Advance Your Career in Information Technology
There are a multitude of reasons why you may have found yourself researching education in Information Technology. If you're already an IT professional, you might want to expand your bag of tricks and be able to work on other types of projects. If you're an IT or HR manager, you may have an upcoming project that requires your employees to pick up some new skills. Perhaps you've never worked in IT, but enjoy tinkering with computers and are entertaining the idea of eventually working in networking or computer programming.
The good news is that education is always a positive thing. In hard economic times the extra education might give you edge over your competion. In times of growth education gives you more options so you ride the economic wave. From time to time we'll be looking for signals in the marketplace and let you know what we see.
Job Market Snapshot
By default, no two IT careers are alike. 20th century job titles such as "COBOL Programmer" that entailed only one or
two technologies have given way to vague, versatilist titles such as "Web 2.0 Developer" that require a large subset of
tech skills within cross-platform frameworks. What does it all mean, and how do you distill the ultimate dream job
from your own library of interests?
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Need IT Career Advice? Ask Trish.
In her "Ask Trish" column, OST Guidance Counselor Trish Gray answers your questions about your IT career goals and how to reach them.
Today's column:
Landing a Web 2.0 Job >
Support Your Employees without Interfering with Their Jobs
As an IT manager, you need to maximize your employees' skills, while minimizing your time
and budget investment. Conference-style seminars can provide short-term training, but are
expensive and easily forgotten. Online courses can be inexpensive, yet restrictive - and
often are no more effective than books. Without real, ongoing practice and instructor feedback on the
actual technology being learned, employees find themselves starting at zero again when faced
with applying new technology skills in the workplace.
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Earn a Certificate
for Professional Development from the University of Illinois' Office of Continuing Education upon completion of a selected series of courses.
