25 Top Jobs From Fast Company

Fast Company also published a list of top jobs for 2005-2009

excerpt:

What makes a job a great job? Obviously, different people will give different answers. It's impossible to account for everyone's personal taste and personality traits -- including foibles -- and how they might fit into a particular job. What makes a great job opportunity is much easier to gauge. How much do you get paid? What kind of professional development opportunities are available? How much room for innovation does a role offer?

Fast Company based this year's index of the top jobs on four categories: job growth, salary potential, education level, and room for innovation. Relying heavily on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the work of Dr. Kevin Stolarick, a lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University and an expert on the creative class, Fast Company has assembled a list of the 25 Top Jobs for 2005.

CNN/Money Ranks "Software Engineer" as Best Job in America

A recent CNN/Money article ranks the best jobs in America.

Software Engineer (also known as Software Developer, Programmer, etc...) ranks at #1.

See the rest of the list and get other career advice.

More evidence that the death of IT jobs in the US has been exaggerated.

As a personal note, the second ranking job is College Professor. As I've held both of the top two jobs, does that make me the luckiest guy in the country?

;-)

IBM Initiative

IBM has recognized the need to reverse the decline in enrollment in technical programs and has created an initiative to this end.

Here is a Q&A with Gina Poole, IBM Vice President of Innovation and University Relations.

Ms. Poole explains the declining enrollment as follows:

There are a couple of reasons: one is a myth, believed by parents, students, and high school guidance counselors, that computer science and engineering jobs are all being outsourced to China and India. This is not true. The percentage of the total number of jobs in this space is quite small -- less than 5%. According to a government study, the voluntary attrition in the U.S. has outpaced the number of outsourced jobs to emerging nations. Further, for every job outsourced from the U.S., nine new jobs are actually created in the U.S.

She discusses the job outlook:

The growth is everywhere. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has identified computer-based jobs as one of the hottest areas, and those involving specific skill sets -- systems analysts, database administrators, computer scientists -- as some of the fastest-growing occupations through 2012, with growth rates anywhere from 40 to 70% in the U.S. alone. Further, at least 1.5 million additional IT field professionals will be needed by the end of this year.

Another factor: approximately 70 million baby-boomers will leave the workforce over the next 15 years, with only 40 million new workers coming in, and that will make the shortage of computer-skilled folks even more dramatic. Canada and EMEA foresee similar retirement rates. And even looking at India or China or Russia, where there are explosions of activity, they are trying to move as quickly as possible from agricultural to manufacturing to services economies. In developed nations in Europe and North America, about 70% of the economy is based on services and knowledge workers, and this is where India, China, and Russia would like to be.

Over 50% of students entering university in India and China select degree programs in science, technology, math, and computer science, but they still don't have enough skilled workers to meet the demand.

She also answers the question, "Some estimates place the percentage of IT jobs eligible for outsourcing at 20%. With that in mind, can you still predict significant IT job growth here at home?":

Absolutely. To say, "20% of IT jobs are being outsourced" is alarming, but there are whole new fields opening up, new disciplines that will be in huge demand. Some of the more traditional IT positions -- application maintenance, transcription services, base application development -- may be outsourced for a number of reasons, principally cost and availability of workers.

But if you think of the exciting jobs marrying technology and business and really making an impact -- data mining, business intelligence, network architecture, Internet and Web architecture, Web services -- these will be the hot jobs as technology becomes more pervasive, less costly, and as more uses are found for it. There's even a view that outsourcing actually will help grow jobs.

Read the full interview.

The IBM Academic Initiative Newsletter is avaialble online.

Career Advice for IT Students

Advice for the next generation of IT execs, an article in Network World reiterates the point of a previous post: the need for today and tomorrow's IT workers to have general business skills and not just technical skills.

from the article:

Awareness of the business side of IT - and the IT side of business - is going to be crucial for anyone starting out in today's workforce. A report issued by Gartner last September predicts that by 2010, six out of 10 people affiliated with IT will assume business-facing roles. Gartner says "technical aptitude alone will no longer be enough" as IT execs will need to "possess expertise in multiple domains." CIOs want IT pros with breadth and depth of skills and diverse experiences, rather than deep and narrow specialization, Gartner says.

The article quotes a number of IT execs, including Jeffrey van Brunt, assistant vice president of finance and IT, Salt Lake Theological Seminary, Utah, who states:

Today's students should focus more on general business skills than on specific technology skills. Businesses will want IT professionals [who] understand how IT really relates to the basics of what businesses do. This is why more and more, companies are looking for those who have skill sets related to things such as Six Sigma, process analysis and design, and general business knowledge, in addition to some set of technical skills.

Although the article is from a networking magazine, the advice is great for any IT career path.

meta-job search...

Indeed.com is a job search site that searches other job sites. You can select by job description and/or location along with more advanced options. Searches can be saved as email alerts or RSS feeds.

Web 2.0

There has been a lot written about "Web 2.0". It is a catchy buzzword that is an umbrella for a number of different concepts. While some have dismissed it as hype, and others claim it is just a new word for concepts that have been around for a while, the truth is that there has recently been a large shift in terms of web applications and the way people use the web.


Here is a great, comprehensive post about what Web 2.0 is.

Here is an excerpt:

But one important ingredient, perhaps the key ingredient, is that it describes the inversion of control of information, processes, and software wholesale over to the users of the Web. This is because users now generate the majority of content these days and they also provide the attention that drives almost everything online financially (particularly advertising). And all of us have a uniquely equal access to the global audience of the Web; each and every one of us now has our own world-class pulpit (in the forms of blogs, wikis, and other mechanisms) that is amazingly the equal of any other person on the Web.

Smart businesses have already tapped into this - with viral or buzz marketing, as well as by monitoring the blogosphere. Stay tuned for more...