Article on How Not to Get an IT Job

Here is an article from last week on Datamation by James Maguire. Has a few interesting points in it. Glad that James referred to comments from Nick Corcodilos throughout the piece. Nick is usually spot on with his viewpoints of the marketplace.

Some of these 10 tips are very obvious. They go without saying, and end up being a little humorous. But, one that I get asked about a lot is the first tip. It is a must that you leave off a generalized objective. I can not tell you how many resumes I get that say, "I want to be part of a dynamic company....blah...blah...blah". Do not waste the space with such nonsense. In all honesty, I highly encourage people to leave out the objective in its entirety about 95%+ of the time. Your experience is going to say it all. The only time there is a need for an objective is if you are trying to steer your career toward a specific niche that might not be inferred from reading through your experience. So, when in doubt, just omit.

The other one is the notion of networking. It goes without saying that networking will never die. But, a lot of it can be done via messaging through social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Instead of picking up the phone, I would encourage technology based professionals to go to community based meetings. In the open source space, attending a LUG (Linux User Group) meeting is not a bad idea. Or, beyond that, there are usually meetup groups that deal with PHP, etc. in most cities. There is nothing wrong with the phone, but in-face contact is generally better and will produce better results. Especially, when you do not know the particular person firsthand.

As always, we highly encourage people that have questions about their job search to either shoot us an email, or you can visit our IRC channel. We look forward to hearing from you!