Making the Best of a Bad Job Market

Computerworld - Hiring consultants, analysts and IT managers offer the following tips on managing your career during the recession:

Stay Put
First, and most obvious, it's best not to leave your present job for the time being, unless you're forced to.
"This recession can last for a long time," says Fran Quittel, a staffing consultant at Frances Quittel Inc. in Emeryville, Calif., and Computerworld's Career Adviser columnist.
"I hate to say this, but if there's another terrorist incident, it could make the the recession last longer. There's a lot of mental stuff in this job market, just like the boom in dot-com was mental the other way," Quittel says.

Get training
Consider getting training or certification in some of the hotter job categories in IT, including security and disaster recovery. These are areas where salaries are showing the best increases and where there's a clear need for hiring this year.
Regarding security, IT managers "are hiring security-skilled systems admins as fast as they can" but showing less mercy with pure managers who can't provide technical savvy, says Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute in Bethesda, Md.
Paller recalls one example in which a chief information security officer was told he was being fired because he couldn't harden a firewall.
David Foote , an analyst at Foote Partners LLC in New Canaan, Conn., says that security jobs will be most in demand starting in the third quarter, when companies will begin to realize the valuable role security plays in attracting customers.
It will be technologists in security, as well as business managers, who see the critical value of security, says Foote, who is also a Computerworld columnist.
In addition, he predicts an uptick in network and enterprise data services jobs.

Reach out
Network, stay in touch, and stay flexible.
Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director of RHI Consulting in Menlo Park, Calif., says the current recession isn't as tough as that of the 1980s, when job candidates would try to offer her money under the table in return for priority consideration in job placements.
"The economy is as bad as you make it, but every single day, you have to keep reading what's happening in the news and how that impacts technology. Keep your skill set hot and current," she says.
Lee and Quittel point to the possibility of changing industries to find work.
"Think about how well the mortgage companies are doing now," Lee says. She also urges IT workers to look at the biotechnology and health care fields. Inthose markets, the work ranges from cloning and the creation of human skin to the development of pharmaceuticals and the implementation of new government health standards.
To illustrate the importance of staying flexible and keeping an open mind, Quittel recalls one IT worker who was laid off from a software company in Silicon Valley and sent out 500 resumes. Almost every day, on the way to job interviews, she drove past a community college.
"One day she said to herself, 'Gee, I'd like to work there,' and got a top IT job," Quittel says. "The lesson is that she had an idea outside what was a normal commercial-sector job."
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