Golf balls run amok and ping around a warehouse in an amusing new DHL commercial. A distraught warehouse manager phones the shipping giant to reroute correspondence and packages, while a booming voice pledges that DHL has adopted a renewed focus on customer service — a promise that will extend clear down to IT personnel manning help desks and scrambling to provide technical support.
IT hiring figures are expected to dip slightly in the coming year, so you’ll be getting a flood of résumés for every job opening you have. From those, hiring executives will pluck people with the strongest combination of technical and business skills. For instance, knowing how to help a call center agent navigate malfunctioning pop-up screens will no longer be enough. Instead, DHL and other big companies want tech support staffs to prioritize and understand why jumping on a problem quickly is a mission-critical must.
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Essentially, CIOs are looking for the “Renaissance” IT professional — for instance, the individual with sharp skills in the Cobit (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology) framework for governing IT and evaluating internal system controls, and a good feel for internal business processes. Proof that a potential hire is well-rounded might include five in-demand skills recently identified in Computerworld’s latest quarterly Vital Signs survey of IT trends: programming acumen, project management experience, IT-business analysis know-how, security savvy and technical support skills.
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“For us, 2007 will be a year of focusing on what is really important to our company as a whole and what will bring us the most value,” says Jim Niemann, vice president of DHL Express IT in San Francisco. “In past years, we’ve tried to solve every problem in the book. Now we are working those projects that show true bottom-line value.”