Lisa Vaas

Once, IT job seekers could post their résumés on Monster.com or HotJobs.com and expect at least a trickle, if not a deluge, of offers. No more. The slow economy has inflated the number of résumés competing for attention on popular job boards, and it has also reduced the number of jobs. Monster, for example, currently […]

Oracle Corp. has quietly slipped out of jCert, a skills testing and certification-focused consortium of Java vendors whose mission statement is “Certified once, recognized everywhere” and whose aim is to reduce exam redundancy. As a result of its defection, Oracle certifications such as Solution Developer from Oracle; tests such as Test 1Z0-501, Sun Certified Programmer […]

Effective May 1, Novell Inc. will raise its certification exam fees from $100 to $125. Novells test pricing page hadnt been updated to reflect the price increase as of press time, but a Novell spokesman confirmed the news, saying the price hike was caused by a need to defray the costs of administering the exam […]

IT research company IDC has confirmed what many technology professionals already know: The boss isnt writing checks for training as generously as a year ago. In a recently published report entitled Worldwide and U.S. Corporate IT Education and Training Services Market Forecast and Analysis, 2001-2006, IDC [www.idc.com] found that in virtually every region in which […]

Project management skills are hot. So hot, in fact, that the Project Management Institutes Project Management Professional certification—a vaunted certification held by a mere 40,000 people worldwide—nets IT professionals an average 14 percent salary bonus, according to Foote Partners LLCs 2001 Hot Technical Skills & Certifications Pay Index. But the PMP has a couple of […]

Citing widespread dot-com demise and the effects of the depressed economy on the IT work force, the Federal CIO Council has joined with the Office of Personnel Management to host a virtual IT job fair that will run April 22-26 at the OPMs site, www.usajobs.opm.gov. The job fair was inspired by a report on the […]

Poor taxonomy wont sink your corporate portal as fast or as noticeably as, say, flawed system integration, but, over time, it will degrade portal usability. In best-case scenarios, either the new breed of knowledge management/portal platforms can do a passable job of setting up taxonomies, or corporations can employ taxonomists or librarians. However, its only […]

Seconds are precious in Jamie Mannings world. Manning doesnt want to see peoples eyes wandering aimlessly, as they waste time hunting for buttons to click. He doesnt want to see search terms such as “paid time off” entered over and over if he can just whip up a time-off tool to plunk on a Web […]

Software engineer is the hot job of the moment, according to a new monthly report on Dice Inc.s IT job site. According to the report, there were 5,294 software engineer positions posted on the Dice site as of Feb. 28, out of a total of 30,970 technical jobs. That makes software engineer the “Tech Stud” […]

Talk is cheap, but getting it certifications is anything but. Self-study certifications start at $900 and go up to $1,200. If IT professionals feel the need to sit in a class to soak up knowledge, those costs shoot up to between $5,000 and $11,000 per certification. Whats a poor, cash-strapped individual or enterprise to do? […]

Scrambling to head off a looming credibility crisis, an industry consortium next month will roll a program to validate that IT skills certification providers are taking steps to ensure that answers to their tests arent being pirated. The validation will come in the form of a seal of approval issued by the ITCSC (IT Certification […]

Recoiling from the spiraling fees of online job boards such as Monster.com and HotJobs, a group of 327 companies dubbed the e-Recruiting Association Inc. has launched DirectEmployers.com, a non-profit, employer-owned search engine that aggregates all job listings from member companies Web sites. The news isnt great for Monster. The Maynard, Mass., company saw profit drop […]