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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."
"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."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
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.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.