Who are CIOs Planning to Hire Next?

Ed Baker writes "Do you have the skills CIOs are looking for? Cioinsight.com just posted their latest research, in which they asked more than 400 top IT executives about the hiring outlook for 18 different IT positions, and finds that the demand for new systems and infrastructure is leading to more hiring for IT professionals who can build them. The result: Project managers and programmers/systems developers top the list of IT professionals CIOs are looking to hire."

Comments

Tecnhincal vs. business skills

[winkydink]

I've harped on this for almost two decades. Technical skills keep you employed. Business skills get you promoted.

[OK, nit pickers, I'm waiting for you to point out the corner cases where this isn't true]

Re:Tecnhincal vs. business skills

[Grishnakh]

Schmoozing, bullshitting, backstabbing your peers, politicking, empire building, etc.

It's weird; the American culture values business skills more than any other (except maybe acting skills and legal skills), but these skills aren't even mentioned in public school.

Re:Tecnhincal vs. business skills

[Grishnakh]

I forgot to mention one very important skill if you want to rise to the very top of the most powerful corporations: throwing chairs.

minor addition

[geekoid]

"Technical skills keep you employed. Business skills get you promoted."
I say:
Technical skills get you the job, social skills keep you employed. Business skills get you promoted."

Re:minor addition

[segfaultcoredump]

I've been involved with dozens of interviews. They all tend to go like this:

me: I see that you claimed to have skils in XYZ. How comfortable are you with implementing an XYZ system?

candidate: I'm an expert with XYZ

me: Oh, how did you solve the /Bogus XYZ/ issue?
    or
me: What were some of the design issues you faced in implementing XYZ? (make sure it is not something that is covered in chapter 1 of the XYZ cram guide)

candidate: Oh, simple.... /5 minutes of bs/

If the candidate gives us a look of 'wtf are you talking about', then we smile and move on, drilling into real issues with XYZ (to determine just how much they know about XYZ).

The general idea is this: give them some bait, see if they take it.

As an average, I'd say that half of the candidates that get to my stage of the process are overstating their abilities. They dont get any further. I have yet to regret hiring somebody. (If they are faking it, I have a tendancy to keep drilling on the topic so that it soon becomes painfully obvious that even they realize that they are faking it and we all know it. Its a great way to make sure that the guy does not expect to actually get the job)

In general, lying will only get you a job at a place run by idiots. If that is the type of job you want, go for it. It can pay well, but the turnover can be a real pain. When layoffs come (and they will. Remember, you are working for idiots), dont expect them to keep "the best" people, just the ones that they _think_ are the best. i.e., the ones with the best golf scores. :-)

Got to know the Business

[twitter]

Translation: Big dumb companies value propaganda more than function and don't value their employees. Notice that training is close to the bottom of the list. Technical competence and familiarity with fundamentals of the field should be the thing they look for in new hires. Business school is something a company should pay for it's own employees if it wants to promote them to upper management. For a new employee it's a place where they can forget what they need to know. Looking for detailed business knowledge outside of the company is an admission that you are not willing to train and have not trained your own people adequately in a long time. Prediction: Big dumb companies are going to get dumber and people working there will continue to be forced to waste their overworked lives on mind numbing nonsense instead of getting things done right. You will be worn out and discarded like a rubber gasket.

True familiarity with the way a company works can only come from working in the company and keeping up with your competitor's actions. Business school case studies, while interesting, generally don't apply outside the specific case except for obvious general principles. Sure, some business schools are very good at understanding industry but I'm not convinced that's going to be useful to some guy who's there to make a better network or information sharing tool for the company. Someone who's been at the company long enough is going to know who needs what information from who an how best to get it there. If they have had the time to keep up with the field, they are a company's best resource.

Yes, I've worked for a fortune 100 company. It got nothing but worse and this survey shows that the trend continues. Notice how the smaller companies valued skill more than propaganda?

Re:Got to know the Business

[BVis]

Yes, I've worked for a fortune 100 company. It got nothing but worse and this survey shows that the trend continues. Notice how the smaller companies valued skill more than propaganda?

I've worked for more than one Fortune 500 company (I'm honestly not sure if they're 100 or not) where it was very clear that there was *no chance whatsoever* that you would ever advance beyond your current job description. It seems to be SOP these days for Big Biz to cultivate the environment in such a way that it's very clear to everyone involved that if you want a raise (past the pittance that you get each year that doesn't even keep up with the cost of living) or a promotion, you must leave the company.

The attitude seems to be that you must leave a company with no more skills than you walked in with, EVER. Frequently employees who get training on their own are seen as being "disloyal" by trying to improve their skill set. Why? Because if you're making yourself more marketable, clearly it means you're not interested in staying in the position you have that doesn't require those skills, and are dissatisfied with the opportunities that you've been granted at your current company. (The fact that those opportunities are frequently described as "no fucking way" never enters into the thought process.)

Why Big Biz seems to be so incredibly phobic of encouraging the professional growth of its employees is a mystery to me. It's so incredibly pervasive that many companies have stopped hiring IT staff *altogether*. Instead they hire "contractors" (read: "temps" or "slaves" or "disposable humans") to do the jobs that need to be done for the continued functioning of the company. The contractor gathers experience about the computing environment over the months (or, more likely, years) that they're there, which is rendered completely useless to both the contractor and the company when one of the following happens: 1) Some beancounter arbitrarily decides that payroll is too high and forces someone to lay off contractors regardless of the importance of their role, 2) the contractor is fired (oh, excuse me, "has their contract terminated") because of some incredibly minor infraction of the rules, their failure to take abuse from a permanent employee, or just because, or 3) the contractor realizes there is no place to go from where they are, and decides to leave. The company has to go hire and train another "contractor", during which time the (usually critical) work the contractor was doing goes undone, to the detriment of the entire organization.

This isn't restricted to IT by a long shot. A close friend of mine had been in the same job for 4 years. Her supervisor left to take another job, leaving the position open. This friend of mine had more seniority and experience than others in her group (not to mention being the only one in the group that actually did any work, the rest spent most of their time talking about Pro Wrestling and NASCAR.) Her supervisor wrote a letter recommending her for the position once she had left. A golden opportunity to reward a valued employee for hard work.

Rather than promote her (even in title, maybe not with a raise), they decided to eliminate the position. That's how much they didn't want to promote her (or anyone else). Big Biz has raised the concept of "penny wise, pound foolish" to an art form.

Re:Ubermensch

[geekoid]

you are not balancing a character sheet here.

You can maitain your '8' in tech AND raise you business skills.

Who cares what CIOs think about technical hiring?

[Money for Nothin']

CIOs (in Fortune 500 companies, at least) are so far removed from the proles at the bottom of the corporate pyramid -- the admins/engineers, developers, etc. -- that they frankly don't have a damn clue as to what they need. It is not their job to know *specifically* what they need that far down the corporate ladder; that is the job of one or more layers of middle-management they have separating the CIO from the people with actual technical skills (unlike the CIO), i.e. the rest of us unwashed masses (and in IT, this is sometimes a literal phrase...).

The CIO's job is to manage management en-masse (to "throw IQ points" at problems, as Bill Gates' approach tends to be), and to have "Big Ideas", or at least read the same business-tech magazines their lowly technical people do (eWeek, InformationWeek, etc.) which present big ideas -- and then tell the techies what to do, even if it's technically the wrong thing to do. Your typical CIO does not have a technical background...

Re:Ubermensch

[Grishnakh]

No one said you had to unlearn anything. But if your job doesn't involve working in X technology every day, you're simply not going to know it very well, regardless of how many books you read or courses you take. I've taken countless "training" courses throughout my job at my current megacorporation. They're really not all that helpful, not compared to actually having to work with it. Most people tend to forget things they don't use.

Re:Like I said, "Ubermensch".

[Cyno]

Depends on the goal. If your company's goal is to create a solid, stable, efficient, maintainable, scalable infrastructure then you can forget about the business skills and focus on the job. If their goal is just to make money at all cost, then forget about the tech skills (you already got the job) and focus on the business skills, such as how to smile and lie to someone's face and turn around to stab them in the back in your next meeting with their superior, and how to cover your ass proactively to avoid taking the fall for disasters that will result from the obvious lack of competence, since nobody cared about competence, its not the goal, etc, etc, etc.. :)

no no no no no

[oyenstikker]

Social skills and [false] confidence get you the job, not completely sucking* keeps you employed, and kissing above and kicking below (aka business skills) gets you promoted. Techical skills get stuff done.

* Nobody wants to fess up to hiring sub-par people, so they pretend they're okay and keep them around.

Ideal skill set

[mpaque]

1. Nod your head continuously any time your boss is addressing your team. This conveys that you agree with everything he says and that you only wish you could have articulated it as brilliantly as he is doing. If his ego is insatiable, his eyes will constantly gravitate in your direction for affirmation. In other words, embrace your inner bobblehead.

2. Disagree with everything the boss says. Go out of your way to contradict her every statement. This shows that you're an independent thinker and way smarter than the rest of the peons you've been thrown in with.

3. Use the same buzzwords as the boss. Make sure what you say is an actionable, user-centric, directionally correct turnkey solution with touchpoints. As you can see, it doesn't even have to make sense if you say it fast enough. For extra points, speak entirely in acronyms.

4. Ask questions during company meetings that have no purpose other than to showcase your tremendous intellect. If the CIO is talking about reorganizing the help desk, don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask what effect the current business strategy will have on the next quarter's profit margin. For an added bonus, ask this question at the end of a meeting. (See next point.)

5. Don't make any major presentations during the course of a regular meeting. Wait until the meeting organizer is wrapping up and makes the perfunctory "does anyone have anything else?" request. Then you launch into your spiel, assuring that everyone has to pay attention to what you say. Sure, they may hate you for making the meeting run long, but you'll have made an impression.

6. Laugh hard at your boss's jokes. The higher placed the boss, the greater your laughter should be. If it's the CIO, feign uncontrollable mirth by intermittently wiping tears from your eyes.

7. Be at work 23 hours per day. Be there when your boss gets in and when she leaves. Even if your workload only constitutes about 3 1/2 hours, stretch it out with coffee breaks, four-hour lunches, non-work-related web browsing, and general co-worker chit chat. After all, productivity is measured by your physical presence not actual turnaround.

8. Pay close attention to whatever phone/PDA/gadget the boss uses. Do a great deal of research on it, then casually let the boss know that you're looking for a new phone/PDA/gadget with particular features--namely the exact ones that his model is known for. The boss will instantly recommend his own gadget, so that when you buy it yourself, he thinks you took his advice, rather than merely copied his purchase.

Shamelessly ripped from "The Trivia Geek" at TechRepublic