skills

Burnout is as predictable in an IT professional's career as the long hours that precipitate it. The demanding nature of IT jobs, coupled with a perceived lack of respect and appreciation, leads many IT professionals to lament, à la blues great B.B. King, that "the thrill is gone." Many eventually wonder whether a career in IT is still the right choice.

Hewlett-Packard's plan to cut 9,000 positions while adding 6,000 new ones appears to be a near-perfect illustration of the ongoing shift in the skills required for enterprise IT jobs.

Here is a skill that you may not have realized you need, but you need it: Become a master of Internet search.

Loss of programming skills is the easiest outcome of the baby boomer exodus to address. Far more worrisome are the impending losses of mission-critical experience and organizational domain knowledge. These challenges can't be solved by replacing skills or systems.

Microsoft is offering 30,000 vouchers for free worker training classes in Washington state, at an estimated value of $3 million, the company said on Monday.

As companies are diving deeper into virtualized storage projects, IT managers are getting a better understanding of the staff skills they need to make those projects succeed. The exact talents required depend on the type of storage implementation, but most employers say they're in the market for two kinds of IT worker: technicians with vendor-specific SAN or NAS knowledge, and systems administrators and IT architects who understand the complexities and interdependencies among applications, operating systems and I/O, all of which affect storage requirements.

Feel like your career isn't going anywhere? Check out these career traps and how to avoid them.

A lack of business-plan writing skills has hindered Kenyans from accessing a venture capital fund worth US$100 million, said Richard Bell of East Africa Capital Partners, the fund's manager.