Time Management for College Students (and everyone else)

Cal Newport is a Ph.D. candidate at MIT. He has a terrific blog, Study Hacks with suggestions particularly tailored to college students, but which are all highly useful for the rest of us. If you are sick-to-death of hearing about Getting Things Done, you should subscribe for a week or two. Refreshing.

NTEN's Staffing and Salary Surveys for IT Staff

NTEN has published its most recent survey on IT for non-profits. A couple excerpts:

� The highest average salary reported was $71,494.57 for a Chief Technology Officer/Chief InformationOfficer.
� The lowest reported average salary was $37,445.65 for a PC Technician/IT Support Staff.
� Reported salaries for most positions were lower this year than last year. The largest drops were for management positions. CIO/CTOs reported salaries 25.44% lower than last year and IT Directors reported salaries 18.42% lower than last year.
� The exceptions to the trend toward lower salaries were Systems/Network Administrator and Webmaster/developer, which were 4.00% and 8.84% higher, respectively.

Brazen Careerist - Get a Job You're Not Qualified For

The Brazen Careerist has an interesting perspective about work-life balance and career advancement for the 21st century. Much of what she writes might be considered appalling from a hiring manager's perspective, but a lot of information is right on. Here's her take on how to get a job you're not qualified for.

This issue comes up all the time with software jobs. Almost by definition, anyone working in software development or similar technology is "unqualified" for their current job, because they would never make the cut if the current job was formally searched. Likewise, companies would like to hire people who are on the cutting edge of the latest technology; it is not uncommon to see jobs for, say AJAX or Voice over IP with five years experience...even though AJAX or VoIP have barely been mainstream for two years. What the hiring manager may not know is that a good candidate for AJAX might be someone who knows Javascript, CSS, XML and backend databases, and a good potential VoIP person would be someone who is all over local area networking, DNS, DHCP, and telephony. If they don't know it, it incumbant on the job-seeker to convince the hiring manager.

Vermont 3.0 Creative/Tech Career Jam - impressions

Update: Video Here
The Vermont Software Developer's Alliance is a trade organization of 60 companies that create software applications, shrinkwrapped programs and software tools. As part of a consortium with Seven Days, Burlington CEDO and our state and local colleges we created a creative/tech career fair for job-seekers who were looking for positions in the green technology, scientific, software development and creative arts.

It is really a kick when you can Make Stuff Happen, and it was evident right from the start that the event would be a success. But then on Saturday I was overwhelmed� I started talking to people at 9:30 and didn�t stop until 4:30 with a brief lunch break. I was at the vtSDA table the whole time wearing my vtSDA hat.

I think it is great from the other comments that people did think that there were a lot of qualified attendees. I was encouraged by the number of companies participating, but wasn�t sure about the people I was talking to. I found a mix:

1. C++/C#/Java programmers, often seniors or recent graduates

2. �Web Developers� � lots of people calling themselves this, a few who could cite more substantial accomplishments (work with database back-ends) and others who clearly were fishing around. A couple cited experience with ASP.NET

3. "Project Managers� � former programmers who may have failed to make the next leap to current development technologies. (?)

4. Some �Career Changers� � I explained to several folks that all of our vtSDA companies weren�t just looking for hard-core techies but will need account managers, financial folks etc.

5. I had several folks were were IT/Network Managers, and interestingly, I wasn�t sure who to send them to except to suggest larger companies, and the colleges.

6. Lots of comments that started with �I had no idea��

• I had no idea there were so many cool companies in Vermont
  
• I had no idea that I could actually get a technical job here, I thought I'd have to go to Boston, or Silicon Valley. (the two places most mentioned...)
  
• I had no idea what I need to know to have a career in software development
  
• I had no idea that company XYZ had done animation for Lord of the Rings
  

I think there are some challenges and opportunities for us on the �low end� and entry-level. I talked to several folks about Vermont HiTec. Several wanted to know how to get started or how to improve their situation or how to transition. Some were discouraged to find out that a B.A. was considered a minimum qualification for many of our companies. Most were short on specifics�. nobody mentioned that they knew much about software engineering, source-code control, ECLIPSE, RUBY. �Web Programmers� didn�t mention XML or CSS. Lots who identified themselves as programmers mentioned VB6�.and were interested in taking the free Visual Studio CDs. (This I find a little worrisome.) Nobody complained that the CDs were from VS 2005 (!) If I was hiring a "Microsoft" programmer, I'd sure like to hear that they had been using Orcas (the VS2008 beta versions) for the past six months.

There were enough take-aways here for another discussion about career planning. In the meantime, here is a link to the Stuck in Vermont vBlog which has a video showing Dealer.com's new offices. Can't get any more innovative than their digs.

Vermont 3.0 Creative/Tech Career Jam

It's happening this Saturday!