This morning’s latest Employment Situation Summary for September, 2010, from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics says a lot by saying very little. Total unemployment edged up very slightly from 9.5 percent last month to 9.6 percent this month. Total employment dipped very slightly again by 54,000 jobs, but that includes another 114,000 temporary US Government Census workers leaving the payrolls, offset by 67,000 workers added in the private sector. According to this latest summary “From May through August, the jobless rate remained in the range of 9.5 to 9.7 percent.”

Title page for September 2010 Employment Situation Summary

To me, the most depressing number in this week’s report is the tally of discouraged workers, currently at 1.1 million, defined as follows “Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them.” Another 2.4 million are marginally attached to the labor force, which means “These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months.” They are not counted as unemployed, however, because they had not looked for a job in the four weeks that preceded this latest survey. That means the real tally of unemployed in the US right now is the official count — 14.9 million — plus the 2.4 million “marginally attached” individuals just mentioned, for a total of 17.3 million out of work in varying degrees of workforce engagement.

Yikes! Things aren’t getting too much worse at the moment, but they’re not getting any better, either. This can’t be a good omen for the Democrats, as the party in power, with mid-term elections now less than three months away.

Looking at IT, things are holding steady with a net loss of 1,000 Information jobs (see Table B-1) over the past month. Telecommunications (-3,600) and data processing (-1,300) lost the most jobs, while publishing (+300), motion picture and sound recording (+800), broadcasting (except Internet, +1,600), and other information services (+300) all eked out modest gains.

Obviously, there’s a whole lotta nothin’ going on right now, in IT in particular, and in the economy in general. For me the “Big Question” has to be: “When things get moving again, will they be going up or down?” I’ll be darned if I can tell.

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As I was reading the business section in today’s Austin American-Statesman, I came across a paragraph in an AP wire story by Martin Crutsinger entitled “Consumer Spending Ticks Up; Earnings Also Rise Slightly.” It contains the best summation of our crazy economic doldrums that I’ve seen anywhere, so I thought I’d share it with you this morning. Here goes:

Without job growth, consumers are not expected to spend much more. But the economy is growing too slowly to support sustained hiring, and companies are waiting to see more demand from consumers. That has left the economy stuck in limbo.

It really does seem like we can’t go forward, and we can’t go back, but are indeed truly stuck in a situation that is neither recession nor true recovery, but some godawful intermediate state that partakes of the worst rather than the best of both worlds. Without consumers to pull things out of the dumps, companies aren’t willing to hire more people; without the money that comes from secure employment and a decent paycheck, consumers aren’t willing to spend while they’re waiting for things to improve.

Gadzooks! We can now only wish for some kind of bolt from the blue to shock us out of the current stasis. But then again, “shock therapy” also has its downside. Sigh, and sigh again. I guess that means this Friday’s job numbers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics will be even more poignant than usual, unless they take the weekend off for Labor Day (but no, the BLS Release Schedule 2010 says they’ll publish on 9/3/2010 as per their normal “First Friday” timing. Stay tuned!).

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Boy, it’s been tough out there on the economic front lately. Last week, we got word that jobs are not likely to grow any time real soon across the whole economy, and that the housing market is showing serious weakness now that the stimulus money for homebuyers has come to an end. (The spigot was closed at the end of June, but it takes a month for the numbers to catch up with the situation on the ground, given typical reporting lags, so we just got the “official bad news” last week that housing purchases were down by 27% for July, with the lowest numbers for the past 15 years).

That’s why I wanted to post a link to an article by Lisa Vaas for the Dell-sponsored ITExpertVoice site that posted last week. It’s entitled “Tech Hiring Creeps Back to Health” and it actually manages to shed a small ray of sunshine on what has otherwise been a grey and dismal IT job market for the past year and more. It’s a small ray of sunshine because — as the story’s lead-in paragraph says — when it comes to IT job growth

…its recovery pace is akin to that of a snail going about its business after recovering from a coma.

In other words: painfully slow. But Vaas does point to several factors causing IT hiring and promotions to improve, if ever so slowly:

• giving into a pent-up need to implement projects shelved because of the recession and subsequent economic slowdown
• a better sense of financial comfort from companies now into the second halves of their fiscal years, with better information about their situations, and a higher sense of confidence about spending the hiring budgets at their disposal
• some modest increases in demand for new technologies and deployments such as Windows 7 and/or Windows Server 2008 (original or R2)
• a modest boost in IT functions for the healthcare, transportation, education, and some aspects of the construction sectors, with continued strong demand for IT people from Wall Street

There! You’ve had your ray of IT jobs sunshine. I hope it doesn’t cause any unpleasant side effects. All I can say is “Please sir, may we have some more?” Preferably, lots more, and sooner rather than later. Sigh.

Shameless self-promotion note: Please check out my latest story for Dell’s ITExpertVoice site, which posted publicly last Friday. It’s entitled: “Why Buy Real KVMs, When Virtual KVMs Will Do?” (and lest you think I advocate wholesale abandonment of physical KVMs, this story not only explains how remote access technologies can supplement and to a certain extent supplant KVMs, but also when real, physical KVMs are still necessary to obtain access to key servers and other devices).

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When I go shopping, nothing awakes my acquisitive spirit like the prospect of buying more stuff to save more money. Of course, this principle applies only if you really, really like what you buy — as regular shoppers at wholesale clubs such as Costco (my personal favorite), BJ’s, Sam’s Club, and so forth can tell. When you go home with that gallon jug of seven bean salad you’re much more likely to buy a second one later if your reaction is something less lukeware than “Hey! That’s not too bad!” (I won’t even bother discussing some of our less inspired purchases that resulted in immediate donations to our compost heap.)

With a “buying more means saving more” premise in mind, Microsoft has teamed up with Prometric Services to offer a “Grow Your Career” campaign. This program targets would-be and working IT professionals, and seeks to draw them into any of a number of career paths with associated Microsoft learning and certification offerings to help them walk along those paths. Click the “Grow Your Careers” tab on this Microsoft Learning page to see what’s up with that.

But here’s the “buy in bulk” pitch from MS, snipped and clipped from the actual offer page:

The more you buy, the more you save

For verisimilitude (or whatever) the fingerprints and coffee stains on the clipped graphic are on the original: I swear those aren’t my work! But the bottom line for this offer, which can save nearly $100 (93.75) on the biggest package (not to mention the free second shot offer that applies to all 2-exam packs or higher) is that you can save by buying enough exams for various certifications if you plunk your cash down all at once.

But like the seven-bean salad at Costco, if you’re going to buy a great big, heaping helping, you’d better be sure you like what you’re buying, and that your appetite is big enough to put the whole serving away. All such exams and retakes have to be completed by June 30, 2011, so you have less than one year to exercise your options for discount exams and retakes. You’d better get going! And while you’re at it, cruise over the Prometric certpacks page to sign up and pay for your selections.

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One of my readers just raised some interesting questions for me about an earlier (4/25/2008) IT Expert post of mine: “What’s the Highest Position in an IT Consulting Career Path?” Despite the economic travails in the meantime, it’s cheering to see that my post still remains relevant even during today’s (and alas, tomorrow’s) ongoing troubled economic situation.

My current interlocutor raises an interesting follow-up question as he seeks to understand “…how IT professionals [can] balance a fast-paced and demanding career with personal/professional development.” That question, in fact, is stated as “…how [can] people in the tech industry find time to develop their career outside of work experience and what are some of the tools they [can] use…?”

About “Finding the Time”
This is a tough one, especially for those with families that include kids not yet off in college, because it’s so important to make sure they get ample interaction with their parents, step-parents, or guardians as well. Unfortunately, this is what’s known as a “bootstrapping exercise” which means that you somehow have to grab and lift yourself out of your current position while remaining where you are (at least for a while). Thus, the real answer to this question ultimately boils down to “give up on some leisure time, downtime, and sleep.” I’m sorry to have to say this so baldly, but that’s how it is.

Tools to Develop Oneself, Personally and Professionally
1. School, specifically in pursuit of a degree or certificate of some kind, which may lead to added technical knowledge, skills and qualifications (Masters and/or PhD taked onto an undergraduate degree), or to bolster technical skills with business or process coverage (like an MBA tacked onto an engineering or computer science undergraduate degree)
2. IT Certification (in pursuit of specific and focused technical credentials, which often impose pre-reqs of more general, less-focused lead-in credentials — like the CCNA leading to CCNP, MCTS to MCITP, and so forth and so on
3. Soft skills certification or certificates — most notably, the Project Management Institute (PMI) Project Management Professional (PMP) certification, which has proven to be a great career booster for people in all walks of IT (and other technical occupations)
4. Volunteer work designed for development purposes — Let’s say you’re a network administrator who years to be a DBA instead. A school, church, or charitable organization volunteer position may give you the chance to learn and develop further skills in this technical specialty that may simply not be available on the job. After enough unpaid time and effort, perhaps combined with a certification or two, you may be able to transition from network admin to DBA as a natural progression.

There are lots of other tools that people can use to improve themselves and their professional skills and standing, but these examples should give you some ideas of how to proceed. As long as you’re willing to sacrifice some time, coiugh up some money, and expend some old-fashioned elbow grease, you should be able to use these tools to get yourself ahead.

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If you’re toiling at a small to medium sized business, and you work with computer networks, whether inside or outside IT, you should check out Spiceworks. For the record, an SMB is defined as an organization with more than 10 but less than 100 employees for small, and from 101 to 999 for medium here in the U.S., but only up to 500 elsewhere in the world (mostly Europe). Spiceworks is a free network management, monitoring, and help desk environment that relies on financial support from technology and hardware vendors to bring cool tools and capabilities — and gosh, the Spiceworks environment suffers from a terrible embarassment of riches in that regard — to its one-million-plus registered users and adopters.

To give you an idea of what Spiceworks can do, here’s a high-level features list from the home page:

The tip of the Spiceworks iceberg shows in this laundry list of major features

Suffice it to say that I’m learning to use Spiceworks to manage my network of 3 to 10 PCs, and that activity on the user communities indicates it’s being used in organizations with hundreds of PCs equally well (if not better, since I’m still a tyro). You should definitely check out this superlative package of network management capabilities, and expect to see regular coverage of its capabilities in future postings here and elsewhere. I’m also trying to twist the arms of management at the company, to persuade them that a certification program would be in everybody’s best interests.

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Every now and again, one of the numerous posters to the Microsoft “Born to Learn” blog throws up an item that details MS Learning product releases for some specific month or another. This month — that is, August 2010 — such a posting has popped up and amidst its many, many items, members of the MS learning community are bound to find at least one or two things of interest. Here’s an example snippet that shows the details, and hopefully also captures somebody’s interest (other than mine):

A sub-set of the SharePoint items coming or already online

What you see is a listing that includes online classes (E-Learning) and also Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC, aka classroom training). In fact, 85 items appear in this particular posting, of which around half are non-English-language versions of existing materials, and the other half English-language versions of new materials. Lots of interesting stuff here for those who care about Microsoft Learning offerings in general, and about e-learning and classroom training offerings in particular. There is also information about 7 new exams as well, mostly related to the new Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) credentials.

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Well, I’ve certainly heard our current economic and employment situation described as a “jobless recovery” — namely a set of economic circumstances where profits and output or productivity are growing, but where such growth has not buoyed confidence to the point where employers loosen their restraints on headcount, and finally start hiring. In fact, it seems like the US and to some extent the whole world (some places like China and India less than others, however) have been holding their breath waiting for some possibly dramatic, or at least obvious, sign of sufficient improvement to finally warrant turning the HR people loose with a hiring mandate.

That’s not a terribly happy state of affairs, so I chuckled when I read the phrase “joyless recovery” in the latest edition of The Economist  (August 7-13, pp. 82-83) magazine. The title of the story is “Profits, but no jobs” Here’s my favorite snippet from this piece:

By some calculations, the rate of recovery of profits from their trough is the strongest since the end of the Great Depression. [paragraph break] Yet nobody seems pleased. Not investors, who have failed to push up share prices… Certainly not politicians, who complain that firms are “hoarding cash” and creating hardly any new jobs.

Then comes a quote from Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton “Bottom line: corporate profits no longer lead to higher employment. We’re witnessing a great decoupling of company profits from jobs.”

Holy mackerel! No wonder this recovery is joyless: joy is a human emotion, experienced by people, and the people are out of work. It seems like we’re trapped in a vicious circle, where corporations are waiting for a boost in consumer confidence (the engine of the economy as we’re told), and the consumers are waiting for jobs and money so they can have something to spend and turn that engine over. Who blinks first? Heck if I know…

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Check out the Syllabus for the CUDA Certification Exam on the NVIDIA Website. Not ony does the company provide free access to the textbook as a collection of individual chapters in PDF format, they even have podcasts of lectures, online assignments and activities, and a raft of other supplementary documentation available — all for free! Seldom, if ever, do you see this level of support for vendor certifications available at no charge. Gee! Do you think NVIDIA is eager to get people enrolled in this program and earning their cert, or what?

For those not already in the know, CUDA is short for Complete Unified Device Architecture. It reflects NVIDIA’s ongoing work to make the hundreds of processors and complex processing pipelines available in its current, high-end graphics cards available for all kind of massively parallel or distributed computing applications. The goal of this cert is to get programmers trained to write code to use and exploit these largely untapped capabilities.

Those who complete  the materials on the syllabus can take an exam to become recognized as an NVIDIA Certified CUDA Programmer. Exams are available through Prometric, and cost $250, which is decidely not free, but still well-supported with preparatory materials in any case.

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When the Bureau of Labor Statistics pushed out their August Employment Situation Summary on Friday morning, it looked like deja vu all over again. Overall, numbers were down by 131,000 for July but that reflects a loss of 143,00 temporary workers hired for the US Census, and was offset by another very modest gain of 71,000 jobs in the private sector. Both the gross total unemployment number (14.6 million) and the unemployment rate (9.5 percent) were unchanged from June.

Looking at the information sector, we do finally see some teeny-tiny signs of improvement vis-a-vis July 2009. The number of unemployed persons in information jobs edged down from 373,000 (2009) to 344,000 (2010), and the unemployment rate likewise dipped from 11.5 percent (2009) to 10.6 percent (2010) (see Table A-14 for details). In the Information sector breakdown, all of the sub-sectors except “Telecommunications” (-5,800 jobs) and “Motion picture and sound recording industries” (-300 jobs) showed small gains (ranging from 300 jobs for “Data processing, hosting, and related services” to 3,800 jobs for “Broadcasting, except Internet”; see Table B-1 for details).

No wonder markets dipped a little, but not badly at the Friday, August 6, close. It’s almost become a “no bad news is no news at all” situation, given that there’s little to cheer about on  the employment horizon, now and for the foreseeable future. All I can say is “Hang in there!”

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