Tag Archives: IT jobs

The Best Advice for Your IT Career That You’ve Never Heard

Most IT professionals are aware of the standard career advice.  How to be professional, how to make sure their work is recognized, etc.  However, the best career advice IT consultants can get, the advice that will make sure IT recruiters are always chasing them and they have their pick of IT jobs, is the advice very few people know.  Below are a few pieces of advice that will get the attention of technical recruiters, fellow IT contractors, and keep their resumes growing.

1. Think outside of your job description.  The best job employees aren’t the ones that can handle their job descriptions.  Employers value the ones who can stretch to meet other unexpected needs for the company.

2. Performance is important, but attitude is just as important, if not more.  Entitlement, rudeness and pessimism can all hurt even the best performer.  If you’re not easy to work with, people won’t trouble themselves to work with you for long.

3. Think from your boss’s perspective.  Always try to keep his or her priorities and values in mind.  Consider his problems and do your best to aid him in dealing with them.  This kind of effort will make you a hot commodity with IT staffing firms.

Are You Messing Up This IT Job Interview Question?

Most IT professionals who search with IT recruiters for their IT jobs are pretty well prepared for interviews.  With all the potential questions- technical and not, technical recruiters usually have lengthy conversations with IT consultants before interviews.   But there are some questions that IT professionals need to prep themselves for: the tricky ones that IT managers may throw out to get the info they don’t want to ask for explicitly.  Here’s one question you may be messing up and not even know it:  How Did You Make Time for this Interview Today?

At first glance, it’s pretty straightforward.  You could easily say you ducked out at lunch, asked for a vacation day, etc.  The point of this question, though (especially in the world of IT contractors who often jump IT jobs more often than other fields might) is to gauge your reliability and loyalty to employers.

If you’re looking to move on, it’s best to highlight that you’re not leaving your current employer in a lurch.  Maybe your contract is ending and your boss knows you’re leaving.  Perhaps you intend to put in plenty of notice and to help find your replacement.  Take this moment to highlight the fact that you care about your current employer and you’lll be a great, reliable, loyal employee to future employers.  It may just get you the job!

 

Is Your IT Team Overworked? How to Fix it.

Sometimes in information technology, a team’s workload is unrelenting.  Perhaps there are just too many top-priority projects and too few IT consultants on staff to finish them.  How can IT managers delegate to the IT contractors reporting to them even if their plates are already full?  Here are a few options to consider:

  1. Show your appreciation for the work your IT professionals do and show an understanding of their current workload.  Even if you can’t ease it, sometimes it’s effective to just acknowledge that somebody is working very hard and, more importantly, you know it and appreciate it.
  2. Reconsider priorities and assignments.  Sometimes shifting projects around, possibly even from employee to employee, will make IT jobs a lot more do-able.
  3. Lastly, consider calling your local IT staffing firms.  You may need to think about hiring more staff—either permanently or for the short-term.  Your employees should always have room for things like sick days and vacations and they should ideally be far from burnout level.  Adding more staff is sometimes the solution for this.

 

 

 

Should You Accept that IT Job Offer?

For IT contractors, the leap to new IT jobs occurs a little more often.  How should IT consultants evaluate a new job offer before accepting?  Here are a few things IT professionals should ask themselves and their IT recruiters before filling out final paperwork.

  1. What are the IT managers styles?  What’s the corporate culture like? Can I succeed in these circumstances?
  2. Will I enjoy most of, if not all, the basic duties of this job?  Does it speak to my passions and the skills on my resumes?
  3. What is the commute like? Can I handle it on a twice, daily basis?

If the answers to any of these are ‘no,’ you may have a tough road ahead of you if you take the IT job.  All of these factors affect your daily life on a deep level.  If it’s hard to consider them objectively, talk things through with your recruiter.  They want you to love your new job, too!

Facebook’s Scandal and How it Will Impact IT Professionals

It may not be shocking, but information technology has seen one of, if not its first, scandal of an IT company abusing its technology.  In the last few weeks, it has come to light that Facebook has used its IT contractors and IT consultants to help a psychological study to be carried out on an unwitting 700,000 participants.  The IT managers and others at Facebook are coming under fire now for having a blanket policy that seems to imply that any Facebook users could be included in such studies without their consent.

While the Facebook scandal is interesting, what is most relevant here is probably the bigger moral questions IT professionals are forced to think about now in relation to their IT jobs.  What are the moral responsibilities that the IT world needs to uphold?  What will IT companies owe its users?  Questions like these will undoubtedly be debated hotly in the wake of the Facebook scandal and as technology continues to evolve.

 

 

3 Things You Must Know Before Doing IT Job Interviews

IT recruiters and IT staffing firms always do their best to prep IT consultants for job interviews, but there are some things IT contractors are expected to know before they interview for IT jobs.  Here are a few things any IT professional should know before they interview with an IT manager:

1. Show interest in the particular job you’re interviewing for.  Do no give a longer career trajectory in which this job is just a stepping stone.  Do not suggest that you don’t know what you want to do with your career, but you think this job works well for now.  Do not ask about how quickly you can be promoted from this job.  The interviewer wants to know you want this job and that you’re excited about it.

2. Don’t ask about the hours or the perks.  These are things to discuss if you’re given a job offer.  You can ask about what a typical day looks like, but you want to give the impression you’re more concerned about the work and expectations rather than when you can jet out of the office every day.

3. Research the company.  Then research them again and again and again.  Try to focus on what information might be relevant to the particular department you’re interviewing for.

 

How to Write Thank You Notes that Get IT Jobs

All IT recruiters and IT staffing firms are adamant that IT contractors write thank you notes to interviewers and IT managers.  However, a shocking number of IT consultants don’t do it.  While it’s hard to say why some IT professionals would choose not to use this huge advantage in their search for IT jobs, but one reason may be that they’re unsure how to write effective thank you notes.  Here are some tips that will transform your thank you notes.

1. Use them to head off any concerns: If you detected any concerns from your interviewer(s) you can use your thank you note as a way to address them.  Avoid coming off as defensive, but simply acknowledging the concern and giving a response to it will go a long way.

2. Reiterate why you’re a great fit: You can give your interviewer a strong impression of why you’d be a great candidate in your thank you note.  Explicitly list relevant skills experience, and past achievements. Drive home your point one more time, but this time, do it in writing!

3. Share resources: If you spoke about an article, a business solution, etc, use your thank you note to share it.  This is a moment to show off your resourcefulness, your research skills, and thoroughness.

 

How IT Professionals Can Make Their Commutes Productive

Having a long commute on top of their IT jobs can really start to drag down IT professionals.  However, there are a few ways IT contractors, IT managers, and IT recruiters stuck on the bus or train can make the most of this time.  Using some of these techniques in really effective ways could even result in cutting time in the office.  Read on for ways IT consultants can be more productive during their commutes.

  1. Make your to-do list for the day as you ride into the office in the morning.  Creating this list will give you purpose and jump-start your ‘work’ mindset.  It will also make you more efficient all day long.
  2. Use the bus or train ride to catch up on emails.  Don’t waste time in the office when you could be interacting with people face-to-face.  Get emails out of the way before you get there.
  3. Start to set aside tasks you can do on your commute during the day.  Be honest about this and make sure you can absolutely do the task well, no matter what’s going on around you.  This is key to making good use of your time!

 

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Are You a Trustworthy IT Professional?

In a field like information technology, where teamwork is often so imperative, trust becomes necessary between IT professionals and their coworkers and IT managers.  IT recruiters can’t help IT consultants get IT jobs when they merely have perfect resumes.  They must be the kind of employees and coworkers that everyone can really trust will get the job done and help to keep the company’s culture positive.  So how can IT contractors make sure they’re trustworthy?  By honestly evaluating themselves in these categories, as suggested by Dr. Paul White:

  1. Competence: Can you perform your responsibilities without more than the occasional issue?  Do you fulfill your role on your team to meet expectations? This is the more obvious part of what makes a good employee.
  2. Character: Are you not only good at your job, but also a good person to work with?  If you’re reliable, honest, and pleasant to deal with, this makes you much more trustworthy.
  3. Consistency: Do you perform at a high level all the time?  It’s hard to trust an employee or coworker who doesn’t always meet expectations.  If your competence isn’t consistent, it may well not even exist.

 

Why Starbucks’ Tuition Program is Important to IT

Though they’re by no means the first company to do it, Starbucks has brought a lot of attention to the trend of companies paying for their employees’ college tuition.  Programs like this bring a lot of attention to some hot-button issues, like the cost of college and the worth of a college degree, as well as the standards employers are held to in the treatment of their employees.

However, the most fascinating part of these stories about Starbucks are how they relate to the IT industry. Since information technology companies already feel the pain to offer perks that will attract great IT professionals, the trend is in full force in the industry.  IT contractors in IT jobs in notable companies like Intel or Apple.  This perk is especially relevant for IT consultants, too.  Since many IT managers are looking for resumes with specialized skillsets, having a BA or BS isn’t always a prerequisite.  This means that a significant portion of IT professionals don’t have a college degree yet, simply because they haven’t need it thus far.  Tuition programs are also particularly relevant to many IT professionals because they’re recent immigrants.  Getting a degree in the US adds a great deal of value to their resumes.  For these reasons and more, tuition programs are really impactful in the IT world.