Real-Life Lesson for IT Job Seekers

Apapito Soto’s story is a lesson that could benefit many IT pros seeking employment. As told in The Wall Street Journal on Monday:

Many workers, especially those out of work, turn to temporary-help firms for jobs. Unlike the past, staffing companies no longer are depositories for dead-end jobs, as they offer higher-paying positions.

"Temporary" is a relative term in staffing. In 2001, Agapito Soto, an Irvine, Calif., information-technology consultant, signed on with Sapphire Technologies, a temp agency that specializes in high-tech work. The agency placed the 55-year-old. Soto in a full-time slot with the Orange County sheriff's department, which continues to this day. Soto says he has notched on-the-job learning in his seven years at the sheriff's department.

He has even passed up permanent jobs that would match his salary because he figures those positions would be vulnerable to cuts that don't affect temps. "With the current climate, employers are looking at spending less," he says.

Follow the Money to Companies Hiring Technology Professionals

Want to know where to find jobs in this recession? Look at the firms where venture capitalists are investing.

Venture capitalist Trevor Loy invests in technology companies that haven’t stopped growing, according to a story posted on the McClatchy news service website. And, he says, these firms haven’t stopped hiring. "The end markets they serve are not shrinking," Loy said of some of the more than two-dozen companies he funds. According to the story:

They're part of a select swath of the U.S. economy that's been protected—so far—from the bad economic weather. They're schools and health-care providers, information-technology firms and green energy start-ups and other firms that, while not thriving, are at least still hiring.

Indeed, healthcare concerns and companies creating solutions to reduce carbon emissions are among ventures most in need of IT know-how.

Bad Economy but Bright Future for Some Info Technology Pros

Software as a service, mobile applications and data security should continue to flourish during the recession.

That’s the gist of a story posted on The Wall Street Journal website:

While the spending slowdown is expected to hit many technology categories, some pockets of tech—such as online software, mobile applications and security—may see increased investment and attention.

Companies investing more in all three of these tech categories make sense. Also known as a variation of cloud computing, software as a service—online apps that replace those housed on PCs, laptops and servers—provide similar benefits at much lower costs. With more people using wireless devices, creating new mobile applications helps drive productivity. And, as The New York Times reported earlier this month—in an article entitled "Thieves Winning Online War, Maybe Even in Your Computer"—securing corporate computers and networks are more crucial than ever.

With vast resources from stolen credit card and other financial information, the cyberattackers are handily winning a technology arms race. “Right now the bad guys are improving more quickly than the good guys,” said Patrick Lincoln, director of the computer science laboratory at SRI International, a science and technology research group.

The Journal's report concurs:

The economic downturn is heightening cyber security problems. Phishing attacks—emails that pretend to be from banks or some other legitimate source—are growing in sophistication. Cyber criminals capitalized on the collapse of several financial institutions this year by sending emails claiming that customers of failed banks needed to log on to a Web site and update their account information. The Web sites were really controlled by cyber criminals.

With the right skills, prospects for many IT pros look solid in these recessionary times.

IT Skills Essential in Recession

An article Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal confirms a tenet of this blog: employers need IT skills especially during an economic downturn:

There are also key areas where businesses—including those that are struggling—can’t go without help, says Jon Zion, president of eastern U.S. operations at staffing firm Robert Half International Inc. "There's still work to be done," he says. "And in bad times, [some] functions become even more essential."

Information technology is one such area, says Mr. Zion. Indeed, there are more than 62,000 employment ads currently listed on the technology job site Dice.com. IT positions are plentiful—even at companies that outsource jobs overseas. Systems administrators, network security specialists and help-desk technicians are still in demand, says Mr. Zion.

As we have noted, IT is so critical in keeping businesses functioning that among the last to be fired and the first to be hired are IT pros. "Today,” says Stevens Institute of Technology IT professor Jerry Luftman, “companies are going to IT and asking them for ideas as to how IT can be leveraged to reduce the costs of other parts of business.”

Can Unions Organize IT Pros?

If legislation to make it easier to organize workers into labor union becomes law next year,
how likely will information technology workers unite to join trade unions?

That’s a question posed in an article in the San Francisco Business Journal. The article quotes labor lawyer Garry Mathiason saying tech employees aren’t immune “merely because they are in technology or businesses where little union organizing has taken place.”

Big labor with the backing of many Democrats, including those in the incoming Obama administration, back passage of the Employee Free Choice Act that would make it harder for companies to battle unionization drives.

Though the bill was written to organize workers at companies like Walmart and not necessarily the information-tech industries, that doesn’t mean attempts to organize high-tech workers in Silicon Valley—where joblessness has jumped 2 points to 6.9% in just a year—won’t take place. Says labor lawyer Mark Ross, in the business journal:

“Times are changing. We’re in a troubled economy. People may be looking for other ways of protecting themselves and insuring that they are compensated appropriately.”

But would core beliefs of Silicon Valley technology workers get them to join a union. Here’s what Jan English-Lueck, a San Jose State University professor who studies the culture of the region, told the journal:

“There is a strong narrative of individuals in garages being successful, and that vision is not something that lends itself to organizing. Unions undermine the idea that I can do anything. You have a couple of really big cultural reasons against organization.”

Yet, the founder of the professional group Programmers Guild John Miano sees it differently:

“A forward-thinking union could set up a web site to create a non-stop certification drive at an unlimited number of Silicon Valley companies. This bill has the potential for having a major impact upon Silicon Valley and technology fields.”

GE Healthcare CollaborationsBode Well for IT Professionals

More evidence that healthcare IT will provide increasing job opportunities in the coming years for IT professionals comes from GE chief executive officer Jeffrey Immelt (left). In a conference call with analysts this week, Immelt discusses how increased collaboration with healthcare institutions will help grow the company’s healthcare IT business that includes high-tech diagnostic imaging, treatment and other wares:

”The trick is in the United States to position our $1.8 billion healthcare information technology business, which I think through some of the collaborations, we're forming with Mayo Clinic, Intermountain Health people like that is very well positioned now in the electronic health record to position this business to really grow rapidly as the government sets new standards and gives hospitals some capability to invest in this activity. … The story is going to be about productivity and efficiency.”

And, among those investments will be IT know-how. How else to connect all these healthcare devices with electronic medical record systems?

Technology Jobs Seen Emanating from Healthcare Modernization

An Obama administration economic stimulus package worth up to $1 trillion could help IT employment in healthcare.

That's the prognosis offered by the career site Jobfox. The top jobs to modernize U.S. healthcare would include IT, bioinformatics and information security specialists as well as software developers, Jobfox says.

Stimulus projects to construct roads, bridges, transit and rural broadband would include, Jobfox guesses, computer-aided drafting specialists and telecommunications engineers among the top jobs.