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Career
25 articles filed under Career.
IT’s Most Needed Skills
IT does not exist in a bubble. IT is a business enabler, a way of taking an existing business and making it more efficient, cost effective, nimble and capable. Except for home hobbyist, and even…
Standard Areas of Discipline Within IT
Information Technology and Business Infrastructure are an enormous field filled with numerous and extremely varied career opportunities not just in the industries in which work is done, but also in…
Legitimate University Programs Are Not Certification Training
The university educational process is one that is meant to broaden the mind, increase exposure to different areas, teach students to think outside of the box, encourage exploration, develop soft…
No One Ever Got Fired For Buying…
It was the 1980s when I first heard this phrase in IT and it was “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.” The idea was that IBM was so well known, trusted and reliable that it was the safe choice as a…
Choosing a University for IT Education
In previous articles I have tackled the questions around approaching university education and selecting a degree program but, thus far, I have not provided any guidance in selecting an institution at…
Finding A Job, or Finding THE Job
Nearly everyone overlooks this incredibly basic question and yet nearly everyone has to face this it when thinking about their career decision making and their future. This applies to middle school…
Business: The Context of IT
I would estimate that the vast majority of people working in the IT field come to it out of an interest in or even a passion for computers. Working in IT lets them play with many big, fast, powerful…
The End of the GUI Era
We should set the stage by looking at some historical context around GUIs and their role within the world of systems administration. In the “olden days” we did not have graphical user interfaces on…
Choosing a University Degree Program for IT
In my last article I looked at the overarching concerns and approaches to an university program and how it would apply to us in IT. Now we will look at individual programs and how to approach the…
How to Approach the University Experience
All discussions of university versus non-university aside, once a university (or college as the Americans generally refer to it) is chosen, the next step is choosing a degree program that will…
Getting Started with IT Certifications
This question surfaces very regularly: you are at the beginning of your IT career or maybe have not even gotten into your career yet, and are wondering where to get started with certifications. Maybe…
Why We Avoid Contract to Hire
Information Technology workers are bombarded with “Contract to Hire” positions, often daily. There are reasons why this method of hiring and working is fundamentally wrong and while workers…
Make Your Business Jealous
I have, in the past, discussed how home technology infrastructures and lab environments are one of the keys to personal career success and how IT practitioners should set a high bar in their own…
Better IT Hiring: Contract To Hire
Information Technology workers are bombarded with “Contract to Hire” positions, often daily. There are reasons why this method of hiring and working is fundamentally wrong and while workers…
On DevOps and Snowflakes
One can hardly swing a proverbial cat in IT these days without hearing people talking about DevOps. DevOps is the hot new topic in the industry picking up from where the talk of cloud left off and to…
It’s a Field, Not a Road
Over the years I have become aware of a tendency in the Information Technology arena to find strong expectations of exactly how much someone should know about certain technologies based on their job…
The Home Line
In many years of working with the small and medium business markets I have noticed that the majority of SMB IT shops tend to one of two extremes: massive overspend with an attempt to operate like…
Starting the IT Clock Ticking
Everyone is always happy to tell you how important experience is over certifications and degrees when working in IT. Few things are so readily agreed upon within the industry. What is shocking…
IT Generalists and Specialists
IT Professionals generally fall into two broad categories based on their career focus: generalists and specialists. These two categories actually carry far more differences than they may at first…
Contract to Hire
There are so many horrible hiring practices commonly used today one hardly knows where to begin. One of the most obviously poor is the concept of “Contract to Hire” positions. The concept is simple…
Doing IT at Home: Good Documentation
One of the most rewarding home IT projects that I have done was to implement a system for “home documentation.” In a business environment documentation is critical to nearly any process or…
Doing IT at Home: The Home PBX
I am often asked what projects I would recommend for someone to do at home to get more IT experience and I am often at a loss to come up with anything very interesting that is both educational and…
IT Roles: Productivity and Availability
As IT managers we face the need to deal with two very different types of technical professionals. These two types of professionals are separated, not by their personality types or working styles, but…
IT in a Bubble
It is an old story in SMB IT, IT managers who get their start young, stay with a single company, work their way through the ranks and become venerable IT managers who have never worked outside of…
IT Managers and the Value of Decision Making
When I was new to IT I can remember people using the phrase “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” At the time I was young and didn’t think too much about what this phrase implies. Recently, I heard…