Shaping a successful IT career!

Successful IT professionals not only approach their work in a different way than most, but they are also very focused and clear about their career objectives and plans. However, regardless of position, booming IT professionals are ambitious and share almost the same perspective. And being top of the line is not just about who has the best technical skills. It is maybe a paradox, that some of the folks who succeed in an IT profession are those whose technical skills are not in effect extra-ordinary. Of course, they can talk bits and bytes when they have to. But when it comes to understanding what makes an IT career progress forward, IT leaders realise that it is effective communication and people skills that matter most.

"I'd advise any person embarking on a career in IT to be willing, flexible and work hard - but it's partly about being in the right place at the right time. And, sometimes, you can engineer those right places and right times - not in a manipulative way, but by developing trusted working relationships with people. It's not all outside of your control." ~ Abby Ewans, IT Director at Simmons & Simmons.

Here are some insights to help shape, grow, and advance careers of IT professionals:

•   Take charge of your career: Take responsibilities. Don’t waste time fulfilling someone else’s career objective. Realise, revitalise, and reinvent your career every day. IT is an evolving market, adapt new technologies, work smart, and embrace change as it occurs.

•   Every encounter is an opportunity: You never know where the next big opportunity lies, make every conversation worth something.

•   Focus on your strengths: Focusing on too many things at a time will not let you achieve the best.  Do whatever you do intensely as Robert Henri puts it.  Focus on your strengths, do what you love or what you are best at. Because this is how you will get your best upshot.

•   Avoid being a Workaholic: Remember workaholics overproduce and overachieve at a cost – often a personal price for their unusual behaviour. Naturally, workaholics usually burn out after a period, long or short, to never recuperate their past performance.

•   Relationships matter: IT is an extensive field. It is important to keep up with latest technologies and develop relationship with likeminded people who can provide solution support when needed. So, spend time building relationships outside the organization.

•   Collaboration is the key: Let people around you share ideas, encourage feedback, and collaborate more often. Master the art of listening. Develop the discipline to listen more and talk less.

•   Never stop working: IT is a challenging field, it demands constant supply of fresh ideas and new skills to remain afresh. Even if are fired or laid off, never stop working, not for a single day. Because the longer you are not engaged, the more it will drain your confidence. Immediately volunteer support for something that puts your skills to work.

•   Make sure you get the respect you deserve:  Regardless of profession, your sense of self-worth is the most important thing. If you are not getting the respect you deserve, there is no reason to struggle or suffer an obnoxious boss.

•   Deliver Exceeded value: Develop more skills, remain on top of evolving technologies, embed new ideas, and be innovative with your work to over-deliver and exceed expectations.

For a reputed IT Recruitment Agency, please visit http://www.vertex-it-solutions.com

How to hire the right IT Resource?

The increase in demand for low-cost and interactive Web based business application and growing IT infrastructures, are leading many companies to build competencies in IT and related services. To cope with the challenges of changing landscape of communication and customer responsiveness, IT resources are needed at companies, large or small, to extend support, improve business operations, and stay competitive in the market.

Hiring IT resources is an intricate process. If donewrong it can be really damaging for the organisation concerned.  Conversely, the right IT people can boost overall productivity of any organisation, in a matter of months, through improved business infrastructure, seamless client communication, and interactive collaboration within and outside the company. No doubt, IT hiring is a crucial task and requires dedicated hours and strategic planning to execute properly. For optimum hiring, it is important to analyse current and future needs of the organisation, define a clear and concise job specification, and strategically market that job position through the appropriate platform/media to attract the right pool of candidates.

Here are FIVE secrets to help you hire Right IT resources:

1.       Strategise Hiring –Hiring capable IT people allows an employer to set strategic goals and directions for the organisation. Whether you wish to hire an apprentice or an experienced professional, plan hiring.  Analyse short-term/ long-term requirements of the organisation, define hierarchies, and know whom, when, and from where to find the best suitable candidates.

2.       Prioritize Skills – It might be tempting to hire a versatile IT candidate with additional skills or experience in diverse markets, but often it is not a good idea. Focus on specific skills required for your organisation to be successful and meet corporate goals.

3.       Realise Specific Work Achievements – While you evaluate a potential candidate, do consider his/her previous work record. Required experience should be defined in terms of particular accomplishments in the skills relevant to the job position, not in terms of years. Use a critical incident interviewing method to gauge and discern capabilities of a candidate. For instance, a Network Engineer, with over 10 years of experience in Network maintenance and big-business credentials, might not align well with the business needs or work environment of a SMB or vice versa.

4.       Recognise Capabilities – Once you have shortlisted candidates from the pool, test their abilities to get a sense of their approach towards work. There is no better way to evaluate performance of a potential hire than the direct assessment of work. Some employers ask candidates to troubleshoot model networks or design mock-ups before selection. If the work sample does not meet standard criteria, reject the candidate and move on. Pre-testing helps employers know what to expect from the hire in the time coming.

5.       Emphasise Persistence – The times are evolving pretty fast in the world of Technology. To stay on the leading edge of IT, It is important to hire candidates who have persistent drive to embrace challenges and who do not get discouraged easily from unexpected setbacks. Do necessary checks and collaborate with previous employers to ensure that the candidate has the competitive drive and ability to manage frustration well.

For IT recruitment services, please contact us at www.vertex-it-solutions.com.

Business Intelligence Recruitment Needs Intelligence

Business intelligence is used to support decision making at the strategic, tactical, and operational levels. At the strategic level, product and market analytics is the top Business Intelligence (BI)function, followed closely by strategic planning and market trends and analysis. Performance management is the dominant tacticalapplication; but marketing, forecasting, operations planning, and line-of-business pricing and profitability are close behind. Financials and sales applications are the foremost operational BI applications, but general operational analytics and CRM applications are also widely employed.It is therefore imperative to have a flexible data architecture and design as well as effective data integration to maintain data integrity and timeliness in all BI efforts. This is particularly important since the demand for a unified information management platform for structured and unstructured data is expected to increase over the coming years. It is not surprising to see increased emphasis in the governance of both data and BI activities. This also helps explain why it is very important for organizations to have a framework for prioritizing and guiding the development of BI activities.

The basic principles of supply and demand pertain to a company’s ability to recruit and retain business intelligence (BI) professionals. Organizational demands for business intelligence capabilities are increasing rapidly and this makes BI environments even more demanding for hiring and retaining significant BI professionals. Old and new uses of business intelligence are on the rise, and enterprises of all sizes are juggling with the complexity of taking on more tools, users and advanced capabilities, according to a new BI market survey. What is driving demand for BI services? Mobile BI, advanced visualization tools, integration of social media, and to a lesser extent, development of intelligent automated decision support/BI systems top the list of expressed BI priorities for the coming years. Web-based collaborative BI, cloud-based BI, demand for SaaS tools, and use of semantic technologies to define business terms are also important undertakings. To find and keep the best people, it takes an understanding of how to match the right person with the job, and not just the one with the best technical skills. In their rush to fill open positions, managers can overlook that simple principle, resulting in a poor hire that causes more problems than it solves. There is also a tendency to hire people that remind us of ourselves rather than what the situation may really require. To get the best results, employers need a process that identifies employees who best fit their company based on facts, not just impressions.

The first step for hiring qualified business intelligence individuals is to determine where you are and why someone is needed. The answer should reflect the driving business need and your staff’s abilities. As you look at your whole team, identify the skill gaps and overlaps and the knowledge base you want in your organization.Otherwise, your organization might lose significant opportunities by not having sufficient business intelligence expertise needed to explore and capitalize on the wealth of data whichit is actively capturing.

For the most intelligent businessintelligence recruitment services, please contact Vertex at www.vertex-it-solutions.com

Vertex Takes on the challenge of Business Intelligence Recruitment

Business Intelligence and Reporting tools are important to the development life cycle. This tool offers you information when you need it in a format that suits your purpose. Vertex specialises in jobs related to business intelligence (BI) and reporting. We organize our technology recruiters in dedicated, technology teams led by a recruiter who has ample experience of recruitment.  The team that specialises in Business Intelligence jobs and roles understands that the candidate they hire needs to be skilled in his/her field to produce the best results for the employer.

According to the spokesperson at Vertex IT Solutions, Mr Keith Jeffcoat, “According to an article in Forbes magazine, businesses are going to need data scientists to make sense of the mounds of data piled up from every direction, if they want to beat out their competitors. In fact, the skills of the data analyst are essential to the 21st century enterprise. The demand for qualified business intelligence people can be judged by the fact that by 2018, as demand for data analysts continues to skyrocket; there won’t be enough qualified people to go around. The reason behind this overwhelming growth is that business intelligence represents a huge opportunity for companies because it likely includes important information about customer behaviour, security risks, potential system failures, and more, and that gives companies an edge over their competitors and also provides them with means and measures to cut costs and improve performance. The challenge for most companies is hiring the right people to figure out how to mine all that data. Organisations that use business analytics software can improve their decision-making processes if they have the right set of tools and the right people.”

About Vertex

Vertex has been at the forefront of I.T. Recruitment for over 10 years. Our consultant’s knowledge has been developed along with our database since the late 1990’s. Over the past decade we have made it our goal to build up a huge amount of knowledge from customers and consultants around the business issues and development requirements involved when enhancing I.T. systems. Whether it is Microsoft, Oracle, Java, or related B.I. technologies or enhancing business processes. We are corporate members of REC and individual members of the Institute of Recruitment Professionals. We provide Contract and Permanent resources across the EMEA region for the full lifecycle of any project and maintenance thereafter. For more information and latest vacancies please visit http://www.vertex-it-solutions.com

Business Intelligence – The Intelligent Way to do Business

Today's Business Intelligence (BI) software capabilities are truly amazing, yet so under-utilized. The question is,why aren't more companies utilizing the extraordinary power of BI tools to perform strategic and competitive analysis on-the-fly? But more importantly, can BI actually become the dominant focal point for all “intelligence” within an organization, driving the integration of internal and external (Customer, Market, and Competitor) information into a single, unified concept? How can improvements in semantic tools help make this possible?

Most companies can only use BI to support tactical or operational back-office functions and not to grow their business. This is because the BI software is usually populated solely with internal ERP data. This type of deployment is usually of little or no value to Strategic Management. The ability to connect multiple data sources is fundamental to enrich the scope of the decisions. Merging internal transaction data with external market intelligence ensures a 360 view of the market-business-profit reality, instantly, right from the BI software. Configuring data and BI tools in this way provides the company with a strong competitive advantage as Marketing and Sales folks can do their jobs more effectively, namely increase market share, revenue and net profit, while maximizing the return on the BI investment.

Integrating real time data from internal and external sources is a non-trivial task and is beginning to be pursued by the data mash-up vendors and others in the BI space. Semantic aware algorithms will become prevalent in developing stored searches and queries across the market place. There are companies who have been doing this and are rapidly approaching maturity. BI in most companies is very primitive and has not changed much in the last decade. End users still live in the world of canned reports and excel models as well as desktop databases such as Access for facilitating reporting. These practices will change but not on their own only out of necessity.

Getting started in a Business Intelligence career may be the easiest way for a graduate to break into the IT industry, but it is no free lunch and a level of competency must be reached. Getting a job is only the first step, being well prepared to build a successful career is something else.The first step to landing your next BI position is to focus on your resume. It is the employer's first impression of you. Don't just add information to your old resume -- really take a hard look at where you are today with your career and what you want to do in your next role. Then build a new resume that focuses on core strengths and accomplishments, and make sure you highlight the skills and responsibilities you are looking to leverage. It is also a good idea to create a cover letter specific to the position you are applying for and highlight your skills that directly correlate to the position description.

A very good way of discovering BI jobs is through recruitment agencies. If you see a position you are interested in posted by a business intelligence recruitment agency, immediately reach out to them by sending them your resume. Most recruitment agencies have a website of their own, so it would be a very good idea to get yourself registered on their website so you can get the latest updates and news about your dream career.

For the best business intelligence jobs in the UK, get in touch with the best business intelligence recruitment agency at http://www.vertex-it-solutions.com/

Vertex Takes Over Web Development Recruitment

Vertex IT Solutions, the leading recruitment, training and placement firm for skilled professionals in the Information technology industry, has started to offer an exceptional service to its clients unlike any other generalist IT recruitment agency, in the form of focused web development recruitment. Each of the recruitment consultants at Vertex has worked in this area of the recruitment market for a number of years and understands the ever changing pressure of the industry.

According to Chief Recruitment Officer at Vertex IT Solutions, Tony Cook, “The benefits of working with a specialist web development recruitment agency such as Vertex includes a detailed understanding of the market, up to date information on current salaries relative to technical experience, bespoke technical assessment geared entirely to web development and access to high calibre candidates. As a specialist, Vertex already has spent years creating links with potential candidates through face to face interaction and via our web portal.”

Maintaining his statement, he further added, “Vertex is focused on web development recruitment by having a thorough understanding of recent developments in technology and industry trends. Our consultants are perfectly placed to source candidates with the right skills for their clients’ businesses and will only present appropriately skilled candidates. Using our specialist web design recruitment services, companies will get access to the best possible candidates whilst saving time. Interview schedules can be cut in half. Only the best candidate will be put forward and negotiations will be handled by somebody trained to get the company the appropriate person they need on time and in budget.”  

About Vertex

http://www.vertex-it-solutions.com/  has been at the forefront of I.T Recruitment for over 10 years. Our consultant’s knowledge has been developed along with our database since the late 1990’s. Over the past decade we have made it our goal to build up a huge amount of knowledge from customers and consultants around the business issues and development requirements involved when enhancing I.T systems. Whether this is Microsoft, Oracle, Java, or related B.I technologies or enhancing business processes.

This enables us to pass to you our consultative approach to resourcing aimed at your organisational needs. We believe this is what separates Vertex from the majority of self-claimed I.T recruitment specialists. We are corporate members of REC and individual members of the Institute of Recruitment Professionals. We provide Contract and Permanent resources across the EMEA region for the full lifecycle of any project and maintenance thereafter.