles at the behest of a global training organization that goes by the name of the National Institute of Information Technologies, aka NIIT. What makes this gig intriguing is a combination of state-of-the-art course development technologies, top-notch pedagogy, and a sharp focus on a key area of IT technology and activity, along with higher rates of pay (the book is a work for hire, so that’s in part due to giving up on back-end earnings) than I’ve seen for computer books or course development for some time now.

But what makes this job fascinating is that I’m working remotely in the US for a global company based in India. Sure, it’s a project-based assignment, and will come to a contractually agreed upon end in about six months when all the deadlines are met, milestone passed, and deliverables handed over to the company. But it also shows me how much globalization and the reach of remote work and collaboration has spread. In fact, I like to look at this as the traditional outsourcing model stood upsidedown — namely, that a company in a country where talent is routinely hired because of high education, great language skills, and low rates of pay is savvy enough to recognize that recruiting individual contributors with recognizable names is a good idea when creating books and training materials for IT training subjects and curriculum that is in very high demand. I also have to respect them for paying at or above going market rates here in the US for this kind of work, to my great surprise and delight.

As more and more individual workers go freelance, and take on contracts through the Internet marketplace, I have to believe that this phenomenon will accelerate. Up to now, I’ve mostly worked for US companies (publishers or Website operators, in fact, along with some big-name training companies such as New Horizons or Global Knowledge) but I see no reason why big-name companies around the globe won’t seek to hook up with individuals who are recognizable in their fields to leverage any available synergy inherent to such a relationship.

For an organization, what’s in a name has to do with branding, name recognition, and customer relationship development. For freelance hired guns like myself, what’s in a name has to do with putting oneself in contention for high-visibility, high-value jobs as and when they become available. In a word: “More work!” I have to believe this is an honest-to-gosh win-win situation.

Online Degrees Worthwhile?

The other day I got an e-mail from David F of Tuscaloosa, AL, that read as follows:

I was recently reviewing some of your writings and used something of yours in an assignment (properly cited of course). I am currently taking classes online through the University of Phoenix working towards an IT networking degree. My question is how do you feel about online programs such as this? Will this type of degree hold me back, in your opinion? Can you offer any thoughts of what I can do to increase my chances of being successful in the IT world? I am not in a big hurry but thought you would be a great person to ask these questions to.

Here’s my reply, which I’ll follow with some additional commentary (text reproduced by permission of sender):

Dear David:
The University of Phoenix has become one of the largest college/university systems in the world, thanks to its successful, global online degree programs. While a degree from UP isn’t on the same level as an Ivy League school, it’s on a par with most state universities. Thus, I don’t think this type of degree will hold you back, even if it won’t open a lot of doors for you either (snip). You should definitely take advantage of UP’s programs that let you earn MS/Cisco/ISC-squared and other certifications en route to a degree. The combination of degree plus certification is a good thing. You should also try to get an intern or summer position in IT as well, to add some real-world experience to your education and training.
HTH, and thanks for writing. Good luck in your educational pursuits and career planning. (snip) Thanks!
–Ed–

I remember hearing on NPR the other day that the University of Phoenix was the ultimate recipient of loan and grant money from Uncle Sam for something in the neighborhood of $3B for 2008 (see “Getting an Education Online” for a fascinating roundtable on this subject), and that online education is the current and future wave of growth for higher ed. Thus, I really don’t think any particular onus inheres to degrees earned online. Going forward, learning online and earnign online degrees will become far more the rule than the exception.

As Expected, US Unemployment Tops 10% Mark

Today’s the first Friday of the month, and that means that it’s also the day that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its “Employment Situation Summary” for the preceding month (October, in this case). As expected, the official unemployment rate now tops the ten percent mark, at 10.2%. Surprisingly, job losses were heavy in retail (with the Christmas shopping season more or less underway), as well as in manufacturing and construction (but no suprises there). According to NPR, this is the first time joblessness has hit this mark since 1983, and they also report that “it’s the 22nd straight month the U.S. economy has shed jobs, the longest on records dating back 70 years.”

The same NPR story also contains this chilling quote: “Counting those who have settled for part-time jobs or stopped looking for work, the unemployment rate would be 17.5 percent, the highest on records dating from 1994.” The story quite accurately notes that recovery isn’t yet fast enough to get hiring on the move, and invokes “the specter of a jobless recovery” — that is, a period of sufficiently slow economic growth that employers don’t feel confident enough to reverse the current trend to reduce overall headcount, and start hiring new employees instead.

Despite this gloomy employment outlook (which was widely anticipated around the globe) stock markets worldwide staged a rally yesterday, and the US markets are up this morning as I write this blog. Yesterday, the Dow closed above 10,000 again (10,005.96), NASDAQ nearly hit 2,000 (2,195.32), and the S&P 500 was up nearly 2% (1066.63). As you might expect, various stock pickers are predicting that this is a momentary market peak, with another big stretch downward into bull market territory ahead (for example, see Bob Prechter’s interview on Yahoo! Finance yesterday).

If that’s true — and only time will tell — I have to speculate that his makes a gloomy employment market even gloomier. IT professionals would be well-advised to re-read & heed the mantras from my Monday blog, which went as follows:

For those currently employed in IT that goes something like this: “Be cool. Stay put. Hone your skills. Wait for things to improve.” For those who want to work in IT, either on a first job or to get themselves back to work, it sounds like “Be cool. Look harder. Hone your skills (and consider some training or back to school). Wait for things to improve.”

What with the normal seasonal downturn in non-retail hiring between Halloween and New Year’s already underway, and the current downward trend in employment, hunkering down remains the watchword for the foreseeable future.

GDP Up, But Employment Keeps Dropping

If I understand things correctly a recession is considered to be over when a quarterly GDP report returns to positive terrritory. With a forecast return for this quarter to a positive growth rate, by some metrics that means the recession is over. But that probably explains why About.com includes these paragraphs in its discussion of recessions and depressions:

The standard newspaper definition of a recession is a decline in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for two or more consecutive quarters.

This definition is unpopular with most economists for two main reasons. First, this definition does not take into consideration changes in other variables. For example this definition ignores any changes in the unemployment rate or consumer confidence. Second, by using quarterly data this definition makes it difficult to pinpoint when a recession begins or ends. This means that a recession that lasts ten months or less may go undetected.

By the other metrics tagged in the quote’s second paragraph — namely, unemployment rate and consumer confidence — this recession is most emphaticallyl NOT over. Consumer confidence dipped in September and October, and unemployment rates have continued to climb by fits and starts all year long with decreases for both August and September as well. Many economists and even President Obama continue to predict that unemployment rates will top 10 percent by the end of the year or in the first quarter of next year (of course, with the current rate at 9.8%, that’s no huge jump in rates either).

What does this mean for IT workers? Repeat my mantras from earlier postings on this very same topic. For those currently employed in IT that goes something like this: ”Be cool. Stay put. Hone your skills. Wait for things to improve.” For those who want to work in IT, either on a first job or to get themselves back to work, it sounds like “Be cool. Look harder. Hone your skills (and consider some training or back to school). Wait for things to improve.” Given that the employment market is normally quiescent between Thanksgiving and New Years (except for part-time seasonal employment) that definitely means that “hunker down” remains the watchword of the day.

Please join me in wishing for improvement and real growth in IT jobs for 2010.

MS, Prometric Team Up to Offer Student Exam Discounts

What with Prometric being Microsoft’s primary global testing center operator nowadays, I guess the two companies simply had to team up to make their recent “learn.grow.succeed” program workable. Here’s the deal:

• Visit the afore-linked Student Discount page
• Check out the discounted exams available (2 for MCITP, 8 for MCSA, 6 each for MCDST and MCAD, and a whopping 55 for MCTS), then click the Get Discount link on any given exam to sign up
• Provide your name, e-mail address, and country to get up to 55% off on any or all of these exams, which you must then take on or before June 30, 2010 (the fine print also reads “You MUST present a valid student ID card at the time of the exam to get the student price”)

The logo for the new student exam discount program

I’m also guessing that it will help if the e-mail address you provide includes the domain name of an accredited college or university, as has been the case with other previous higher-ed offerings from MS and Prometric — even though this isn’t spelled out explicitly anywhere on the related Web pages (I’m going to try to sign up for a discount voucher in the absence of such an address, and I’ll let you know what happens).

Discounts apparently vary by country of location, with 55% off as the cap (that’s $82.50 off, for a total exam cost of $67.60, if that discount level applies in the US). Because MS varies its charges from country to country, and generally charges less for exams outside the first world, it makes sense to me that they would vary their discount by location. I can only hope they’re giving those from the poorest countries the best student deals.

Check it out!

Thinking About Presentation Skills in IT

On Wednesday, I posted a mini-review of Alan Carroll’s book The Broadband Connection, which aims to help IT professionals prepare, deliver, and manage more effective and compelling presentations to audiences of all kinds. In some back-and-forth about that review with the publisher’s rep, I got to thinking about my own experience in presenting to audiences of various types and sizes, and how I myself came around to developing a set of creditable presentation skills.

For many newbie presenters, their focus is entirely on the material. Do they know their stuff? Are they familiar enough with what’s on the slides that they can talk about them fluidly and accurately? Have they prepared for questions? Practiced their delivery? and so forth…

What’s missing from this focus, and what Carroll spends much of the coverage in his book on adding to the picture, is the audience to whom the presentation is to be delivered. Although he wraps up his advice and behavior coaching in transpersonal psychology language, his most important points can be summarized as follows:

• Make eye contact with the audience. People need to feel like you’re interested in and talking to them, not to an empty room.
• Don’t talk all the time, with no breaks. People need time to digest what you’re telling them, and to think about what you’re trying to convey.
• Check the audience members’ facial expressions and body language to see how you’re doing: are they bored? confused? Do they “get” what you’re talking about? Do you see signs of interest?
• Interact with the audience: Get to know peoples’ names, then use them. Ask questions. Solicit input. Provoke opinions and information sharing from the audience, particularly if they’ve either failed or succeeded in trying to address issues, develop solutions, or implement systems that you are trying to explore and explain.

I could go on and on, and if you find this stuff interesting, you should definitely check out this book, too. But the key is to understand ultimately that it’s not what you know, or how much ground you can cover, that really counts when you give a technical (or other) presentation. What really counts is what you can give to your attendees, and what they can take away with them when the presentation is over. If you remember that basic principle, and increase your efforts to get your messages across, you will improve your presentation skills immediately.

A New Age Guide to IT Presentation Skills?

About two months ago, I got a very nice letter from Adrienne Lang, a marketing associate at boutique publisher BenBella Books in Dallas, TX. She recommended one of her books to me for review in this blog, and described it as follows:

In The Broadband Connection, Alan Carroll offers his proven strategies in this fresh and innovative, step-by-step guidebook. I’m confident in saying that it’s the only book and one of the only sources anywhere on presenting and speaking written for IT professionals.

Front cover: Broadband Connection

As a long-time IT presenter myself (I made my living for 4 of the 7 years I worked at Novell as a “talking head” briefing high-level customers around the world, and have taught IT classes for Novell, Interop, the Internet Security Conference, and off and on at Austin Community College for the past 15 years) I was both curious and interested to learn more about what Mr. Carroll had to offer. But although Ms. Lang sent me the book more or less instantly (I think it came one week after she offered to send it to me), it’s taken me some time to get around to reading it from cover to cover.

Here, after some delay, is my review. Allen Carroll is obviously a gifted presenter himself, and understands very well how to teach others to develop their presentation skills. That said, I found this book to contain a sometimes baffling mixture of New Age philosophy and hard-boiled presentation skills, tips, and techniques. I’m guessing that Mr. Carroll gets his inspiration and insight from his New Age philosophers and sages (he quotes regularly from Werner Erhard, Eckhard Tolle, Ramakrishnan, and even Albert Einstein, throughout the book). And because it informs his world view and understanding of what it means to present to an audience, especially in terms of establishing rapport, making genuine communication occur, and checking in through a variety of means with attendees to make sure messages are received and understood, he also seeks to impart much of that information to his readers so that they, presumably, can put these same insights and philosophies to work in making IT presentations.

My biggest beef with the book is the way he uses technical concepts as metaphors for interpersonal communications and interaction. For example, he talks about IT presenters who focus only on dumping their knowledge bases in front of an audience without regard to their needs, reactions, or uptake as operating via a 56 Kbps connection. By contrast, a more enlightened presenter who can intersperse nuggets of useful, relevant information (communication packets that use voice, data, and video) between pauses and interpersonal interactions (space packets, which include outright pauses, body checks, agenda checks, audience observation and responses, and so forth) operates at a broadband connection level of interaction. He refers to making eye contact with audience members as establishing a VPN link to them, and talks about the personal and cultural preconceptions of reality and identity that prevent presenters from opening up fully to their audiences as a firewall from which bricks must be removed to facilitate freer, more open communication between a presenter and his audience.

I get what Mr. Carroll is saying, and I appreciate his enthusiastic and insightful attempts to move his readers from a dry, disconnected, monotone interaction with the audience to a more enagaging, active, and interactive presentation style (and philosophy). There’s a great deal of useful information in this book, especially when it comes to teaching presenters that what they themselves know is of relatively little value, but what they can impart to (and learn from) the audience is of great worth.

If you read this book you’ll find it full of useful tips and tricks for managing a presentation, working with an audience, learning how to read and react to an audience, working with resistance and difficult questions, and more. But you’ll have to plow through a lot of New Age rhetoric about overcoming fear, opening yourself up to the world, abandoning your needs and preconceptions, and so forth to find that information. If you like this kind of thing, or at least it doesn’t bother you very much, you’ll find this book both interesting and informative. On the other hand, if you prefer to steer clear of deep psychological insights and the occasional bit of mystical mumbo-jumbo, this book might just drive you up the wall.

As a former academic anthropologist with a minor in cognitive psychology, I found it fascinating myself, not least because Carroll turns subject matter related to perception and presentation of self in everyday life into an interesting and challenging toolset to remake oneself as a more fully engaged IT presenter (and hopefully also, a more well-rounded human being). It came as absolutely no suprise to me that Carroll is described in the promo copy for the book as a transpersonal psychologist — that’s clearly the tradition upon which he draws for this book, and the milieu that he inhabits. Here’s my final assessment: if you want some coaching from a man who obviously understands the interpersonal dynamics about making good, effective presentations, you can get some value from this book. But if you’re looking for a book for IT presenters by a practiced IT presenter himself, this probably isn’t what you’re after. But for a mere $10.47 (list price from the publisher, not including S&H) it may still be worth taking a flyer anyway (if you don’t like it, you can always give it one of your more touchy-feely comrades down the hall or a few cubes over).

Interesting Employment Info Source

For this blog, I lean heavily on the monthly employment situation summaries from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). But there’s another, more commercial source of employment information out there to which I’d like to point for today’s blog. It’s Manpower, Inc. a global player in the employment services industry. They publish a quarterly Employment Outlook Survey that takes a more global look at the employment situation, that helps to put the US numbers into a more comprehensive context. Their Q4 2009 Manpower Outlook Survey: Global is out, and it has some interesting tales to tell.

For the Americas, the US is at the middle of the pack ahead of Costa Rica and Peu (both down more than 20 percent since this time last year), on par with Argentina, Guatemala, and Mexico (all down 11 percent or more, just like us). Canada is slightly ahead of the US at 9 percent down, while Brazil is way ahead of everybody else, even with its own numbers for last year.

In Asia Pacific, China and Taiwan are the leaders with numbers that are officially flat (though China is down 1 percent and Taiwan down 8 percent when seasonally adjusted factors are taken into account). In that part of the world, Singapore is doing relatively well at 2 percent down, while Australia and New Zealand are down 9 and 8 percent respectively. Other countries in that part of the world are down over 10 percent (Hong Kong, India, and Japan).

In Europe and the Middle East numbers are all over the place. Hungary and Italy are flat, with the UK nearly so (down 1 percent, but at 0 when seasonal adjustments are factored in). Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Ireland, and Spain all fall between 3 and 5 percent down, and everybody else fits into two broad camps. Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland all fall between 6 and 9 percent. Other European countries fall between 12 percent (Austria and Greece) to 14 percent (Poland) to South African (?, 16 percent) with Romania bringing up the rear (at a whopping 32 percent).

Overall, this report characterizes US employment as weaker in terms of movement for the coming year, and relatively stable when comparing this quarter to those immediately preceding and succeeding it. What does this mean? We’re down, and can’t expect massive relief any time soon. But then again, things shouldn’t get too much worse looking forward, either. After the roller-coaster ride we’ve had for the past 18 months, maybe this isn’t too bad but it looks like it will be a while before things genuinely start to improve in the US.

Need a cheaper MCP exam? Ask an MCT

MCT stands for Microsoft Certified Trainer, and these stalwart and knowledgable professionals make up the backbone of the classroom training industry for Microsoft certification exams. I stumbled across this tidbit of information in the Born to Learn blog while trolling for topics to write about. Their entry is named “Exams: Why Pay Retail?” and it explains that MCTs can offer discounts of between 10% and 20% (the actual amount varies by country), as well as a 40% discount on any MeasureUp 60 Day Online Practice Test (this program gives you 60 days during which you can take as many practice exams on your topic as you like whenever you like).

How to take advantage of this offer? Ask an MCT for a discount voucher through the MCT Rewards program. Here’s what such a voucher looks like, grabbed straight from the aforementioned Born to Learn blog on this subject:

MCT Discount Voucher

With most MS exams now going for $150, this will save you $30. It’s not enough to retire on, but it ain’t bad either. Now all you have to do is find an MCT…and perhaps you can get lucky even outside the classroom!