IT Salary Survey

This in agrees with the data that Janco has collected.

• Document what is happening and what your benefits should be
• Relax and get yourself in a good frame of mind
• Review all of your employment records including job offer and performance reviews to know your rights
• Update your resume
• Expand your skill set via any training that is available to you
• Review your professional networks contract information and keep a copy at home
• Review your spending and saving situation and know what the impact of losing your job would be
• Utilize your existing insurance programs and do medical / dental work quickly and know what insurance options such as COBRA you will have if you lose your job
• Put out feelers to see what other opportunities you have, use internet job boards to measure market conditions
• Know you strengths and weaknesses and begin to prepare for the interview
• Re-establish your contacts with recruiters
• Keep good records on all efforts you place in the “potential” job hunt
• Be proactive

The actual percentages were 71.63% - Laid off; 8,65% - Quit within 90 days of the outsourcing; and 19.72% - Remained with the company at least 90 days after outsourcing.

That may be good news for California-based tech employees who want to take their skills to another company, or head a start-up that may directly compete with their former employer. "Noncompete" contracts, in place largely to protect an employer's intellectual property, began being used by companies during the dot-com boom to prevent losing valuable workers in a competitive technology labor market.

The California law has been in existence since 1872, forbidding "noncompete clauses" that restrict management employees' options in their next job or business. But the law has been interpreted differently throughout the state, and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has ruled in favor of allowing a company to limit their employees' future job choices, as long as it doesn't prevent them from working in the same field.

Thursday's ruling was a response to the Edwards vs. Arthur Andersen case, stating clearly that Edwards, a tax manager, signed an invalid noncompete clause. The court said in its final disposition (see PDF) that "Non-competition agreements are invalid...in California even if narrowly drawn."

No application relationship diagram is available – When it is time to upgrade or change and you find that there is no application interface definition nor is there any documentation which tells you how the application interfaces with all of the other applications within the enterprise.

Key employee is actively seeking a new job or looking to retire – Out of 100 IT employees 22 change jobs within each 12 months.  Add to that the fact that between 20 to 30% of "legacy" system experts are going to retire within the next 5 years and you have another issue the CIO needs to address.

Users and the CIO want an application and you cannot document the ROI – Pressure is placed on you to build the business case for a new application or an enhancement to an existing one and you cannot prove that it meets the enterprise’s ROI threshold.

You do not know what the CIO’s vision is – You are in a meeting with users and the CIO and say something that shows that you are not on the same page as the CIO.

• Manager Enterprise Architecture
• Project Manager Enterprise Architecture
• Enterprise Architect
• CIO
• CIO - Small Enterprise
• Chief Compliance Officer - CCO
• Chief Security Officer - CSO
• Manager Database
• Manager SOX Compliance
• Capacity Planning Supervisor
• Change Control Supervisor
• Database Administrator

The Internet and IT Job Description WORD files have also been updated to include these changes.

In a research published recently in the Journal of Research in Personality, the scientists took a look at just e-mail addresses and had the people who created them fill out a brief personality questionnaire. Then, they asked other students to rate these same addresses to find out if the e-mail names seemed to be neurotic, open, agreeable, conscientious, narcissistic or extroverted.

They discovered is that the students tended to judge people based on their addresses. The researchers say it's astonishing that the sliver of information that you pass on in your e-mail address can be enough for people to get a valid read on your personality.

Their advice is simple: Choose an address you like. After all, is it really such a bad thing for others to see you the way you are?

A culture change from decisions being made from a large to a small group of people might force an employee to quickly adjust the way they get things done. A change from a U.S focused IT organization to a global one might put pressure on a worker to adjust their schedule, and their way of communicating with customers to fit the culture.

However, the message is that the onus is on the IT professionals to adapt to the changes being made within their departments. Yet most employees have from time to time felt that the culture of their group was changing and perhaps leaving them behind. Is the only option to quietly focus on getting another job?

As the culture changes the IT professional needs to be aware of the way decisions are made, who makes the decisions, and how that impacts them?  If that is not understood and dealt with frustration and poor performance follows.

• Obtain a university or technical degree – A BA or BS will have value long past that of a certification that will be out of date in a few years.
• Build your network of peers and potential employers - You need others who will vouch for you, whether you are transitioning outside your current company or aiming for an internal promotion, so it is important to build trust and respect with your peers, bosses and associates. As a part of this effort, focus on improving your communication skills.
• Increase Your hardware, software, and application experience -  If you are  going to have to use IT hardware, software, and applications, maintain them for other users or convince customers to include those products in solution, you need to be able to discuss your own experiences with those products.
• Attend training and seminars of the latest IT solutions – Expand your knowledge and experience base by every means possible.  There are many training and seminar programs that are available from vendors – attend them and then quickly apply what you have learned.
• Expand your on-the-job experience  - Whenever opportunity arises, throw your hat in the ring for that new project, whether or not it is outside your areas of expertise.  Pursuing projects outside the normal scope of your job responsibilities not only expands your marketable knowledge and experience, but can put you in the position to meet, network with and impress new people.