Deborah Rothberg at eWeek has a puff piece about making yourself indispensible when the outsourcing comes.
My view is that management, the directors of any outsourcing drive, have no idea who’s indispensible or not. That coupled with “why would you want to work for a company that outsources it’s intellectual capital” brings me to a big yawn on this article.
I guess the many pieces of “don’t be a tech-dweeb” advice will help, in such that management will hate you less – you stop confusing them and instead talk about synergizing the paradigm going forwards for a win-win team outcome.
“Get into project management,” screams the article, “its your only hope!” – Yep, not enough PMs, that’s a likely problem. Very view people can drive MS-Project and run through risk-management checklists.
“Maximize internal knowledge” – unless that’s where the bodies are buried, I’m not sure tying your brain so tightly to one employer is such a great plan.
“Don’t whine” – well, I guess I can’t argue with that. The squeeky wheel gets tossed overboard at the first opportunity.
$50 million
Combined salaries of the Top 10 CIOs, according to Baseline’s 2006 CIO Compensation Ranking, released Aug. 1.
Wow. Check out all that value they’re adding, with their amazing intellects and all.
Has anyone out there found that certification (as suggested by the article) helps, either with staying or getting employeed?
I disagree that project management is a safe role. In my experience, the PMs are the first up against the wall.
Certification has never been a factor from what I’ve seen.
Squeaky wheels don’t always get tossed overboard. At least they have some profile, so the managers will know who they are. Having a personal connection with the person doing the firing can really help. After all, if you’re going to majorly inconvenience someone, it helps if they’re not in your MonkeySphere.
From what I’ve seen, the way retrenchments are done is that they get a spreadsheet with everyone’s name, role and salary. They group roles together and then sort by salary. Then they start at the top and choose the highest paid people, deciding if they should be kept or not. So you either need to be not very well paid (relative to others in your role) or you need to be seen as valuable by a couple of the managers.
Being in work continually is the key. Not necessarily with the one firm, but just a regular
history of being in work gaining experience.
When I started work after leaving Uni (without a degree) my parent’s generation was used to
the “good education – good job – set for life” paradigm. They weren’t to know that the world
had changed. From the start of 1971 ’til the end of 1987, when an accident and subsequent
periods of hospitalisation and recovery kept me away from regular work for the best part of 2
years, I had 6 jobs as an employee with different companies, followed by 16 contracting
assignments, again with various clients. At no time did I spend more than two weeks off
work between jobs.
During 1988-1989, after the accident, I developed “holes” in my resume – “holes” being periods
of six weeks or more away from work. *That* was when it started to get difficult to find new
work. There were a few contributing factors that went with the “holes”, but they were the
main cause of problems.
So, to my mind, it doesn’t matter who you work for or how many jobs or assignments or contracts
you have – just keep doing it and don’t stop.