| | | INSIDER Alert | | Your guide to the top content posted this week for Insider members | | | | Computerworld Although degrees and IT certifications can be great eye candy for a resume, experience is king. As you may have encountered, a lack of experience can be a major roadblock to getting interest from employers in your early years. Though you might have the Network+ or CCNA cert, for instance, have you actually configured or played around with a network? Even if you already have held a network technician or administrator position, you might not have experience with all aspects of networking yet. Fortunately there are ways to get hands-on network administration experience, even at home -- and most don't cost anything.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story) | | Computerworld Have you ever felt as if you were being punished for someone else’s mistake? Maybe your project sponsors “remembered” some requirements at the last minute and insisted that the schedule couldn’t change. So you had to stay late or work all weekend. You suffered. The consequences to them? Nil. Maybe you discovered a product bug and the vendor told you that everything was OK because it had a workaround. Great. You were stuck with all the manual work to get around the vendor’s bad code. You suffered. The vendor? Not so much.How did you feel in those situations? Hold on to that feeling for a moment.Now, let’s be honest. Sometimes the shoe is on the other foot. We make mistakes, and our users and sponsors suffer. Maybe the accounting system goes down for a day during the year-end close, and once you fix it, the folks in accounting are stuck working overtime to meet their regulatory deadlines. Maybe your automated backup system stops working and you don’t notice for a few weeks. Then, when someone needs a critical file restored and it isn’t there, he has to re-create it from scratch. Or maybe an invoicing input screen has a bug and it takes a week to fix. Once it’s working, the accounts receivable people have an entire week of backlog that they have to dig through. They probably will suffer mightily. You, only a little embarrassment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story) READ MORE | | ITworld The leading unified communications (UC) vendors are taking a hard look at the opportunities for virtual reality in the conference room or the boardroom. For example, there are a number of enterprise-friendly virtual world platforms that are already or soon will be compatible with the Oculus Rift and other virtual reality devices. These are business-safe alternatives to Second Life – which itself has already come out with a beta version of an Oculus-compatible viewer. The three biggest commercial players are ProtoSphere, AvayaLive Engage, and 3DICC's Terf. On the open source front there's OpenSim, a Second Life clone that can run behind a corporate firewall.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story) READ MORE | | Computerworld Preserving privacy by keeping information secret isn't working. Consumers give away precious data for online baubles. Data breaches, large and small, spill data all over the Web. Marketers indiscriminiately gather details about the online lives of people in their target markets. Does that mean we should be reading the last rites over privacy? Not necessarily, say two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who are working on a new Internet protocol that could preserve privacy by making information less private. The researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab -- graduate student Oshani Seneviratne and principal research scientist Lalana Kagal -- call the protocol HTTPA -- HTTP with Accountability. The protocol doesn't attempt to shroud data in secrecy. Rather, it allows the owner of the data to attach conditions for its use. It also allows usage of the data to be audited so its owner can determine if its conditions are being followed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story) READ MORE | | Network World As the old saying goes, a lie may take care of the present, but it has no future. Nowhere is this truer than when conducting a job search. In a hyper-competitive talent market, it can be tempting to embellish your work history, exaggerate your IT skills or even claim to hold advanced degrees if it'll give you an edge over other job seekers. Unfortunately however, even if these lies manage to go unnoticed at first, they'll many times catch up with; potentially landing you back among the ranks of the unemployed with a bad reputation according to Tracy Cashman, senior vice president and partner of Information Technology Search at WinterWyman."The unemployment rates have been the lowest since 2008, but the job market is still competitive enough to make some job seekers feel like they need to embellish their resumes. In some cases, for the long-term unemployed, they can feel desperate and they're only thinking in the short-term, not the long-term impact of what'll happen if they're found out," says Cashman. A recent CareerBuilder survey found that 58 percent of the 2,188 hiring managers and HR professionals have caught a lie on a candidate's resume; 33 percent of these employers have seen an increase in resume embellishments in the post-recession era.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story) READ MORE | | Computerworld When demand exceeds the supply of available IT talent, many companies are using contractors to help fill the gaps. IT contractors provide manpower when workloads spike and can bring key expertise and skills to a team. (See related story, Life as an IT contractor) Across all fields (not just IT), independent workers are on the rise, according to MBO Partners, which provides back-office services to self-employed professionals. The number of independent workers is forecast to reach 40 million in 2019, up from 30 million today. Over the last four years, the independent workforce has grown 12.5% -- greatly outpacing the 1.1% growth in the overall U.S. labor force, MBO asserts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story) READ MORE | | | | |
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