The one Project Manager type that has been impacted the most by the economy is Network Technical Services. That is the area where many enterprises (Mid-sized Enterprises in particular) have made cuts. 

Currently the Mid-Atlantic market is toughest place to find a job.

The CEO of Janco, Victor Janulaitis said, "Over the last six quarters there has been a noticeable reduction in costs associated with senior level IT professionals in large enterprise.  In New York alone there are over 200 IT executives  that had earned well into the six figures that are now looking for work."

The 2009 Mid Year IT Salary Survey will be released at the end of June and more information can be gotten at Janco's websites.

1990 Applications	2010 Applications
Mainframe - Host Based	Web - Server Based
Designed to last	Designed to change
Tightly integrated	Open Architecture, modular
Application silos	Enterprise Mirrors
Code-oriented	Process-oriented
Rigid sequential development - SDM	Interactive and iterative development - SOA
Cost-centered	Business-oriented
Homogeneous	Heterogeneous

Job content is changing as well as knowledge requirements.

• Meetings happen without the CIO or IT manager being involved or informed.
• The CIOÂ’s or IT ManagerÂ’s feedback and input are not sought or are ignored.
• CIO or IT manager are not included in strategic planning.
• The IT department suffers from high turnover, and the CIO or IT manager have a particularly hard time keeping top-tier talent.
• People work around the CIO or IT manager.
• The business-side peers seek out others in IT to handle their problems, while IT staffers seek out other IT leaders or even go over your head.
• The CIO or IT manager don't hear bad news directly from those who should be delivering it. (It could indicate that they are not good at taking criticism or handling problems.)

• Know the laws that apply – EEOC and OSHA
• Create an employee handbook and follow it for everyone
• Minimize the use of employee contracts
• Retain copies of your offer letter
• Document all employment-based conversations
• Do not assume that "transferring" an employee will solve a problem
• Hire well and do detail vetting and reference checking
• Be proactive any all personnel issues

• Inability to communicate effectively
• Poor interpersonal skills
• Lack of leadership skills
• Inability to accept new solutions - locked into doing things the same old way
• Inability to deliver systems and expected results
• Not meeting budget (time and dollars) expectations
• Inability to see beyond technology - missing business objectives

Respondents widely commented that further falls in new business and an uncertain economic outlook were key factors that contributed to the latest decline, Markit Group Ltd, which compiles the monthly survey, said.

However, overall cost burdens faced by private companies also fell as job layoffs accelerated and staff costs marked their steepest drop since June 2003, the survey showed.

The Hong Kong purchasing managers' index (PMI) rose to a seasonally adjusted 44.77 in May from 44.34 in April. A reading above 50 indicates growth in activity, while a figure below 50 signals deterioration.

The survey compares business conditions with a month earlier, based on data from Hong Kong companies across industries including manufacturing, services, retail and construction.

The in-migration that happened in the middle of this decade certainly had a lot to do with the housing boom. When that went bust, so did those crazy population balloons. But these particular places are still growing because instead of building an economy that relies heavily on one industry, most of the metro areas on Forbes' list serve as headquarters for a diverse range of companies.

For example, Austin's biggest employers include the University of Texas, Advanced Micro Devices and Dell. That wide range might have something to do with the area's relatively low January 2009 unemployment rate of 6.4%.

This is the opposite of what happened in true housing boom-and-bust towns like Las Vegas. In 2004, Las Vegas - a foreclosure mecca - saw a population increase of 4.6%, followed by 3.66% in 2005, 3.98% in 2006 and 3.22% in 2007. In 2008, that number fell to 2%.

Global IT service providers continue to be adversely impacted by the economy as BT Group plans to cut about 15,000 jobs.  This news comes on top of 15,000 job cuts the company made during its fiscal year, which ended March 31. BT said that as part of its cost savings program, it had reduced full-time employees during the year by 5,000, while also reducing by around 10,000 the number of indirect employees working through agencies or third party contractors.

Further reductions of a similar level are planned this year according to BT.  These moves by BT come as its profits and revenue slide due to the global economic downturn, and fierce competition.

Janco Associates' predicts that if the new taxes on un-captured offshore revenues are enacted Microsoft will be forced to more of it operations outside of the US in order to maintain its competitive advantage in the software market.  This would in turn mean ever-greater lay-offs in the US.

The best solution is to have a well-defined set of policies and procedures in place for security, which includes processes to assist in the management of employee termination.  The Security Manual Template offered by Janco Associates directly address how to do this and provides forms to assist enterprises of all sizes to more effectively manage the termination process.

• Tambe and Hitt found that as many as 8% of US IT workers have been displaced by offshore outsourcing, either through job loss or job transfer.
• New York University's Stern School of Business and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania that finds the use of H-1B workers by U.S. companies is decreasing wages for computer programmers, system analysts and software engineers by as much as 6% and IT managers by 3%.
  
  The researchers said they found evidence that the wages are falling by accessing tens of thousands of resumes provided by a "leading online job search site" they would not identify, to gain demographic and wage data of individual companies. They took all that information and combined it with government and other public data sources, including H-1B visa use and outsourcing, to get what they termed a "micro-data" view of what is going on in public companies that hire visa holders and offshore work.

Companies operating in the U.S. tech sector have announced 84,217 jobs cut in the first quarter of 2009, according to a global outplacement company. Of which 18,972 employees were laid off in the telecom tech sector (12,395 more than the number of employees laid off in the same area in Q1 '08), 33,665 in computer (26,740 more layoffs than in the same period last year), and 33,665 in electronics (27,737 more jobs cut than Q1 '08).

This is the largest quarterly jobs cut since Q4 '02 when the industry had posted 133,511 layoffs and five times higher than Q1 '08 when it had registered 17,345 jobs cut.

The CEO of Janco, Victor Janulaitis predicted that the number of visa requests will fall between 85,000 to 95,000 this year.  He said," The economy has impacted everyone and there is a 'reluctance' by US employers to hire non-US citizens and face a possible public back lash."

Demand for H-1B visas typically fluctuates with the economy. The initial number of H-1B applications filed with the federal government was down sharply from the number filed a year ago.  In 2008, in just five days, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) received 163,000 applications for the 85,000 visas that were available. The USCIS resorted to a lottery to award the visas.

USCIS began accepting H-1B applications for fiscal 2010, which starts in October. However, nine days into the filing period, only about 62,000 visa petitions had been submitted. The USCIS said 42,000 of those applications were for one of the 65,000 regular visas that can be issued. Another 20,000 visas are set aside for foreigners with advanced degrees from U.S. universities; the agency has received more than enough applications for those visas but said it is continuing to accept additional petitions.

Moreover, that still may happen, especially after college graduations in May. Foreign students cannot apply for H-1B visas until they graduate - a restriction that shut them out of the application process in recent years. That prompted the Bush administration last April to extend the amount of time that some foreigners can continue to work in the U.S. on their student visas.

There were 9,000 more jobs cut than analysts had predicted, and March's losses were 12,000 more than February's. January's numbers have been modified from an original number of 655,000 to 741,000. Since December of 2007, the economy has lost a net total of 5.1 million jobs while the federal government has imported more than 2 million foreign workers.

Factories took the hardest hit in March, cutting 161,000 jobs. Despite some positive news in the home sales numbers from February, construction firms cut 126,000 jobs. Professional and business services, retailers and the hospitality industry also saw significant cuts.

One of the greatest expenses in most IT organizations is personnel.  Even in today's environment unexpected opening will occur. Janco has identified the best practices that CIOs and IT managers should follow if they are to succeed in successfully manage their staffing.

Understand and be able to justify how each position supports the enterprise's key objectives.

• Establish quantitative and objective metrics to evaluate job performance
• Validate that compensation is competitive, based on current market rates for the position and metro area the job is in
• Look at both internal and external candidates for open positions when they need to be filled
• Apply a consistent selection process to all candidates
• Include key stakeholders in your employee selection process
• Train your interviewers in your employee selection process
• Give your interviewers guidance to help them probe deeper into a candidate's suitability and compatibility with the culture of your enterprise
• Conduct comprehensive reference and background checks on job candidates and validate the information on resumes of all employees
• Ensure your orientation process helps re-deployed people become productive faster.

• Be more than a technologist - Understand how economic cycles affect your professional associates, the enterprise as a whole, and the industry in which it operates.
• Understand how the economy impacts your job - Big projects and challenging initiatives could to be put on hold, and you might find yourself working on less-than-exciting tasks.
• Create your future - It is very easy for people to keep their heads down and hope not to be noticed, but that is often exactly the wrong thing to do. As an IT professional you have the opportunity to demonstrate what you're capable of.
• Know the new technologies - Be aware of the latest technologies that offer new ways to improve productivity and expand your expertise.
• Listen to what others say - Companies shed poor performers, so it is important to stay at the top of your game by soliciting feedback as part of a focus on continual self-improvement.

As the economic news continues to get bleaker, budget and staffing cuts are a fact of life for many IT departments - resulting in postponed purchases, delayed projects, hiring freezes and layoffs. IT investments need to be targeted and focused on the core business and its bottom line.

The situation poses difficult leadership challenges for CIOs. CIOs need to focus on key IT initiatives so they can proceed as planned, because of a desire by many business executives to rely even more heavily on technology to help reduce corporate costs and boost revenues.

The recession is not good for IT per se, but CIO do have an opportunity to clean up the processes at facilities where things maybe were not as efficient as they could be.

• Are job responsibilities documented in detail job descriptions?
• How does each job support the key objectives and mission of the enterprise?
• When looking for individuals to fill roles are internal candidates looked for first? Why or why not?
• Are specific job performance criteria defined for each job?
• Is the compensation for jobs within the enterprise competitive? If not why?
• When recruiting for new employees and/or promoting existing employees are the selection and evaluation process robustly defined?
• When interviewing potential employees does the enterprise have guidelines established that key in on the suitability of the candidate for the job being filled?
• Are all potential employees thoroughly vetted?
• Are all employees afforded equal opportunities to be trained to meet specific job requirements?

All of these questions are the basis for an HR process which can insulate an enterprise from risk and costs associated with terminations that go wrong.

• Communications skills
• Presentation skills
• Project management
• Organizational skills
• Business acumen
• Strategic planning abilities
• Relationship management
• International experience
• Team building
• Negotiation skills
• Decision making skills
• Cost control management

• Keep it short - The typically recruiter only spend about 10 to 15 seconds on their first pass through review.  If your resume is 4 to 5 pages long recruiters ofKeep it short - The typically recruiter only spend about 10 to 15 seconds on their first pass through review.  If your resume is 4 to 5 pages long recruiters often do not get past the first page.
• State what your objective is - When the recruiter reviews the resume if he sees that your objective is the same one that he is trying to fill that is plus for you.  At the same time, he may have a second position that needs to be filled and could move you into that stack.
• Highlight your current skills - No one really is hired because they leaned a programming language in college.  Rather they are hired because they implemented a Web 2.0 application or some other current technology.
• Minimize the number of Acronyms - Acronyms say nothing about what you know, rather spend the limited space that you have in a resume to show how you have been able to apply a technology to business solution. For example instead of saying that, you worked on an ITSM provide and example of how your actions improved the service a key customer received and then resulted in more revenue for your company. That is not to say that acronyms and protocols should not be mentioned at all. However, if you do, be prepared to back it up.
• Present practical facts not theory - Recruiters are interested in what could be and should be.  They want to hire IT professionals who can get things done now.  In addition, do not use buzzwords if you do not know what they mean.  If you use the term Sarbanes-Oxley, know what it means and how you can help the recruiter's organization meet its compliance objectives.
• Define a broad scope for the position - When a recruiter sees a resume that is limited or single dimensional they often reject the resume.  If on the other hand the scope is broad, they move the resume to the keep pile or the other position they are recruiting for.
• Be specific about your experience - Try to avoid words like "assisted" and "supported", they mean nothing.  What the recruiter is looking for is what you personally actually did.  This is the age customization, match the experience to the position you are applying for, even if it means some repetition.
• Focus the resume on getting the interview - The resume should be directed to an IT professional. Yes, human resources may review the application as well, but ultimately the position's supervisor (and peers) will choose whom to interview. Your resume should speak to them. rvisor (and peers) will choose whom to interview. Your resume should speak to them.

CIOs now have to decide whom to hire by sorting through a maze of competing technical expertise, business acumen, cultural preferences, and career expectations.

That is not always easy. Millennials have a tendency to eat, sleep and breathe Web 2.0 technologies, and the value of that may not be immediately clear to a traditional CIO.

Boomers have expertise in more traditional technologies such as IT infrastructure and operating systems. That's good news for large enterprises, which are always on the lookout for IT professionals with the skills needed to support its largely mainframe-based package-tracking system.  That type of expertise can limit boomers' prospects elsewhere.

This eagerness to learn gives many millennials a leg up on the competition. There is a managerial flip side to consider. Young IT workers who are bold enough to take on new technologies are also more likely to be impatient with the constraints of traditional workplaces.

Businesses that expect all employees to march to the beat of the same drummer, however, may have a tough time reining in millennials' more spirited work ethic and thirst for experimentation.

The U.S. Senate bill would bar any recipient of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), the program being used by the government to purchase some $700 billion of bad mortgage assets, from hiring anyone on an H-1B visa.

The feeling by some on the Senate floor was that companies going through layoffs that employ H-1B visas (holding workers) have a moral obligation to protect American workers by putting them first during these difficult times. Earlier Senator Grassley told Microsoft that it had a "moral obligation" to give job priority to U.S. workers over foreigners with H-1B visas.

Helping to ensure that IT security workers have job security are factors such as industry  (PCI-DSS and ISO) and regulatory (Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA) compliance demands, increasing data protection requirements stemming from wireless deployments and rollouts of virtualization technology, and growing consumer angst over data breaches.