How To Become Productive At Work (Part I)

Each day starts with best of intentions. There are deadlines to meet, essential work to be finished, important business meetings & phone calls and short and long-term projects to be started. As the day comes to a closure and we are wrapping up to leave, we discover that barely a fraction of what we had on our to-do list has been accomplished. As a result we make a mental note to come in early the next day, stay late, and work at weekends as well. Yes, we are busy, but are we productive?

A professional is hired for one reason, i.e., he demonstrates the potential to be productive at work. So now you are there in a cubicle, facing a computer with the expectation that you will do something good for the company. Do you feel like being stuck at work sometimes? Would you like to be more productive and feel a greater sense of accomplishment at the end of each day? Well you can. It just takes a desire and commitment to renew your habits and routines.

A productive environment leads to productive employees. The article below is divided into two parts. This week we will give an insight on why a productive environment is necessary to motivate and make employees industrious at work while next week we will focus on how can employees themselves inculcate productivity in their profession.

Why is a productive environment necessary?

Employees produce good results when their managers treat them well and the organization pays special attention to their professional needs. So the question arises: What do most talented, productive employees need from a workplace?
Good managers recognize employees as individuals and do not treat everyone at a collective level. They don’t try to “fix” people and their weaknesses; instead, they excel at turning talent into performance. The key to productivity is to make fewer promises to your employees and then strive to keep all of them.

What does a great workplace look like? Gallup took the challenge and eventually formulated the following questions:

The Twelve Questions to Measure the Strength of a Workplace:

1. Do I know what is expected of me at my job?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3. Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best everyday?
4. In the past seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing well?
5. Does anybody at my job place seem to care about me as a person?
6. Is there anyone, may it be a supervisor or a colleague, who encourages my development?
7. Do my opinions seem to count at my workplace?
8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel that my job is important?
9. Are my co-workers committed to accomplishing excellence while performing their job responsibilities?
10. Do I have a best friend at the organization I’m an employee of?
11. Has someone at work talked to me about my progress in the last six months?
12. This last year, has my job given me an opportunity to learn and grow?

The results yielded that the employees who responded positively to the 12 questions worked in business units with higher levels of productivity, profit, employee retention and customer satisfaction. It was also discovered that it is the employees’ immediate manager, and not the pay, benefits, perks or charismatic corporate leader, who plays the critical role in building a strong workplace. So it implies that people leave managers, not companies. This means that if your relationship with your immediate manager is fractured, no amount of company-sponsored daycare will persuade you to stay and perform.

Relationship between managers, employees & companies:

According to the Gallup survey:

• A bad manager can scare away talented employees, hence, draining the company of its power and value. The top executives are often unaware of what is happening down at the frontlines.
• An individual achiever may not necessarily be a good manager; companies should take care not to over-promote.
• Organizations should hold managers accountable for employees’ response to these 12 questions.
• They should also let each manager know what actions to take in order to deserve positive responses from his employees because an employee’s perception of the physical environment is colored by his relationship with his manager.

Bring out the best:

The Great Manager Mantra is: People don’t like to change that much. Don’t waste time trying to put in what is left out. Try to draw out what is left in.

Managers are catalysts:

As a catalyst, the manager speeds up the reaction between the employee’s talents and the achievement of company’s goals and objectives. In order to warrant positive responses from his employees, a manager must:

1. Select a person
2. Set expectations
3. Motivate the person
4. Develop the person

Why does every role, performed at excellence, require talent?

Great managers define talent as “a recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied”, or the behavior one finds oneself doing often. The key to excellent performance is: matching the right talent with the required role to be played.

“Excellence is impossible to achieve without natural talent.”

Every individual is unique and everyone has his/her own personality accompanied by a dignity and self respect to go with it. Without talent, no amount of new skills or knowledge can help an employee in unanticipated situations. In the words of great managers, every role performed at excellence deserves respect; every role has its own nobility.

Comfortable environment:

In today’s competitive corporate world, it is becoming increasingly important to focus on the appearance of the workplace. With a mounting number of people spending more time in their offices, the physical comfort, visual appeal and accessibility of their workplace has gained ever more importance. Wouldn’t it make far better sense to retain valuable employees by making small, yet meaningful, aesthetic adjustments to their work environments?

Studies have shown that employers, who care about their employees and their work environment, have fashioned more motivated and productive people. There is a strong relationship between motivation and productivity at the workplace. Employees who are inspired will be more diligent, responsible and eventually, more industrious.

Well lit, airy & clean:

Employees spend 6 to 8 hours at their workplace every day which makes a workplace their second home. It is up to the employers to see and make sure that the office is fully facilitated and is in good working order. It must be well lit and well ventilated with the right amount of lights, fans, air-conditioning. Cleanliness is of utmost importance as there are a huge number of workers working at a job place. The offices, cubicles, rest area, washrooms, kitchen & serving area must be neat and clean. The more comfortable the working environment is more productive will be the employees.

Safety measures:

An employer must make sure that he provides a safe environment to his/her employee. The security measures outside office include security guards and parking facility. While inside the office, there must be introduced a safe environment for male and female employees to work so that if an employee has to work late hours she/he should feel safe and comfortable working in his/her office. There must be no discrimination or harassment practiced and the employee should be given equal opportunity to grow as an individual despite being male or female.

The power of recognition:

Acknowledgment is a powerful motivator. If you praise your employees and acknowledge their efforts they will feel better about themselves and about the hard work they have put in.

The saga of raise:

Sometime back it was believed that a “salary increase” is the most obvious tool for encouraging employees to work hard. Today several studies have discredited the idea. Employees do not become more productive simply because they are paid more. After all, employees do not calculate the monetary value of every action they perform. Studies show that while a raise makes employees happy, there is an abundance of other things that can accomplish the same thing.

The power of praise:

A pat on the shoulder can produce wonders. For effective management, a manager must recognize that fairness and leadership alone cannot inspire his staff to work hard. Deep inside all of us, we crave for being appreciated. Praise is an affirmation that an employee did something right, and every time he receives compliments in the workplace he pushes harder to receive the same avowal the next time around.

The importance of incentives:

Incentives even with no monetary value are just as important as praise. Incentive can be categorized as, praise with a physical form. It is actually a reward for a job well done. Managers tend to ignore the importance of non-monetary incentives while these have been found to dramatically increase employee’s sense of worth in relation to actual work accomplished. They could be company logo mugs or shirts or business card holders, no matter what you decide to give to your employees as an incentive, never lose sight of the need to recognize their efforts, whether verbally or through small office gifts.

How to Ask for a Resume Critique

Is your resume as good as it could be? Are you happy with the number of calls you’re receiving for job interviews? Is your resume email-ready, optimized for keywords and strategically written to market your best credentials? If you answered no to any of these questions, you would benefit from a third-party resume critique.

Kathy Sweeney, a certified resume writer and president of the nonprofit National Resume Writers’ Association (NRWA), says job seekers can benefit from getting a second opinion on their resumes. “A critique can provide insight into whether the job seeker is using the proper wording for his or her industry and if the document will make a great first impression,” she says.

Whom to Ask

What qualifications should your resume reviewer possess? "I firmly believe that credentials are important,” Sweeney says. She recommends looking for such resume-industry designations as:

Nationally Certified Resume Writer (NCRW), awarded by the NRWA. Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW), offered by the Professional Association of Resume Writers. Master Resume Writer (MRW), offered by Career Masters Institute. Sweeney adds that the professional conducting the critique should have reviewed resumes and interviewed candidates themselves. “Unless a professional has experience in the hiring arena or at the very least has networked with hiring managers to learn what they like to see on resumes, it would be hard to provide a valuable critique,” she says.

What to Expect

Sweeney says the reviewer should look at all aspects of the resume, just as a hiring manager would — reviewing it for initial impression, content and how well it stands out from other resumes.

You can sign up for a fee-based or free critique. Here are the differences:

Fee-Based Critiques: These are normally conducted by resume writers and other career-industry professionals. For a fee, your reviewer provides detailed feedback on your resume’s strengths and weaknesses in a written report, telephone consultation or combination. If you sign up for a paid review, find out exactly what you will receive, and request a sample report so you can see the quality of the feedback. Ask if the reviewer will complete a follow-up review after you make the suggested changes to ensure the document is job search-ready. Expect to pay between $25 for a basic critique and $200 or more for a detailed, comprehensive review.

Free Critiques: These can also be helpful but probably won’t be as detailed as a paid review. “A free critique is usually very general,” Sweeney says. “It may provide a synopsis of the reviewer’s overall opinion [of] the resume and potential problem areas. Reviewers may offer strategies on what they would do differently with the resume.” Good resources for free critiques include the Monster Resume Tips message board, hiring managers in your industry and professional resume-writing firms.

Information You Should Provide

Your reviewer needs to know your career goal and industry target to supply useful feedback. “I usually gather information about the job seeker’s target position, and ask how his or her background relates to the position,” Sweeney says. “I also ask job seekers to provide me with a few position postings related to their target job.”

Tell your reviewer about potential problem areas, such as employment gaps, job-hopping or unrelated work history. The more your reviewer knows about your background, the more constructive the feedback can be.

Use What Works, Disregard the Rest

If you ask 10 people to review your resume, you will likely receive 10 different opinions. You may also receive conflicting advice, making it difficult to know what changes you should implement. After you receive a resume critique, be open to suggestions and ready to make revisions that work for you. Pay attention to advice from resume writers and hiring managers, especially those within your target industry. By listening to professionals who know what makes a resume successful, you will be on your way to a successful job search.

Show Your Skills on Your IT Resume

Employers often screen candidates based on their technical skills, so job seekers naturally want to make sure they present their skills properly. As a result, creating a resume’s skills section can be a challenge.
Typical resume issues techies wrestle with include:
- Whether to list skills alphabetically or in order of importance.
- Whether to include every skill - but how much detail is too much?
How they can differentiate between expert knowledge and passing familiarity.

Don’t Exaggerate

One recruiter’s advice is simple: Don’t obsess over the skills section to the point of embellishment. "In adding a skills section to their resume, a lot of people have a tendency to exaggerate their level of expertise in various technologies," says Scott Hajer, senior corporate recruiter for Software Architects. "They figure the more keywords, the more exposure."

Such tactics are likely to backfire, especially during a technical interview. "We had a candidate who had a big grid on his resume, listing all the skills he had and rating himself on a scale of 1 to 5 in them," says Hajer. One of the skills was J2EE, with a "3" (for average ability) tagged to it. "When asked to talk about J2EE, he could not even define the term, much less talk about his experience in it," he says.

Some employers provide questionnaires asking candidates to rate themselves on particular skills, but they don’t expect such ratings in a resume’s skills section. Keep things simple. Denote each skill with the number of years’ experience or, if you’re intent on including a rating, with words like novice, intermediate and expert.

Skills and Their Uses

The skills section should be buttressed with job descriptions detailing how those skills have been used in the workplace. For example, a resume listing Java, Oracle and UML in the skills section should describe how those technologies were employed on a particular project. Those details provide employers with genuine insight into the depth of a person’s knowledge and experience with those technologies.

Stay Relevant

Consider these tips:

• Delete outdated skills or those with no relevance to your job objective.
• Separate tech skills into familiar categories such as operating systems, networks and programming tools.
• List skills in the order of their relevance to your job objective, rather than alphabetically.
• If you’ve only read about it in Computerworld or on News.com, don’t include it.

Resume Organization

Techies may want to place the skills section after the job objective and before the experience section. But there are exceptions. If you’re just starting out, you may want to place a greater emphasis on education and internships. If you’re seeking management or sales positions, you may want to avoid crowding the resume with a list of technical skills. Instead, consider placing the list below the experience section or adding other elements, such as communication abilities and foreign languages, to the skills section.

Here are examples of one job seeker’s technical skills section:

Paragraph Format — the Most Common

Technical Skills
Languages: Java, XML, C, C++, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, UML.
Tools: Borland JBuilder, Sun ONE Studio (Forte), Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, Rational Rose, UltraEdit-32, Borland CBuilder, Oracle SQL Plus.
Operating Systems: Windows (XP, 2000, NT), IBM OS/2 2.0, HP-UX 9.0, DEC VMS 4.1, Unix (Linux and Sun Solaris).

List Format — Gives Employers a Quick Overview

Technical Skills
Languages Tools Operating Systems
Java Borland JBuilder Windows (XP, 2000, NT)
XML Sun ONE Studio (Forte) IBM OS/2 2.0
C Macromedia Dreamweaver HP-UX 9.0
C++ MX DEC VMS 4.1
JavaScript Rational Rose Unix (Linux and Sun Solaris)
SQL UltraEdit-32
HTML Borland CBuilder
UML Oracle SQL Plus

List Format with Years of Experience — Shows Depth

Technical Skills
Web Technologies Dreamweaver, JavaScript, HTML 4-7 years
Languages Java, C, C++, UML 5-8 years

List Format with Years of Experience and Skill Level — More Detail

An alternative is to denote only the years of experience.

Technical Skills
Languages Years’ Experience Skill Level
Java 6 Expert
XML 3 Intermediate
C 6 Expert
C++ 4 Intermediate
JavaScript 6 Expert
SQL 4 Intermediate
HTML 6 Intermediate
UML 2 Novice

The 10 Worst Job Tips Ever

Liz Ryan / Business Week

Nearly every day, someone sends me a bit of astounding job-search advice from a blog or a newsletter. Some of this advice seems to come directly from the planet X-19, and some of it seems to have been made up on the spot. Here are 10 of my favorite pieces of atrocious job-search advice, for you to read and ignore at all costs:


1. Don’t Wrap It Up

The Summary or Objective at the top of your résumé is the wrap-up; It tells the reader, “This person know who s/he is, what s/he’s done, and why it matters.” Your Summary shows off your writing skills, shows that you know what’s salient in your background, and puts a point on the arrow of your résumé. Don’t skip it, no matter who tells you it’s not necessary or important.

2. Tell Us Everything

Another piece of horrendous job search advice tells job-seekers to share as much information as possible. A post-millennium résumé uses up two pages, maximum, when it’s printed. (Academic CVs are another story.) Editing is a business skill, after all—just tell us what’s most noteworthy in your long list of impressive feats.

3. Use Corporatespeak

Any résumé that trumpets “cross-functional facilitation of multi-level teams” is headed straight for the shredder. The worst job-search advice tells us to write our résumés using ponderous corporate boilerplate that sinks a smart person’s résumé like a stone. Please ignore that advice, and write your résumé the way you speak.


4. Don’t Ever Postpone a Phone Screen

A very bad bit of job-search advice says “Whatever you do, don’t ever miss a phone screen! Even if you’re in the shower or or on your way to be the best man at your brother’s wedding, make time for that phone interview!” This is good advice is your job-search philosophy emphasizes groveling. I don’t recommend this approach. Let the would-be phone-screener know that you’re tied up at the moment but would be happy to speak at 7 p.m. on Thursday night, or some other convenient time. Lock in the time during that first call, but don’t contort your life to fit the screener’s schedule.

5. Don’t Bring Up Money

Do bring up money by the second interview, and let the employers know what your salary requirements are before they start getting ideas that perhaps you’re a trust-fund baby and could bring your formidable skills over to XYZ Corp. for a cool $45,000. Set them straight, at the first opportunity.

6. Send Your Resume Via an Online Job Ad or the Company Web Site Only

Successful job-seekers use friends, LinkedIn contacts, and anybody else in their network to locate and reach out to contacts inside a target employer. Playing by the rules often gets your résumé pitched into the abyss at the far end of the e-mail address talent@xyzcorp.com. If you’ve got a way into the decision-maker’s office, use it. Ignore advice that instructs you to send one résumé via the company Web site and wait (and wait, and wait) to hear from them.

7. Never Send a Paper Resume

I’ve been recommending sending snail-mail letters to corporate job-search target contacts for three or four years now, and people tell me it’s working. The response rate is higher, and the approach is friendlier. A surface-mail letter can often get you an interview in a case where an e-mail would get ignored or spam-filtered. One friend of mine sent her surface-mail résumé and cover letter to a major company’s COO in New York, and got a call a week later from a general manager wanting to interview her in Phoenix, where she lives. She showed up at the interview to see her paper letter—yes, her actual, signed letter, on bond paper—and résumé sitting on his desk in Phoenix (probably conveyed via an old-fashioned Inter-Office envelope). An e-mail might have ended up in the COO’s spam folder.

8. Wait For Them to Call You

You can’t wait for companies to call you back. You’ve got to call and follow up on the résumés you’ve sent. If an ad says “no calls,” use your LinkedIn connections to put you in touch with someone who can put in a word with the hiring manager. Don’t sit and wait for the call to come. Your résumé is in a stack with 150 others, and if you don’t push it up the pipeline, no one will.

9. Give Them Everything

Give them your résumé, your cover letter, and your time in a phone-screen or face-to-face interview. But don’t give anyone your list of references until it’s clear that mutual interest to move forward exists (usually after two interviews), and don’t fill out endless tests and questionnaires in the hope of perhaps getting an audience with the Emperor. Let the employers know that you’d be happy to talk (ideally on the phone at first) to see whether your interests and theirs intersect. If there’s a good match, you’ll feel better about sharing more time and energy on whatever tests and exercises they’ve constructed to weed out unsuitable candidates. Maybe.

10. Post Your Resume on Every Job Board

This is the best way in the world to get overexposed and undervalued in the job market. (Exception: If you’re looking for contract or journeyman IT work, it’s a great idea to post your credentials all over.) People will find your LinkedIn profile if they’re looking and if you’ve taken the time to fill it out with pithy details of your background. If you’re not employed, include a headline like “Online Marketer ISO Next Challenge” or “Controller Seeking Company Seeking Controller.” Your résumé posted on a job board is a spam-and-scam magnet and a mark that your network isn’t as robust as it might be. These aren’t the signs you want to put out there. Use your network (vs. the world at large) to help you spread the job-search word.

Avoid the Top 10 Resume Mistakes

It’s deceptively easy to make mistakes on your resume and exceptionally difficult to repair the damage once an employer gets it. So prevention is critical, especially if you’ve never written one before. Here are the most common pitfalls and how you can avoid them.

1. Typos and Grammatical Errors

Your resume needs to be grammatically perfect. If it isn’t, employers will read between the lines and draw not-so-flattering conclusions about you, like: “This person can’t write,” or “This person obviously doesn’t care.”

2. Lack of Specifics

Employers need to understand what you’ve done and accomplished. For example: Worked with employees in a restaurant setting. Recruited, hired, trained and supervised more than 20 employees in a restaurant with $2 million in annual sales. Both of these phrases could describe the same person, but clearly the second one’s details and specifics will more likely grab an employer’s attention.

3. Attempting One Size Fits All

Whenever you try to develop a one-size-fits-all resume to send to all employers, you almost always end up with something employers will toss in the recycle bin. Employers want you to write a resume specifically for them. They expect you to clearly show how and why you fit the position in a specific organization.

4. Highlighting Duties Instead of Accomplishments

It’s easy to slip into a mode where you simply start listing job duties on your resume. For example: Attended group meetings and recorded minutes. Worked with children in a day-care setting. Updated departmental files. Employers, however, don’t care so much about what you’ve done as what you’ve accomplished in your various activities. They’re looking for statements more like these: Used laptop computer to record weekly meeting minutes and compiled them in a Microsoft Word-based file for future organizational reference. Developed three daily activities for preschool-age children and prepared them for a 10-minute holiday program performance. Reorganized 10 years’ worth of unwieldy files, making them easily accessible to department members.

5. Going on Too Long or Cutting Things Too Short

Despite what you may read or hear, there are no real rules governing the length of your resume. Why? Because human beings, who have different preferences and expectations where resumes are concerned, will be reading it. That doesn’t mean you should start sending out five-page resumes, of course. Generally speaking, you usually need to limit yourself to a maximum of two pages. But don’t feel you have to use two pages if one will do. Conversely, don’t cut the meat out of your resume simply to make it conform to an arbitrary one-page standard.

6. A Bad Objective

Employers do read your resume’s objective statement, but too often they plow through vague pufferies like, “Seeking a challenging position that offers professional growth.” Give employers something specific and, more importantly, something that focuses on their needs as well as your own. Example: “A challenging entry-level marketing position that allows me to contribute my skills and experience in fund-raising for nonprofits.”

7. No Action Verbs

Avoid using phrases like “responsible for.” Instead, use action verbs: “Resolved user questions as part of an IT help desk serving 4,000 students and staff.”

8. Leaving Off Important Information

You may be tempted, for example, to eliminate mention of the jobs you’ve taken to earn extra money for school. Typically, however, the soft skills you’ve gained from these experiences (e.g., work ethic, time management) are more important to employers than you might think.

9. Visually Too Busy

If your resume is wall-to-wall text featuring five different fonts, it will most likely give the employer a headache. So show your resume to several other people before sending it out. Do they find it visually attractive? If what you have is hard on the eyes, revise.

10. Incorrect Contact Information

I once worked with a student whose resume seemed incredibly strong, but he wasn’t getting any bites from employers. So one day, I jokingly asked him if the phone number he’d listed on his resume was correct. It wasn’t. Once he changed it, he started getting the calls he’d been expecting. Moral of the story: Double-check even the most minute, taken-for-granted details — sooner rather than later.

IT Hiring Outlook - 2009

Job and Salary Outlook

With the US economy tanking, the question for IT professionals is this: Is my niche relatively safe?

According to many observers, there is good news for IT folks in a number of sectors, whether they’re veterans with decades of experience or recent graduates whose skills are untested in the marketplace: If you’ve got the right tech skills and can think like a line-of-business manager, you’ll be in demand. “For sure, there is still a shortage of IT skills,” says Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn, head of the certifications group at networking vendor Cisco Systems.

But with the economy likely to shrink for a good part of 2009, will employers be able to build their IT staffs, or at least fill vacant positions? Here’s what we’re hearing around the industry.


Will IT Head Count Rise, Fall or Go Flat in 2009?

The proportion of employers increasing their IT head count will edge up from 40 percent in 2008 to a projected 43 percent in 2009, according to a survey by the Society for Information Management (SIM) published in November 2008 using data collected in June.

Jerry Luftman says this number remains valid, even with the fiasco in the financial markets. “Information systems and business executives are not panicking,” says Luftman, SIM’s vice president for academic affairs. “In previous recessions, IT was the place to cut, cut, cut.” Why not this time? Because IT has become a champion of cost-cutting across the enterprise, Luftman says.

Offshoring may be more of a threat to American IT jobs in 2009 than it has been in recent years. After trending down slightly since 2006, IT budget allocations for offshore outsourcing will jump from 3.3 percent in 2008 to 5.6 percent in 2009, the SIM survey says. Why the increase? “The economy is in a downturn, and many organizations believe they can get IT staff at a much lower cost offshore,” Luftman says. IT executives may also feel financial pressure to try offshoring, even if they have concerns about quality, he says.


Financial IT Jobs Lost and Gained

Obviously, thousands of jobs in distressed banking and financial services firms will be lost to downsizing, mergers or bankruptcies. But for the companies left standing, “even in the worst crisis on Wall Street, networks still have to perform,” says Beliveau-Dunn. For that reason, mission-critical IT operations will carry on, while many growth-oriented IT projects may be suspended or sacked, industry sources say.

But just as the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting reforms created work for IT professionals in the wake of the early-2000s corporate scandals, the current financial crisis is driving up demand for financial IT talent in select niches.

“The government has enacted new securities regulations and modified existing ones” to mitigate the effects of the financial crisis, says Ari Packer, a financial software engineer with Galatea Associates LLC in Somerville, Massachusetts. As a result, Packer and his colleagues have been putting in extra-long hours for their clients – Wall Street broker-dealers – to rework software that must continue to function well in a rapidly changing regulatory environment.


These IT Areas Are Likely to Remain in Demand

Broader areas in IT are likely to see relatively healthy employment in 2009. Through 2008, for example, “there’s been a lot of demand for people doing integration and IT people with a business background,” says Matt Colarusso, a branch manager with Sapphire National Recruiting in Woburn, Massachusetts, a unit of Sapphire Technologies.

Networking skills especially in demand for 2009 will be in three areas, according to Beliveau-Dunn: wireless communications, data center virtualization, and unified communications and collaboration. “Travel budgets have been cut tremendously, so you need to enhance your tools for [distance] collaboration,” she says.

But ultimately, negative growth will hurt IT employment across much of the economy. “To maintain a business of a certain size, you need an IT operation of a certain size,” Packer says. “If the business gets substantially smaller, so will IT.”

While IT salaries are expected to rise 3.7 percent in 2009, according to Robert Half Technology’s 2009 Salary Guide, 2009 clearly won’t be the best time to ask for a big raise. Still, certain specialists – even some new grads – may do relatively well. According to Robert Half, three examples of in-demand IT specialties and 2009 starting salary ranges are:

• Web developers, with starting salaries between $60,000 and $89,750.
• Programmer analysts with skills such as .Net, SharePoint, Java and PHP, who will command starting salaries of $60,000 to $100,750.
• Tier 2 help-desk workers, starting at $36,750 to $48,250.