Career Advice for Students

Opportunity is everywhere and you need to be prepared to talk about yourself at the drop of a hat. The “elevator speech” is the most important part of your career development strategy and you should have one ready. I love 15SecondPitch.com and send all of my students to it to help them develop their pitch. As I like to tell them – “Your mother will brag on you, but no one else will”. If you cannot talk about yourself – your knowledge, skills and abilities – effectively and if you cannot state what makes you different and unique, you will have a great deal of difficulty selling yourself to a potential employer. Once you have your pitch developed, it is essential to practice, practice, practice until it sounds and feels natural.

Speaking of selling yourself to your employer – there is no better reading on this topic then the Fast Company classic, Brand YOU. The career market is competitive and especially so in the technical career market. You must learn to treat yourself as a product and apply marketing techniques to the presentation and promotion of YOU. In the College of Communication & Information at Florida State University we require our graduating seniors to prepare an Interactive Resume (IR) that is, at its core, an online marketing tool for Brand YOU. A list of IRs will go up shortly – CHECK IT OUT! – these are some sharp young people and it has been a joy to work with each one of them.

How do you build the skills required to move into a management or policy position? Students often fail to see the connection between their entry-level job choices and their long-term career goals. I found a wonderful tool that really helps the student understand how skills build progressively over time. The tool is called the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) and is produced by a UK think tank to help provide a standardized view of career paths in the IT industry.Version 4 of the SFIA has just been made available and consists of the following materials:

I use the SFIA as a tool to analyze short and long-term job prospects selected by my students. By having the student identify the skill and level of responsibility indicated by each of their long-term job targets, I can show them that within each of their long-term prospects lurked the job they need to look for after graduation – all they had to do was identify the areas with responsibility levels of 1 or 2 to understand where to begin their career path. Match the skills they have with the responsibility areas 1 & 2 and voila – the short-term job that gets them there is identified. Of course, these are necessarily the gruntwork jobs of IT but when they are taken with the bigger picture in mind, it makes the stress of being in the trenches on the frontline a lot easier to bear!

Versatility is a characteristic much desired by employers. I constantly stress to my students that IT does not happen in a vacuum. They are going to be employed in some industry that has unique problems and constraints. IT is part of an overall strategy that helps businesses be more competitive and profitable – which is the only road to survival. Tech Republic published a great read on the importance of versatility that contains this important idea:

“Enterprises that focus on technical aptitude alone will fail to align workforce performance with business value,” the Gartner study said. “Instead, they need to build a team of versatility who build a rich portfolio of knowledge and competencies to fuel business objectives.”

This industry is challenging in many of the same ways as the medical profession. In both instances, the practitioner must deal with an end user who does not understand the inner workings of the machine (body or computer) that they rely on. The end user comes to the professional for help with a limited understanding of either the cause or the cure of their problems. The end user is totally dependent on the professional providing the service and because of this, the IT professional – like the medical professional – is held to a higher level of ethical responsibility and behavior. The Board of Medical Examiners created an excellent list of the traits of professional behavior – mentally replace the references to medicine with references to IT and there you have it.

What are employers looking for in their IT hires? Well, ask and they will tell you. This report from CIO magazine is an excellent guide to help you develop skills employers want to hire. HINT: They are looking for more than the ability to calculate a sub-net mask…

Other resources to help you understand what employers are looking for:

Raising the Bar: A survey of employers that gives insight into what employers expect you to know/know how to do when you graduate from the University

Technology Leadership and Communication Skills

Kimberly Moore, CEO of Workforce Plus for the region that includes Leon County gave this awesome presentation on Life After College to my Spring 2011 Perspectives students about the current employment outlook as well as how to prepare to enter the workforce. Though we did not collaborate prior to her visit, her presentation was right on target in terms of echoing everything I tell my graduating seniors about how to prepare their resumes/Interactive Resumes and market themselves to potential employers. Review the presentation for some valuable tips and insights into getting ready for life after graduation.

ATTENTION YOUNG PEOPLE. This is a serious business and when we send you out in the world, you assume a great deal of responsibility for the most important asset in any organization – its information. I discuss the ethics of dealing with clients and their vital and sensitive information as often as I can with you. Last semester, I discovered the Systems Administrator’s Code of Ethics Pledge. I had every IT Practicum student read and affirm their commitment to this code by having them download and sign the pledge document and turn it in as part of their Professionalism grade. I feel very strongly about the importance of instilling a strong ethical foundation in every one of you before I send you out there with the blessing of the FSU College of Communication & Information.

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