Information Technology Jobs and Careers
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 I resigned one full time employee job to begin another job as a consultant for three months before becoming a full time employee. It took me four weeks to find that job. However, a consolidation was announced two months into this gig, effectively closing out the possibility of me going full time. It took me just two weeks to find my next job. For the benefit of my brothers and sisters in consulting who may be struggling with looking for work, I offer these thoughts. They may or may not work for you, but they have surely worked for me.
This isn't the time to be modest. Put your resume out to all the major sites, agencies, and employees. Network and affiliate. Get your name out to as many people as you can. You may even want to advertise in the situations wanted column of the Sunday paper.
I hear people say that they don't use the internet or that they don't respond to newspaper ads because they don't work. But how do they know for sure? Try everything. Don't make assumptions about what will or will not work. You don't need ten jobs. You just need one-and you never know where it will come from.
You have just eight seconds to impress someone with your resume and just eight seconds to impress someone on the interview. Hone down your resume to no more than two pages. You also want a 1:1 cardinality between your resume and the job you are seeking mirroring as well as possible those skills that are specifically mentioned in the requisition. My strongest recommendation is to make job hunting if you are unemployed your job. That means working eight hours a day five days a week to getting that next job. Doing what? If you're not interviewing, I would spend four hours elsewhere searching for opportunities. I would use the remaining four hours prepping for the interviews-both the soft questions ("What is your definition of teamwork") and the hard questions ("What is a FRM-40726 error?") You don't want to know just concepts and facts. You want to be able to articulate them clearly and smoothly and with authority without appearing arrogant or abrasive. And remember that people interpret a firm hand shake and steady eye contact as confidence. Practice gazing at someone's eyes and counting silently to yourself-one, two, three, four, five-before turning your gaze to someone else. Also, practice your greeting, you "elevator speech"-a thirty second summary of why you're the absolute best, and your departure. I typically tell the hiring manager that "I really want this job. I think I'm a great fit. If you make me an offer, I will accept."
It's better to negotiate from a position of strength. Thus, if possible, you should always try to land that next job while you're still employed.
I wrote the following to my brother in 2004, an engineer, who had been out of work for more than a year. It was some of my lessons learned in getting re-employed.
"It cannot be easy being away from the work you love for so long. I remember how bleak I felt in New York when I was looking for work after college after eight months. No one seemed more cruel to me then those receptionists. I'm doing my best to settle down at my present job, but who knows what evil lurks in the minds of executives four levels up? The Sunday column inches of computer ads has remained constant at about four, so I don't really see too much job growth in my field. What works for me may not work for others, but the approach I've taken is as follows: (1). Line up a half dozen recommendations from people that you know won't rain on you parade; (2). Set up intelligent agents on the major employment web sites; (3). Save the part of the Sunday paper that has computer want ads-- should I be unemployed this will give me over the last year about 100 or so leads; (3). Use the reflecting technique-- word your resume to reflect as closely as possible the ad so there is agreement between what you have and what they need; (4). Make small changes in my online resumes so that bounce to the top of the queue; (5). Practice soft interviewing skills-- coming across as warmly confident; (6). Redefine myself in terms of what others need, not in terms of what you are. (7). Try to network. This, frankly, has never worked for me but other people recommend it; (8). and finally, to paraphrase the words of Winston Churchill, never, never, never, never give up. It is an unfortunate fact of life that the skills needed to succeed in finding work are not the same skills needed to succeed in work."
Reinvention is as American as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who noted that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", or Walt Whitman: "Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself/(I am large, I contain multitudes)" In this nation where cosmetic surgery is a $10 billion dollar business, recreating yourself is a constant theme of literature, art, and business. To someone with my background who despaired of every getting a job, I wrote that "before presenting yourself in the marketplace, I think it's important to reflect on what you've achieved relative to the current market demands. You've valuable suitcase skills, but you're not only keeping the suitcase closed, you're throwing away the suitcase! You should consider redefining yourself in terms of supporting the mainframe as a server in a client-oriented organization. Those with hybrid skills-big iron plus client/server-command premium rates at many firms. So ask yourself: What is it that I have worked on that either interfaced with emerging technology or created the pre-conditions for emerging technology? If you have ten years of mainframe experience, without even knowing your experience, I would say that you have at least seven years of client/server experience but are just not aware of it. You need to be rigorously introspective, digging into your past for those analogues to those engines of today's information technology, which is e-commerce, distributed objects, multi-tier client/servers, networks, and relational databases. There is no need to lie. You simply need to find out all the truth about what you really have done and then communicate that truth in a way that brings offers. The best artists and politicians constantly reinvent themselves, as do the best companies. The horse and buggy factories of the 19th century were the car builders of the 20th century and will be centers of e-commerce of the 21st century. If there is one principle that I have learned in twenty years of data processing, it is this: we must adapt, we must learn, we must build on our past experiences, we must orient our minds to what the market place wants, or we will get the sustained unemployment and underemployment that we deserve."
I expanded on these thoughts in another posting in 2000 to a newsgroup that I entitled "This Mainframe Dinosaur Made the Jump." "I started out in PL/1, IMS, RPG, and VSAM. Today, I code PL/SQL, Oracle 8i, JavaScripting, and Java, and command appropriate market-competitive rates. In making the transition, it became clear to me that "there was nothing new under the sun" and that the leap from the procedural world into the object world was not that great conceptually. I've never taken any formal classes, although I read everything I could get my hands on, immersed myself in web sites, downloads, code examples, books, magazines, and manuals. For me, entry to the client server world came not through language as much as databases. I had some background in DB2/SQL, which I then segued into Paradox, Access, and then Sybase and Oracle. The key thing is to approach new technology with curiosity, looking for hooks between what you do know and what you must know, and then by systematically filling in the gaps through personal initiative. My approach is to buy two or three solid "bibles" from different publishers from the local bookstores, download as much production code as I can get from the site I am at, create a "hello world" application, expanding it with additional operations, and then going out to the web for forums and tutorials. Without being too arrogant about it, I truly believe there isn't a language or a system that I cannot master within a month by using this approach. I do realize some people need the structure and the security of a classroom, but for me a "university of one" is the way to go. And you can't beat the tuition."
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