Career advice: You can make your job situation better by communicating with your boss

Computerworld -

Dale Christian

Title: CIO

Company: Avanade Inc., Seattle

Christian is this month’s guest Premier 100 IT Leader, answering questions about communicating with the boss, making the most of a degree in infosec and regrets over leaving a job. If you have a question you’d like to pose to one of our Premier 100 IT Leaders, send it to askaleader@computerworld.com and watch for this column each month.

Dale Christian of Avanade

The division of the IT department I work in lost a few employees due to attrition last year, and rather than replace those people, management has distributed the workload to me and others. I'm now working 60-plus hours a week, including occasional weekends, and I'm getting burnt out. Do you have any suggestions on how I can approach my supervisor about this? Approach the situation from your supervisor's point of view. She probably doesn't want her team working 60-hour weeks and realizes that it's not a healthy or viable situation. However, she's likely under pressure from management to keep costs down and doesn't have a strong case to justify hiring more people.

So, make a case for her and anticipate what she needs to solve the problem. First, document the problem objectively: write down the specific tasks you are expected to perform and how long it takes to do each one -- each day, week, month or quarter.

Next, use that list as a concrete basis for discussion: Are there tasks that you can drop, service levels that can be relaxed, or efficiencies you can find? You might be able to slim your job down to a reasonable number of hours just by focusing on the essentials. Or it might convince her that more people are needed in your team.

In that case, give your supervisor the facts to take the case to her manager. Help her develop a similar list for the rest of your workgroup, laying out what services the team delivers to the company and what resources -- people, hardware, software, etc. -- are needed to meet those expectations. Then, management can decide whether it's worth hiring more people or reducing the services your group provides.

I have a fresh bachelor's degree in information security, certification in computer networking, eight years in PC troubleshooting maintenance and repair, two years in Internet help desk and two in PDA and BlackBerry support. I am finding it difficult to break into the IT field full time. Most hiring firms want me for the help desk only. What would you suggest? Call me! Seriously, security skills are particularly valuable in today's market. The challenge is that security roles tend to demand deep experience, so you should look for entry-level positions in operations (also called Tier 2 support, production management, systems administration or infrastructure engineering, depending on the organization) that will give you hands-on experience in the production infrastructure. Supporting servers, networks and applications will put you in a good position to grow directly in that area. It will also give you opportunities to practice and deepen your security experience and move into a security role when the time is right. Good luck!