Careers

Job ads in the IT sector dropped 8.8 percent in June, the second weakest performing sector after Financial Services, to bring its overall decline to 1.3 percent over the past year.

Experience pays. And if you are an IT Director/CIO, Program Manager or Enterprise Architect, then quite handsomely so, according to a new report issued by an IT recruiter.

Six months paid maternity leave is one way to curb the high female churn rates in the engineering field, claims the Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers Australia.

The term information technology has ballooned to encompass many aspects of computing and technology and is more widely recognised than ever before.

After months of continuous falls, executive demand experienced a welcome rise in May, when it increased by seven per cent from previous month, according to the EL Consult Executive Demand Index.

It took a 19th-century English poet to convince Robin Hunicke that her future lay in computer science.

In many ways, managing a developer is just like managing any other employee. Developers want managers who'll help them solve business and technical problems, who'll protect them from unnecessary office politics and who will help them meet their personal career goals. But programmers are...different. Like musicians, these creative folks can alternate between big-picture thinking and persnickety detail in a heartbeat. They can be sidetracked by silly toys, and convinced to work overtime by the promise of pizza and a T-shirt. Trying to understand and motivate these people can drive managers-particularly nontechnical managers-to distraction.

For most of us, our jobs aren't about systems or reports or lines of code - they are about how we pay our bills, spend our free time, and create a future for ourselves and our families.

Probably the only technical qualification to put Joel Cohen, a writer and associate producer of The Simpsons, in front of the keynote crowd at the Red Hat Summit in June was that Red Hat Enterprise 5 was used to render some of the animation in The Simpsons movie. But Cohen had surprisingly deep-and quite entertaining-advice about innovation and the creative process to offer the conference attendees.

What do Xerox printers, Fenway Park, green creatures and an executive zipping around with a personal jetpack have in common? Are you stumped? You might not be if you had an avatar.

Most IT managers would not think twice about employing recruitment consultants to get the staff they want, but how far should they take the process?

Insurance firm Travelers Property Casualty Corp. had a policy problem on its hands. The company's decentralized training strategy made it tough to effectively track course attendance and ensure curriculum was relevant for its 2,000 IT pros.

Q&A with Randall Craig, the president of Pinetree Advisors discusses some of the ideas in his book Personal Balance Sheet: A Practical Career Planning Guide.

IT professionals with strong technical backgrounds can drum up some great ideas for start-up companies, but they often lack the business acumen to keep those companies afloat. To help these would-be captains of industry, Computerworld recently spoke with Ken Blanchard, the best-selling co-author of The One Minute Entrepreneur and The One Minute Manager to gain insight on the steps that technology entrepreneurs should take -- and avoid. Step one: Remember the basics.

What if half the men in science, engineering and technology roles dropped out at midcareer? That would surely be perceived as a national crisis. Yet more than half the women in those fields leave -- most of them during their mid- to late 30s.

When Anne Mulcahy took over as CEO of Xerox in August 2001, the outlook for the company to which she had devoted 25 years of her life could hardly have been bleaker. Xerox was over $17 billion in debt, bankruptcy appeared inevitable, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating alleged accounting irregularities.

Ram Murthy, the director of application systems at the Peace Corps, answers questions about education, certifications, leadership and dealing with slackers.

With the economic downturn on everyone's mind, assumptions about job security come under question, and everyone starts reexamining their skills. There are lots and lots of valuable jobs performed in IT, but some skills are valued even more highly than others. With all the upheaval we're experiencing in IT, many new skills are in high demand or rapidly increasing in value. Here are my Top 7 skills that could help you not only keep that job, but secure an even better new job, positioning you to work on the next generation of IT applications and software products in the era of Web-delivered online applications.

Facing a potential onslaught of baby boomer retirements and a smaller pool of Generation X employees to replace them, IT managers who want to create or sustain a Best Place to Work environment will need the additional help of another group of professionals: Generation Y. Also known as Millennials, this group consists of nearly 80 million individuals born roughly between 1979 and 1999. They are the workforce of the future.

Kathleen Melymuka's Q&A with researcher Sylvia Ann Hewlett created quite a stir. Titled "Why Women Quit Technology Careers," the interview, posted on our Web site last week, has elicited well over 250 reader comments, many of them faulting Hewlett's statistics and conclusions.

I feel lucky to work with so many smart young people. These twentysomethings, often referred to as Generation Y, belong to the generation behind mine. We hear a lot of generalizations about this group. My take is that they are energetic, intelligent and not too different from my own generational peers.

In the information biz, more isn't necessarily better. Though full disclosure and transparency are buzzwords today, that doesn't mean your boss wants to hear about everything going on in the office. In fact, there are some things your CIO definitely doesn't want to hear, and if your career is going to thrive, you'd better know what they are.

The Linux Essentials course held at New Horizons Learning Centres catered to students new to Linux. And the first thing one learns is that working with a nice-looking GUI -- as is the case in the Windows environment, where pretty much all the students come from -- is not high on the agenda in the Linux operating system. Rather, students are taught to befriend the console from the outset. Windows may unfortunately be associated with the blue screen of death, but it seems Linux, with the console, has the black screen of joy.

Need a little help studying for certification exams? You can find a treasure trove of free study guides for Cisco, Linux, Microsoft and Unix certifications at the Global Document Database.

Until just a few weeks ago, I thought rebalancing was only something you do to your tires or investment portfolio. That's before I heard about a book on work-life balance.