James Gaskin spoke with Matthew Moran about his new book IT Career Builder's Toolkit. This is an edited transcript of that conversation. You may also listen to it here.

Welcome to ITworld Voices. My name is James Gaskin and I'll be your host for this series of interviews with the leading technology book authors of today. Our interviewee today is Matthew Moran, author and Strategic Consultant for about 17 years. His book is the IT Career Builder's Toolkit. It features market-focused skills and proven methods that you can use to jumpstart and advance your career. It was published in 2005, in January, by Cisco Press. Matthew, thanks for joining us today.

Matthew Moran: Thank you very much. I consider it an honor.

First of all, why is your book different from other career books, because there's certainly a shelf full of career books in most bookstores?

Moran: Absolutely, and one of the things I try and tell people is I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. What they'll come to when they read my book is they'll say, gosh, this makes sense or I heard my parents say stuff like this. What I've tried to do that makes the book unique is focus a career message for the technology pro. There's books that are great, like Bolles', What Color is Your Parachute? But I've tried to focus on a comprehensive skill set that is typically lacking or an area where technology professionals struggle. And I try and focus on business savvy communication skills. Some of the software skills -- there's a section on technical skills, but I really try and focus on some of those skills that technology professionals traditionally have struggled with.

Gaskin: So you're actually trying to get technical people, like engineers, to learn how to speak and talk and communicate with normal people?

Moran: That's absolutely the case. There was an article I wrote back in 2001 called Why Technologists Must Learn to Speak Business and it forms kind of an underlying principle I carry through the book, that's one of the ideas. But it really grew into this project and so I try and address some of those issues, communication skills, speaking skills, but also written communication skills. How do you structure a paper? How do you organize ideas, which for the technology professional would seem to be intuitive, but often on that medium it's very difficult.

Gaskin: You said you wrote an article a couple of years ago. Is that how you came to write this book?

Moran: Well, I wrote the article, Why Technologists Must Learn to Speak Business and you can get a copy of that on my website. And I have a website, CBToolkit.com, which is CareerBuilderToolkit.com. And you can get the article there, but then I took place on several online discussion forums. I've always been a writer, never thought I would write a career technology book. And what happened is I took some input that I've received on these online discussion

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