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Friday, June 19, 2009
Where the jobs are
For CIOs, it’s less tech, more about business
By Galen Moore
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For IT experts itching to occupy the CIO’s office, there have been years when being a technology wizard was enough to get there. The year 2009 is not one of those years.
More and more, enterprises value experience in specific business verticals — and some verticals are better than others, said recruiters and executives. IT executives with experience in Asia are much sought-after, for example. Manufacturing and supply-chain expertise are also in hot demand, headhunters said.
However, the trend toward industry-specific talent is hurting IT managers with experience in the financial sector. In the 2000 tech bust, dot-com IT executives were able to quickly transfer out of the deflated tech sector. In 2009, IT professionals are having a harder time making a similar transition out of financial services, executive recruiters said.
“If you got jettisoned from Lehman or Citi, you’re going to have a hard time making those skills transfer,” said Charles Polachi Jr., a partner at Framingham-based Polachi Co.
Company-specific successes
For IT professionals, the job market has become more complicated this time around, said tech headhunter Thomas Barth, managing director at J. Robert Scott, an affiliate of Fidelity Investments. In the current environment, it’s hard to identify an industry that is doing well.
“Success is very company-specific, not industry-specific,” he said. As a result, “There’s no really easy industries to dissipate into.”
As a result, companies with strong market position and cash are looking to bring in the best upper-management talent they can attract in a buyer’s market — both to stay competitive through the downturn and to position themselves for growth in a recovery. Those companies will continue to pay their top managers well, he said — but bidding wars are unlikely.
“The days of jumping from $100,000 to $140,000 (a year) — we’re just not in that kind of market,” he said.
Go global
Hiring is happening in manufacturing, said Polachi, and IT managers are in demand if they know how to handle systems that connect geographically dispersed manufacturing and assembly locations, and if they can get products moved to customers across distances — especially when those distances involve the Pacific Ocean. Globalization has come hand-in-hand with the rising importance of software tools such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management, Polachi said. With mission-critical functions dispersed, companies need to integrate with facilities offshore, which may not have the same software tools.
“It’s probably the highest demand I’ve ever seen for people who can work overseas,” he said. “Many of these facilities in China, it’s 18-column green paper.”
Understanding that fact can be important for a CIO whose company is trying to figure out where its inventory is, Polachi said.
Sanjay Mirchandani, recently appointed CIO at Hopkinton-based EMC Corp., answered questions on the globalization trend in IT via e-mail from Asia, where he was traveling on business.
“We must view everything through a global lens,” Mirchandani said. “I encourage my team to live a day in the life of a typical EMC employee in Munich, Mumbai or Manila, so we can make the lives of our customers better by collaborating as a global team.”
Right now, EMC is looking for tech experts with in-depth knowledge of its customers’ business practices, Mirchandani said. Although he didn’t specify which business areas the company is focused on, he said core competencies and skills for IT managers and executives have generally remained static.
Technological mastery has receded in importance, replaced by an understanding of business problems.
“A candidate must not only have the relevant technical skills, but he or she must also understand the business, the customers’ needs and global perspective,” he said.
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