Lisa Vaas

Life was so much simpler for e-learning pioneers like Patricia McCormick before the non-IT people showed up. It used to be that the Internal Revenue Service School of Information Technology Austin campus—where McCormick is project leader—delivered training only to the IRS Unix administrators and C programmers—a subset of the IRS 10,000-person IT department. That bunch […]

The good news: U.S. IT workers are, on average, putting in fewer hours. The bad news: Whoever doesnt get laid off is churning out more work than ever and, in the long run, that will lead to burnout among many IT workers. In its 2002 World Wide Benchmark Report, Meta Group found that of 1,100 […]

In spite of the sour economy and the highest unemployment rate in four years, the average number of open IT service and support positions in American companies has more than tripled since 1999, according to new research from the Computing Technology Industry Association, a non-profit trade association. The study, “The Ongoing Crisis in IT Management,” […]

Quarterly taxes, social security payments, invoice preparation and settlement, health care and dental program payments, 401(k) payments. Hey, nobody said being an IT contractor was all fun and games, now did they? “Its a pain in the butt,” said Gary McKay, a contractor used by Electronic Data Systems Corp. to keep the Navy and Marine […]

Is your IT certificate worth the paper its printed on? It depends on whom you ask. James Kotwicki, for one, thinks his prove that hes got pluck. Kotwicki has an A+—a broad hardware and software certificate for entry-level computer service technicians—and a Network+—a vendor-neutral certification that measures the technical knowledge of networking professionals with 18 […]

Psst. Want to buy or sell some telecom routing capacity? For you buyers: today only, real cheap. For you sellers: Dont worry, its all anonymous. Nobodys going to tell your muck-a-muck retail customers you slid some capacity under the table at flea-market prices. Sound good? If so, have we got an online exchange for you. […]

Soured economy or no, you still have to have the skills of a sleuth to find information security professionals. How bad is the dearth? Lee Kushner, CEO and founder of L.J. Kushner & Associates LLP, an executive recruiting company specializing in information security, estimates that the number of unfilled jobs requiring skilled security professionals is […]

On one hand, theres dot-com die-off. there are H1-B visas going begging. There are job boards seeing IT job-seeker traffic as if theyre Los Angeles freeways. On the other hand, enterprises are still gnashing their teeth, hungry for networking, security, e-commerce/Internet, customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning skills that they say they just cant […]

Swim OK LLC, with a whopping four employees, is small fry. But the Web design company made a surprisingly big splash early last month when it put out an ad seeking to hire a programmer skilled in using Macromedia Inc.s Flash 5 design tools. The company was flooded with 173 résumés, many of them from […]

Revenge is sweet. A year ago, Old Economy stalwarts like $100.7 billion Enron Corp. were ridiculed for their slow pace in moving to embrace e-business. Today, those same companies are being showered with accolades and awards. Most recently, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Managements eBusiness Awards last month named Enron—the No. 1 […]