Despite the high demand for IT workers, it’s still an employer’s market. That’s due in part to the laundry lists of skill requirements for IT positions. Convergence and cloud computing are increasing the base of skills that workers need to have. We’ve occasionally touched upon what needs to be done to solve this problem, but what can workers do in the meantime?
Developers are increasingly turning to Github to highlight their skills, and we’ve covered this trend a couple times. Meanwhile, the IT recruitment company CWjobs.co.uk is trying to find more creative ways to present job candidates.
CWjobs.co.uk recently published research finding:
- 88% of recruiters often see mistakes on IT jobseekers’ CVs.
- 74% of IT jobseekers are confident they represent themselves better in person than on paper.
- 23% of IT jobseekers admit to getting someone else to write their CV for them.
In order to help workers better present themselves, the company is experimenting with augmented reality.
Here’s an example:
Gimmicky? You bet. And it was probably quite expensive to produce. I doubt AR résumés are the way of the future, but what if you were applying for a job as an AR developer and you built something yourself instead of hiring someone else to do it? That would be an effective résumé.
Animators, designers, writers and other creative types have always been able to include examples of their work with job applications. Developers can include code samples. That’s harder to do for a data center operations manager, network engineer or systems analyst. But with cheap access to cloud computing resources through services like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud, it’s becoming possible for enterprise IT workers to create sharable samples of their work.
Have you ever presented a project as part of a job application? What types of side projects can workers do to learn and demonstrate new skills?
Photo by CharlotWest
