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Loading ...Video: What IT job seekers said at CareerDoor’s HiTech job fair
I recently took a trip to the CareerDoor HiTech career fair in downtown Toronto. The event featured a few dozen companies looking to tackle the skills shortage and hire IT pros.
But despite the fact that companies are reportedly desperate for new tech talent, we ran into quite a few job seekers haven’t had much luck taking advantage of the skills shortage. Read my coverage from the event and see what some of the conference attendees had to say in the video posted below.
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(3 votes, average: 9.67 out of 10) Loading ...How IT can fill the engagement gap
Pop quiz: Which would you rather spend more time with, your boss or your e-mail?
The answer to that question could do a lot to explain the results of a survey by professional services firm Towers Perrin that examined the attitudes of a staggering 90,000 people worldwide, including 5,000 in Canada. Towers Perrin says only 23 per cent of Canadians are “engaged” with their work. In fact, 32 per cent admitted they are either partly or fully “disengaged,” meaning they are unwilling to go that extra mile to help their organization succeed. Towers Perrin calls this the engagement gap. While the company would probably say managers need better training, IT may be just as effective in fulfilling that gap.
“Companies have an enormous impact on engagement – far more than they think they do. The influence of the organization, especially its senior leadership, far outweighs employees’ personal traits (like ambition or learning orientation) or, say, the role of a person’s manager,” the Towers Perrin report says. “What we’ve learned is that driving engagement depends on creating a corporate culture that aligns with the company’s unique strategy, and that emphasizes leadership, learning, empowerment and corporate social responsibility.”
Unfortunately they left out the part about how you create that culture, but I guess that’s what expensive consulting fees are for. If you consider the fact that experts always cite the need for executive sponsorship for IT projects to succeed, however, you begin to see how technology and engagement interrelate. IT managers may not put it this way, but a lot of their work involves fostering engagement through better access and control over information. Done properly, such projects give employees the tools they need to be more autonomous, collaborative and productive. In other words, more engaged.
Of course, I know some CEOs would argue the tools turn into little more than time-wasters. As dependent as they may be on e-mail communications, a lot of companies hate the time employees spend sending and responding to personal messages. In some cases, though, e-mailing your friends is what you do when you’re waiting for another system to finish churning away through its work, or when you’re encountering so many glitches with a system that you’d rather do something more engaging (like writing to someone about how crappy your IT is at work). In other cases poorly-designed technology systems create workflow with mundane or needlessly redundant steps which waste just as much time as e-mail or Facebook and have the added effect of distracting employees from what they would like to do. There’s no point in going that extra mile if the IT you need to get there drags you down.
Towers Perrin didn’t break down responses by job title, but a lot of IT managers would likely say they’re disengaged, too. They aren’t included on the projects that really change the way the business runs, their budgets are too small to do anything creative and they spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with trival end-user troubleshooting. If companies are serious about closing the engagement gap they have to start somewhere, and the best place might be with the people who can help engage everybody else.
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(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Certified to store things virtually
VMWare has branched out into storage virtualization certification, which is one of the few areas in the enterprise that isn’t getting as much attention in terms of technology to create a pool of storage resources.
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(2 votes, average: 7.5 out of 10) Loading ...Those in the field don’t want to hear about a skills shortage
Mari-Len wrote a story in the latest CWC about labour issues affecting the IT market, but not in the usual way. Instead of just trotting out the same old facts and figures (which are always dire, for some reason), she tried to address the concerns raised by readers who get angry every time we publish articles about how many companies are looking for good IT people. We tend to get letters, for example, from people who say they have been looking for months, or that employers’ expectations are uninformed and unrealistic. Hopefully this balances out the various points of view.
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(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Essential learning: The structure of information networks
Interesting post from O’Reilly Radar today (by way of Paul Kedrosky) about a new course in the structure of information networks being offered by Cornell University this Fall. I don’t know the instructor, but the course outline does look interesting.
Right now Canada is more focused on business-oriented programs for IT professionals like the one Rafael covered yesterday, but this might be food for thought for Canadian schools (including the University of Waterloo) that want to raise their game a bit.
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(3 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...IT departments shouldn’t put up with bullies, either
I can’t find it online, but this week’s Maclean’s has an interesting story titled: “Your boss is an ass. But now you can sue,” which looks at a couple of recent precedent-setting cases in Canada involving office bullies and the victims who were brave enough to go to court. Bad news for the enterprise: lacking soft skills can cost you a lot.
Some of the cases in the Maclean’s article ended up in $1 million settlements, even though, as the piece noted, corporate culture often defends those who rub others the wrong way. (They actually included a photo of former HP chief exec Carly Fiorina as an example of a bully boss, though I think her reputation had much more to do with her gender than anything else).
As these kind of cases start to pile up, it’ll be interesting to see whether the financial impact they have on firms might be factored into the overall risk management strategy. If so, we’re all going to have to work a lot harder to get along.
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(2 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Certified to annoy anyone sick of compliance issues
I wrote a story in today’s Daily IT Wire about a new certification from ISACA that will cover off governance in the enterprise. Maybe it’s about time, but I also wonder how many people you need to get these kind of credentials before they really have an impact.
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(4 votes, average: 9 out of 10) Loading ...We’re laughing at you, not with you
Normally we focus on the IT-specific surveys that come out of Robert Half, but one caught my eye the other day about laughter in the workplace. I guess this should be obvious, but ninety-seven per cent of workers polled told the staffing firm it is very or somewhat important for managers to have a funny bone, although 10 per cent their bosses aren’t that funny. And you thought it was just IT people who lack soft skills.
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(3 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Ring the bell, sucker, school’s back in!
In today’s Daily IT Wire we have a story about McMaster University and Mohawk College offering courses for technology professionals that will teach them more business skills. This kind of continuing education seems long overdue, but it makes you wonder how long it will take for more post-secondary computer science programs to integrate more MBA-like components to their curriculum. That way graduates enter the workforce with the necessary mix of business and IT backgrounds, rather than struggle to play catchup later on.
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(2 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Oh, to be a Big Blue intern . . .
I got a pitch today from IBM, seeing if we were interested in writing about its Extreme Blue program for post-secondary students with great potential. We’ve written about it before, so I don’t think we’re going to go back to the well. Besides, our audience are mostly working for non-vendor firms, so the experiences of these students may not be as relevant.
On the other hand, imagine working in any other corporation’s intern program where you are challenged, as the Extreme Blue interns are, to meet the following objectives:
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