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 Topic: Career NewsThe new items published under this topic are as follows.
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System Administrator Appreciation Day
6th Annual - Friday - July 29th, 2005
( Celebrated annually on last Friday of July )
System Administrator Appreciation Day - A special day, once a year, to acknowledge the worthiness and appreciation of the person occupying the role, especially as it is often this person who really keeps the wheels of your company turning.
Read more at the Sys Admin Day website
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By Sharon Gaudin
Published at: Earthweb
A network engineer searches out business executives and questions them about processes and goals. In the evenings and on weekends, he reads business journals and researches trends.
This ten-year IT veteran knows that to remain valuable and to remain employed means understanding the business side of a company. Being skilled in IT alone is no longer enough.
''I spend a lot of time researching and talking with individuals to learn their part of their business,'' says Russ Schadd, a network engineer for a Chicago area consulting and contracting firm. ''The more educated I am, the less time is spent trying to establish a common ground for communication. That leads to a quicker resolution or implementation of what they want to get done, and that's basically why I'm here.''
Schadd is one of the smart ones, according to analysts at Forrester Research Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based industry analyst company.
A new report from Forrester says that while talk of IT's demise has been greatly exaggerated since the dot-com bubble burst about four years ago, the profile of the IT worker is changing. And it's changing quickly.
Laurie Orlov, a vice president and research director at Forrester, told Datamation.com that the IT profession basically has been having a crisis of confidence.
''Think of it as mid-life angst,'' says Orlov, referring to the financial and emotional turmoil that followed the collapse of the Internet boom of the late 1990s. ''It's somewhat ironic if you think about it, because it's right at the time that dependency on technology is increasing. But with a ton of publicity, outsourcing and cut backs in IT spending, all of that is at the other end of the pendulum from the enthusiasm we had in the late '90s. We had overhyped enthusiasm then and now we have overhyped fear.''
The IT industry isn't going down the drain, despite several years of layoffs and a growing trend to offshore high-tech jobs. What is happening, according to Orlov, is that the profile of the IT worker is changing.
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It appears women are leaving the American IT workforce faster than male executives can say, ''Go fetch me a beer, Darlin.'' But apparently, in the Silicon Valley, ''You go, girl!'' means, ''We're outta here.''
The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) recently published a gender diversity study in IT and the numbers are sobering: The percentage of women in the IT workforce declined by almost 20 percent over the last decade, from a high of 41 percent in 1996 to 32.4 percent in 2004.
Worse, the ITAA figures show ''no progress'' in the numbers of women in the professional or management ranks from the 25.4 percent mark achieved in 2002. And, the study claims, when women leave the IT field, they're not likely to come back.
In other words, there is a female brain drain occurring in technology. This isn't about educating and training more young women in engineering and science, worthy goal that it is. It is about women who already have those degrees taking their skills to a climate that is more likely than tech to be respectful.
This is happening at a time when Bill Gates, Craig Barrett and John Chambers, et al., are trooping to Capitol Hill to decry the declining American IT talent pool. They want relaxed immigration rules. They want more tax dollars invested in science and technology. They want outsourcing.
Perhaps they should also call for an equal playing field among the sexes.
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Hewlett-Packard has dismantled four research groups at HP Labs, including one led by a world-renowned scientist, as the company begins its latest downsizing initiative that will eliminate 14,500 jobs.
The technology giant has shelved a team based in Palo Alto focused on advanced software research led by Alan Kay, a respected computing pioneer, according to HP Labs spokesman Dave Berman.
HP also dissolved two Palo Alto labs that dealt with emerging technologies and consumer applications and a group in Cambridge, Mass., that handled research on health care and medical issues.
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Not the guy with a pocket protector, but a middle-aged minority woman.
Pop quiz: Which schools produced the most degrees in computer science in 2001? MIT? Carnegie Mellon? Georgia Tech?
If you guessed any of these, you’re wrong: try Strayer University and DeVry Institute of Technology.
And what kind of student is most likely to take up computer science at Strayer or DeVry?
If you guessed a young geeky guy with a pocket saver, guess again: try a 35-year-old African American or Hispanic woman who already has a full-time job at a company where information technology (IT) skills are a key to advancement.
She’s the one taking the night courses at one of the for-profit institutions like Strayer or DeVry that have a wide variety of locations, and offer courses in the early morning and evening, as well as on-line courses.
“We were so blown away by this,” remarked Dr. Shirley Malcom, director of Education and Human Resources at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and one of the authors of the report, “Preparing Women and Minorities for the IT Workforce: The Role of Nontraditional Educational Pathways.”
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IDG News Service (07/18/05); Montalbano, Elizabeth
shortage of qualified U.S. computer science engineers is indicative of dwindling interest in the field among college students, said Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit on July 18. He is concerned about the decline in the number of students entering computer science, and said Microsoft and other tech giants have a responsibility to dispel IT's negative image and boost its appeal to students. Gates said Microsoft must emphasize the positive aspects of working in different areas of technology projects in order to counter the perception of computer science as a field characterized by social isolation and mind-numbing programming. "The greatest missing skill is somebody who's good at understanding engineering and bridges that to working with customers and marketing," he said. "I'd love to have people come to these jobs wanting to exercise people management, people dynamics as well as basic engineering skills." Gates' comments came about during a question-and-answer session with Princeton University computer science professor and former ACM President Maria Klawe, who cited findings from UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute estimating that computer science suffered a more than 60 percent drop in popularity as a major for incoming college students between 2000 and 2004. Her feeling was that students-- women in particular--view computer science as a less glamorous field to work in. Gates also used the summit to pledge his support for continued government investment in computer science, noting that technology plays a critical role in addressing social issues such as education and global health care.
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