I’m writing about a post a week for ITJobBlog. I’ve already written a couple of posts about how to develop your interview skills when you’re a candidate, part 1 and part 2. Please join us over there, too!
Add comment August 27th, 2008
I spoke with someone who wants a senior level management position. (He’s currently a mid-level manager.) I asked him about his experience with assistants. “I’ve never had one.”
Oh. Senior people have assistants because they need them. Other people need them, but our organizations have decided we can do all the grunt work ourselves. Don’t get me going.
A great assistant can make you or break you as a senior manager, because an assistant will make or break your ability to finish your work. That assistant can also make it possible for your managers to succeed or not.
A manager’s time is valuable, and while a manager can amplify the work of his or her staff, a manager’s assistant can *allow* the manager that time–especially time to think. When the assistant takes on the nitty gritty details, the manager is free to focus on the big picture or to dive deep where necessary. But you can’t do that unless you have a great assistant.
Great assistants can make the organization hum. Bad assistants can drop it to its knees. I was a project manager once in an organization where the assistant had her favorites. Luckily, I was one of them. I got what I needed: help from the facilities group, my contractors’ invoices were paid on time, I got the conference rooms I needed, and more. But she disliked one of my colleague project managers, and he didn’t get those things. He found it difficult to keep his projects rolling–not because of the technical work, but because of the environmental issues.
Turns out, he was fired later because he was a jerk 
She’d given her boss feedback about this guy (and feedback to his face) for several years, and finally stopped working with him when his jerk-iness got so bad it interfered with her ability to help other people. So she stopped helping him.
I stayed in touch with that assistant until she retired. For her entire tenure at this organization, she made the organization hum smoothly. Her boss made great decisions, because he had time to think.
4 comments August 19th, 2008
Some of my readers appear to be new to reading and commenting on blogs. Here’s how I manage my comments:
I don’t take ads on this blog, by design. I am happy to have people with content-ful (or even partially content-ful!) comments to post their urls in their comments. But don’t just take comment space to advertise to my readers. I won’t approve those comments, and I will not let you do it.
Back to the real topics now.
1 comment August 15th, 2008
I was talking with a junior colleague recently. He can’t find a job. I offered to help network with him. He said no, he’d look for a job himself.
Big mistake. If someone offers you help networking, take it! No matter who you are, how many years of experience you have, how sure you are you can get a job by yourself, take the help.
4 comments August 14th, 2008
In the comments to Why Hire Junior Contractors?, one of my recruiter colleagues, MN Headhunter, asked a great question:
…if we do not hire junior developers how they gain the experience to be a senior developer?
I was not clear enough in my original post. I believe in hiring a diverse team, especially in diversity of experience, and diversity of personality type. That includes junior developers (and testers and analysts and whatever other kinds of roles you need for your team). I encourage you to make that kind of diversity part of your hiring strategy.
Junior staff have a lot of possibilities to offer your team, which is why it’s worth hiring them: energy, a willingness to tackle any kind of work, maybe some ideas you haven’t considered, and more than I can think of right now.
But they do require training, which is why hiring a junior employee makes sense. To me, hiring a contractor as an extra pair of hands, when those hands need to be trained, doesn’t make much sense. But hiring employees–especially junior staff whom you can grow–that makes a lot of sense.
4 comments August 11th, 2008
I wa just reading recent grad frustrated by job search, and want to highlight something many candidates, even experienced candidates, forget:
Remember, a hiring manager is going to spend maybe a minute (or less) on the initial scan of your resume. What do you want her to see in that minute — a list of college courses you took, or work experience directly relevant to what she’s hiring for?
That means that no matter who you are, focus on your experience in your resume. If you can attach any value to the work you did, say that too: “developed microcode for blah-blah project, saving the company $50,000 in NRE.” (NRE is non-recurring engineering costs.)
Whether you’re a new grad or an experienced knowledge worker, use your resume to highlight your experience and the value it provided to your organization.
2 comments August 1st, 2008