Slashdot Mirror
Moving Up the IT Ladder in a Poor Economy?
Andy asks: "As almost anyone who joined the IT industry on the tail end of the Dot-Com boom can tell you, trying to move up in the industry for the past couple of years has been like jogging up-wind in a hurricane. I have sent resumes to countless numbers of employers only to still be working in the same $13/hr. low-end outsource support job as when I started (and $13/hr. doesn't get you too far in Boston these days). Learning more and more languages/technologies/protocols has merely resulted in a larger skill set on my resume, with pretty much the same level of experience, and no new interviews. Has anyone else been able to get out of this sort of slump, either during this economic slump or a previous one? Should I just continue the path of learning as much as I can and applying for jobs? Would getting a cert (maybe an RHCE or some Cisco certs) help? Would it be worth it to get a degree in MIS or CS?"
Move out a Boston.
Big cities think in big company ways. You have management and underlings.
Get to some smaller city where you can work for a smaller business, learn the entire business and move up from there.
At aim for smaller companies ones without a set corporate structure that has no room for you anywhere but the bottom.
t
Keep computers in your basement as a hobby. I am wrapping up my BS in Business this spring, likely startting MBA next year. Why be Dilbert when you can be the Pointy Haried Boss?
My biggest problem is I am too good at what I do (I build Oracle/MS-SQL DB's for health care facilites). I also make enough money that the ROI on the MBA doesn't look that great. I'll have to work hard on forgetting what I know to be an effective manager. "I heard Mauve has more RAM". heh. Can't wait!
JON
Maybe this will change when I finish school next year, but damn, I would kill for a salary of $13/hour at the moment.
Currently, one month's pay at that rate that would pay my rent, food, utilities, cable, phone, gas, and 6 months of car insurance, with a sizable chunk left over.
Probably couldn't support a family on that amount, granted, but for anyone (single or splitting costs) not living right near a giant city, $13/hour would be awesome.
I have resorted to reference farming, since in my experience a bad reference can kill any chance you have at getting a job. I know from my experience of interviews there is a large glut of tech-certifiables. Just because they have the initials doesn't mean they know the stuff. Certifications are a bit like final exams. Sure you may have gotten an A on your calculus exam 5 years ago, but if you don't use the skills daily they will degrade.
Also, many people ignore the requirements on the job-descriptions for new applications. It surprised me at first when requesting for a SQL engineer and recieving resumes specifying MSaccess experience solely as for a DB admin position. Resume's like this go to the shredder.
From my own personal attempts at getting hired (which were quite extensive.) My biggest problem was a "poisoned" reference. It made all the other references pretty much worthless. Upon calling this individual, I learned later of course, that most of the prospective employers just stopped and tossed the resume in the circular file.
Also, presentation and attitude helps a ton. If you're looking for a new job be as personable as you would be with a client, as they potentially are. The employer is attempting to find someone who is not only adept, but also socially capable. Shave the beard (or trim it), at least tie the hair back and wear at least a tie when you even HAND in your resume. A good hand shake helps as well as your eye contact, making sure they know who you are is good since then they will know you're not just some resume spammer.
A smart employer will hire someone based upon their experience, if you have no professional experience in an area you would like to move into donate your time somewhere for an NPO, or find a way to utilize it in your current employers setup. A class or certification only helps so much, experience counts for so much more.
2 things:
1) Certification earned in the military most likely was tough to get, and thus is respected.
2) There are a lot of worthless IT certs in the civilian world, that's why we disrespect them. The poster mentioned "technically adept and smart employers"... headhunters rarely (at least in my experience) have a clue, they're just trying to match technology names to a resume. I once had this fellow quite confused, as it took 5 minutes to explain, that coding Java, and "writing java scripts" were not related. stoopeed headhunter...
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
I graduated in March 02 from getting a technical degree in Java Programming(along with a few certs) and was in a very similar situation that you were. I finally had a brain storm and started sending in resumes to jobs in marketing departments that had internet marketing groups. I positioned myself as the guy who interface between tech needs and business needs. It's worked out great so far.
I've been keeping my programming skills sharp by freelancing when available and working on interesting projects for my website. In another 6 months I'll start looking for a programming job again but now I'll have 2 years experiance managing people, working out budgets, working on business strategy and an established protfolio of freelance work.
This approach probably isn't for everyone but for it's made this recession bearable.
"You're better off selecting one or two specific areas and focusing on getting experience within it."
Considering how much outsourcing there is in the industry, jack of all trades are becoming more popular. Companies want to hire people who have varied knowledge since the specific tasks can be outsourced. Managerial positions in IT where one can make decisions on what and where projects can be outsourced requires broader knowledge.
I recently did a paper for a Human Resource Management class in which I interviewed two hiring managers in from two different software companies.
I asked how they would rank their candidates on based on education, experience, and certifications.
While one preferred education over experience, they both agreed that certifications were a distant third and worthless without the corresponding experience.
However, since labor is a commodity and we are currently in period of high supply and low demand, you aren't going to get as much as you might want to.
There are a lot of very experienced and very educated people going for the same positions you are. As one manager put it, "Right now I can get an incredible amount of talent for a third of their last job, simply because they need the check and benefits."
These days, you either need an impressive degree, an impressive amount of experience, or a combination thereof.
As someone said above, your social networking skills are important, too.
Good luck.
It was a business reference who had offered to be a reference. They had been a client for a few years, and I had a good relationship with the owner. I made sure to ask the references I did list to see if anyone contacted them, and the only one who responded was this client.
I won't point fingers or name names, but I surely won't use any business references ever again. Still this is old news, I kind of skipped over my point... I was eventually hired by those who had worked with me in the past and knew my skillset as well as my social aspect. I don't believe they even bothered to contact references.
The one thing that's better to have is a DOD security clearance. In the DC area, if you've got a security clearance, you can score a job in the low $60s with barely any experience. Since it can take upwards of 18 months to get clearance, most employers want new hires to already have clearance.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
I agree... a cert won't mean much once the interview process starts, but it could make the difference in getting the interview in the first place.
I worked as HR Database Admin for a fairly large (6000+ employee) manufacturing company with plants all over the US. A monster ad for a new Network admin brought in 500+ resumes.
The position reported directly to the CIO, so he was running the hiring process. You don't drop 500 resumes on the CIO's desk. You don't even drop 100 resumes on his desk.
We told him how many applicants we had, and he basically said "OK, throw out everyone who doesn't have a degree, everyone who doesn't have a certification, and everyone who doesn't have a stable work history and at least 5 years of experience. Let me know how many are left."
That got us down to about 60 or so. Did we toss out the best candidate? Very likely. Did we have the time and manpower to give each of those resumes the attention it deserved? Hell no.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
Hey, how about I lend my credibility to yours.
Whenever I see someone require a college degree for an IT position, I think, hey, there's someone who doesn't really know how to assess someone's skills much.
I have known, throughout my relatively long career, many talented people in software development with either no degree at all, or an 'unrelated' one (art, music, etc).
I myself have no degree, and I have never been unemployed. I've chosen my career moves as wisely as I can, and avoided the urge to 'job-hop'. I've developed good relationships with not only my fellow programmers, but with the business-folks I've met.
As a direct result, I've been earning over six-figures since around 1999 and am about to close on a 35 foot sailing yacht as a reward for my hard work. And yes, I am bragging, but it's to make a point.
Success in this business requires being good at what you do, but that only gets you part way, the rest is all about people. The relationships you've made, the bridges you've burned, all of it.
"That naive cube! How long must I suffer this!" --Sheldon J. Plankton
I've never meet a hiring manager that doesn't move former military guys to the very top of the resume pile
I'm a network admin, and one step below the guy who does the actual hiring at my job. The last three tech support positions that we filled with ex-military applicants, because we once felt the same way about them, all turned out to be duds, and all three were just alike in personality and professional demeanor. In the interview, they all seemed very competant, yet humble and eager to learn and play on the team, but once aboard, all three had one and only one goal in mind: to see how fast they could push their way to the top and see if they take over mine and my boss's jobs. Rules and procedures be damned... those were just a hindrance to their goals. We had a constant mess just cleaning up all the unauthorized, unlicensed software they kept installing all about the organization and fixing all the network shared filesystem ACLs that they'd open wide up to full access to everyone because they thought ACL management was too big a hassle. One of them would deliberately install more unlicensed software on the users machines after each time my boss busted him for doing it. They turned out to not be team players at all, except when they got together to conspire against our boss and undermine his authority. My boss is an ex-Marine, and he swore he'd never hire another ex-military tech again if that's the way Uncle Sam is making them these days. Our two best, most productive, sharpest, and easiest to keep-in-line techs hired since then are a couple of typical total geeks. One is a complete Microsoft fanatic, and the other is a totally rabid anti-MS Linux & BSD fanatic. Thet get along great at work, no sh!t.
I have found that most CEO's are more interested in making more money, rather than your particular skill set. Making money for the company is the ultimate skill, no matter what language or platform you use. Most of the succesful people I know are not specialists, they are "jack of all trades" that know enough about lots of subjects. Its not the knowledge that matters, its their ability to apply it in a way that is profitable.
I see so much potential for programmers, it is unreal. I look into the void and see a major shortage of applications for many industries that run on Linux. I have been searching for many, many months, and have not found any of the software I need to change the network to a *nix environment. I don't even care what flavor: Linux, BSD, OSX, whatever. SAPs suite only runs on Windows, and they don't want to support Linux as a Windows file server. Many calls to IBM have resulted in dead end leads. Oracle is just too much for this job, and slightly out of budget for only a 4 year license (and we have a fairly liberal budget).
I hear alot about skilz and such, but most small to medium business owners care about the results, not the methods. Often, you have to be able to fill more than one pair of shoes to get in. One way is with the ability to produce/demonstrate some software that will address some problem they have. Desperately. Business owners need solutions. We need software. We need a reason to fully embrace Linux. We want to. And we can pay fairly for it, and for extra support. But we can't if we can't the software to run the business to begin with.
I can't say what the solution is, but Linux desperately need commercial programmers to succeed, and I know there are lots of people willing to pay for it. I am one of them. It seems there just HAS to be lots of opportunity for a programmer in this environment. The economy is not bad. It WAS bad, and its getting better fast. Some industries and/or companies didn't really have a recession. They saw growth every year for 10 years or more. Even new startups need software, and MS is so expensive for a small network (think 20 to 40), that GNU/Linux can compete if it has the right applications. None of the licensing headaches, get to use older hardware, more stable, easy to customize, much easier to administer. Yes, we believe you, we already use Linux for routers and web servers. Now give us the biz apps. Here, have some money.
Nothing would make me happier than being able to say "Yes, this is exactly the software I need. I will gladly pay you your asking price, and full support as well.". Everything out there is either too small and simple, or too much for a company with under 50 employees. There simply IS opportunity out there. Now would be a good time for some visionary capitalist to finance it and make themselves rich in the process. Once Linux becomes the dominant OS and bgates is irrelavent, we will need someone new to kick around anyway.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
P.S. I would never hire a specialist except probably for a decent DBA.
Amen to that. When I see people with 5-10 yrs experience doing one type of work, I run. This typically means that they either can't or won't learn new things. I've been a tester for a diverse set of projects, but there are others in my group who have been working on the same set of technologies for 10 years. Guess who understands the company better? Guess who is more employable (especially outside of telecomm, where I currently work)? Yep, me. I have a lot of knowledge and I've proven that I can and will learn and improve.
So to the question at hand. My advice is do something to show you want to do more than what you are doing now. All you have proven is that you can handle a $13/hr support job. Fine, I have no problem hiring you to do that for me. But you want more. If I were interviewing you, I would want to know what job do you want and what have you done to prepare yourself for it. With the way support is being outsourced, you can't expect to stay in that field and make more money. You need to do _something_ to move yourself where you want to go. Certs? Degree? Depends on what you want to do. But if you aren't willing to go get some of the easy certs how would I, as a hiring manager, know that you will really stretch yourself at my company. I've seen a lot of resumes and everybody with a few years of experience can list lots of technologies, even if they don't really know them. You have to do something to prove you are different.
I personally think a degree is the way to go. It gives you the background you need for other things and shows you are willing to work hard to improve yourself. It is the key to most of the higher paying jobs out there. Without it you will always be chasing after the latest certificate.