Janet Pinkerton Posts

Hunter Iemmolo works with IT Instructor Scott Johnson at Martin County High School's IT Career Academy. Iemmolo, a junior, plans to pursue a career in computer science, spurred by his experience in the IT Academy. Florida is using high school and middle school IT career academies, industry certifications and local business involvement to build a statewide IT skills pipeline to extend into college and the workplace. The pioneering effort comes at a time when companies across the United Sta ...

"The evidence keeps growing that career academies work," says Andrew Rothstein, special advisor on educational policy at the National Academy Foundation (NAF), a non-profit that supports a national network of 60,000 students in 469 academies, including some of Florida's IT career academies. NAF works with school districts to develop the career academies in general and often provides technical assistance to support non-NAF academies. According to the NAF: In 2011, 97% of NAF seniors graduated fr ...

Writing well is a critical skill for IT professionals who have to convey technical information to technical and non-technical people. "The better you can communicate your message in ways that other people understand, the more likely you are to succeed in whatever you are trying to do," says James Chartrand, founder of Damn Fine Words, an online writing course for business people. Do you find yourself repeatedly frustrated because people misunderstand your emails, or fail to take the right act ...

Saying 'What are some ways we can both benefit from these negotiations? Let's invent some new ideas' can do wonders." Dan Shapiro, Harvard International Negotiation Program founder and director Years ago, J.R. Samples and his salesman walked into a CIO's office with a $250,000 network proposal, but as the conversation progressed, Samples, then an EVP at an IT engineering firm, had his salesman keep the proposal off the table. They walked out of the meeting with a $50,000 short-term contract ...

Andrew DiCosmo Andrew DiCosmo Software Engineer, Peters & Associates, Oak Brook, Ill. "I've been at the right place at the right time," Andrew DiCosmo says of his career. "And I had the right skills at the right time." Working at a local steel fabrication company in high school, he moved from a laborer to an office job, where his managers soon found out he was studying computers at ITT Technical Institute. So IT assignments, such as desktop maintenance and software upgrades, started co ...

"Get the right education. Keep learning. Reinvest your skills. Influence others and make your presence known. Mentor those people who can benefit from your insights." Ginger Moore, senior staffing consultant, Unisys Building an IT career requires focus, hard work and sometimes creativity, but the opportunities are vast, even for those who don't currently hold a four-year computer science degree or aren't currently in the IT workforce. That was the message of the Nov. 7 webinar "IT Careers ...

Phil Norton Phil Norton Systems Analyst, Sourcebooks Inc., Naperville, Ill. As a teen, Phil Norton loved video games, computers and technology. He thought he'd become a programmer. But a high school internship working as a desktop maintenance technician at a local hospital led to a part-time desktop support job. "Working at the hospital, getting the feel of all the different aspects of IT, I realized I didn't just want to be coding," Norton says. "I wanted to get out there and help people. ...

IT workers have to be careful to speak so their listeners can understand. "No matter how talented you are with computers, you have to learn to communicate with all types of people and translate your ideas into their language," says Nancy Ancowitz, a business communication coach. IT workers have to have sharp communication skills in order to succeed. Such skills don't always come naturally, but they can be learned. "Just like with baseball playing and piano playing, you can actually improve ...

Today, CompTIA launches the CompTIA A+ 800 exam series, which adds performance-based questions, new objectives for mobile devices and virtualization, and an increased emphasis on troubleshooting. The changes reflect new demands being placed on the entry-level IT technician, who must now help integrate and manage computer networks interfacing with a wide range of devices, such as smartphones and tablets. The current CompTIA A+ 701 and 702 exams, which focus on assembling, fixing and troubleshoot ...

CompTIA is adding performance-based questions to its CompTIA A+, CompTIA Network+ and CompTIA Security+ certification exams in the coming months, and many candidates are wondering how this type of question will be different from the exams' traditional multiple-choice format. Multiple-choice questions in CompTIA exams ask a candidate to select one or more correct answers to a specific question, and the candidate clicks on the correct answer or answers. However, performance-based questions r ...