Soft Skills More Important Than Ever

It’s a tough time to be looking for a job. The global economy remains weak and any potential recovery hasn’t translated into meaningful employment opportunities. Available positions are harder to get. More people are vying for open slots, and efficiency minded employers are often seeking more diverse skillsets in new hires. The resume that got you a job a few years ago might not even yield an interview these days. So where do you look for a job in this environment, and how do you go about it? Recent research from a leading employment firm and observations from some of the country’s top headhunters provide some context and tips for how computing professionals can best pursue one of the most challenging job markets in years. 

Building Successful Global Teams

These days, computer professionals often work on globally distributed teams. While this practice was unusual a decade ago, today even small startups rely on global teams to increase competitiveness. Using talent from around the world lets a company draw on regional expertise, increase productivity and speed time-to-market by “following the sun” to create a 24-hour workday, and take advantage of a region’s economics to reduce investment and operational costs, particularly salaries. Today, companies realize that relying on email and other basic communications methods to facilitate interaction and collaboration among team members isn’t enough to ensure that they are satisfied in their jobs and produce the desired outcomes.

Facing Rapid IT Change

The information technology industry may be mature but it’s also changing rapidly. That may sound like an oxymoron, but IT workers who don’t work with these rapid changes in the next few years could see themselves left behind. IT workers and especially chief information officers face a host of disruptive technologies that require them to play a bigger role in the business framework of the companies they work for. Information technology and research group Gartner has identified what it expects will be the top 10 disruptive technologies over the next several years, including the use of multicore and hybrid processors, virtualization and “fabric” computing, social networking, cloud computing, Web mashups, user interfaces, ubiquitous computing, contextual computing, augmented reality, and semantics.

CIO Compensation Takes a Hit

The slowing economy is taking its toll on information technology professionals’ pay, with compensation declining for the first time since the bursting of the dot-com bubble and hiring demand falling to its lowest level in 15 years, according to a new survey. Overall IT compensation fell by more than 2 percent in Utah-based consulting firm Janco’s annual compensation study, with executives and those at mid-sized enterprises taking the largest hits. According to data Janco gathered from surveys and other sources, North American CIOs’ 2009 salaries of $168,839 were down nearly 7 percent from 2008 levels, mostly due to the cutting of bonuses and fringe benefits.

Protect Future Growth When Making Cuts

Forced to cut budgets and complete scheduled projects on time with fewer resources, CIOs are facing one of the most challenging years ever—one in which basic survival will take precedence over rolling out the latest technological marvels or gobbling up market share. Luckily for them, analysts at market-research firm Gartner are offering some free advice to help get 2009 off to a good start. First and foremost, the analysts said, CIOs need to safeguard future growth prospects while making their cost cuts.

Time to 'Think Like a CFO'

Now that federal governments, banks, and financial services firms have all reworked their budgets to reflect global bailouts, stock market declines and economic turmoil, it’s now time for technology company executives to do the same. “With the credit crunch, bailouts, financial derivatives, and bankruptcies, what are you going to be called on to do in 2009?” asked Peter Sondergard, Gartner senior vice president of research, at the market-research firm’s annual itXpo symposium. For 2008, CIOs were advised to create two budget scenarios and be prepared to make changes along the way. For 2009, Gartner advises high-tech executives to do three things: assume a likely global IT spending growth rate of 0-2.3 percent, turn the management team into “a cost-optimization team,” and lastly, start thinking like a chief financial officer.