Ever wonder what it takes to get an interview for a federal job? What is the difference between applying for a federal job and a civilian job?

Resume expert, Heather Eagar gives us some insight to getting in with the feds.

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When do you pull the trigger to look for a job while having a job? In these uncertain times many executives find themselves faced with downsizing, mergers and acquisitions and corporate restructuring. Do you believe your job may be in potential jeopardy? Don't wait until it's too late to focus on a possible move. Here are three easy tips to keep tabs on the job market without taking up too much of your time.[Read More]

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We all have been hearing about the "Great IT Talent Shortage" for some time now. Here is a recent one, a survey conducted by Deloitte of US HR Professionals, nearly three quarter of them stated talent shortage as their number one concern. The talent shortage drum roll has been going on for quite some time and the sad fact is - there may or may not be a shortage and we will never know for sure,  because the job market is not that efficient. Contrasting Efficiencies - The Stock Market versus The Job Market The stock market is efficient, the job market in general and the online job market in particular is not. Stocks are traded in a few specific places (specific stock exchanges), the online job market aka job boards are everywhere. In the stock market, supply and demand are matched automatically (with the advent of electronic trading). In the job market, the supply (you and me) and the demand (job openings) are to be found everywhere and there is no matching of them across all of the places they can be found. (This is the biggest reason for the existence of OdinJobs, which I will come to later)

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Answering the IT shortage questions emphatically one way or the other is near impossible because of the in-efficiencies of the online job market as listed above. Its like the blind men and the elephant, everybody is right (partially) and everybody maybe wrong. Sure there are long term macro trends like the number of US graduates with a engineering or computer science degree entering the workforce and the boomers starting to retire, but those trends do not explain why Acme, Inc is unable to find a mid-level SYS Admin  today.  One, there are no SYS Admins in the market, or they are looking in one place and the most qualified, well suited SYS Admin is in another place. What do you think is more likely..

 

Truthfully, we won't know for sure unless we have the information of all the available talent out there to come to the correct conclusion. The same holds good when you  are looking for a job. The state of the current job market plays up the role of chance and luck, way beyond the role it should play in matching supply and demand.

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The vast majority of the IT media obsess about new technologies and at predictable periodicity proclaim the death of a language introduced in 1959, COBOL. Their obsession with new technologies is understandable as they (according to the media experts) will change the way we eat, sleep and work. Of course, nobody holds them to their predictions. Sensationalism as a sales and marketing tactic sells.

Cobol, from the late 80s, has been getting a bum rap from the media, and the language is so old that it just does not have any media cache other than predicting its imminent demise.

 

 This post was triggered by an article in InfoWorld, "The 7 Dirtiest jobs in IT"  (Fair Warning: the article is a veritable ad trap, go there and you will see what I mean). No surprise, Cobol was included in the list and in fact was kind of a left handed compliment to Cobol, IMS and other mainframe tools. This got me thinking...

Cobol has been around for many, many years. I have personally seen it in manufacturing companies in the 90s running business critical applications on AS/400  boxes.  How will it compare with a new technology, say Ajax. I threw in PHP in the comparison mix for good measure. I know financial and manufacturing companies in general and Fortune 1000 companies in general are reliant on cobol based mainframe systems. I wanted to compare the median salaries and the job demand in these sectors. Below are my findings....
 

Generated By:  OdinJobs - Technology Job Search Engine

The median salary comparison on the left was done across industries and to my surprise cobol median salary was greater that PHP median salary and within respectable distance of Ajax median salary.  Median salary was generated from advertised jobs that had a salary. (Its a fair assumption that the percentage of advertised jobs with salary is independent of the skills required.)

 

I then compared the job demand in the financial industry for Cobol, PHP and Ajax. The financial industry needs 2 times more cobol developers than PHP developers and about 1.5 times more than Ajax developers. This was very similar in the manufacturing industry. Of course when I exclude any industry restriction, the demand for Ajax developers were 2 times higher than cobol developers. You can look at the comparison and also come up with your own comparison by using our Market Statistics Comparison tool. (Feel free to use the graphs on your blog or website. Just ask you to keep the links at the bottom)

Generated By: OdinJobs - Technology Job Search Engine

Cobol is not dead by any means. In Fortune 1000 companies, financial and manufacturing industries in particular, have built business systems based on cobol, mainframes, that is not going anywhere. A large scale re-write is fraught with risks and no CIO will pull that trigger. I bet my non-existent salary that no one in those companies know the entire business logic that these systems embody and that there is very little to no documentation.

Cobol  will keep going and systems will be retro-fitted to satisfy new business requirements. Companies like Micro Focus has built wrappers, to make cobol run on Windows, Unix and Linux platforms and they seem to be doing good business at it. Its about time IT media realize that Cobol is not going anywhere and stop foolishly predicting its demise again and again. They need to realize that if a language, system establishes itself in a Fortune 1000 IT shop, it is very difficult to shut it down. In the meantime, people with cobol skills should be happy to know that they are in demand and their salary prospects are comparable to other "cool technologies". See the latest Cobol Jobs.

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Going into the last weeks of the year, the news around us is not pretty - sub-prime, falling US Dollar, and the talk of the dreaded "R" word is gaining strength.  Today, Market Watch has this report regarding layoffs. Here is another. Didn't mean to ruin your holidays, but what does this all mean for IT workers.

On one hand we have Oracle which posted a 35% rise in fiscal second-quarter profit today and they are hiring (Jobs in Oracle) but on the other hand we have major financial institutions, banking or otherwise reeling under the sub-prime exposure.

There is a theory that layoffs is a trailing indicator of a recession as employers do not want to lose their good employees and tend to hold off on making  a call on layoffs until well after a recession has begun. If we are already in a recession, it sure does not feel that way looking at the number of jobs advertised. OdinJobs has indexed well over 500,000 IT jobs in Nov and is on track to reach that mark in Dec.

There you have it, there are financial problems besetting us all but companies are still hiring, so what gives?

 

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