Certification - October 2008 - (Page 30)

INTERFACE Crowe Chizek: Grooming Tomorrow’s Techies AGAThA GILMORE The consulting firm looks for educated young talent willing to learn and adapt to industry demands. You may have just completed a four-year IT degree program, but when you take a job as an IT consultant at Crowe Chizek, the learning has just begun. That’s because the company, which the South Bend Tribune called “a community leader for both inhouse employee programs and training,” invests a lot of time and energy in its employees — all 2,500 of them. And it’s quickly expanding its performance services group — otherwise known as the technology group — with plans to significantly grow its employee head count from the current 150 within the next year, said Mark Strawmyer, a technology professional and hiring manager in Crowe’s Indianapolis office. For this reason, Crowe isn’t afraid to hire graduates fresh out of school, with the intention of grooming them to be tomorrow’s leaders. “A core component and strategy for us is going out to campuses each year and finding folks that can learn and grow and adapt and be molded into a professional consulting environment that works well for us and for our clients,” Strawmyer said. “One of the areas that’s been the most successful for us has been that campus hiring.” Strawmyer said Crowe’s approach to hiring is based on the assumption that if a candidate is graduating with a technology-related degree, he or she has the basic tech skills that will be required for the job. Additionally, he said, technical skills develop over time with experience and the rise of new technology. It’s the soft skills that his team is looking for in the interview process. 0 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE October 2008 “Our core focus is on the soft skills side of things: communication — open dialogue, written, oral — teamwork, interfacing with others,” he said. In fact, the company weighs a candidate’s soft skills equally with, if not more than, his or her education and experience. “For us, the certifications are more of a plus, and we don’t necessarily require them,” Strawmyer said. That’s not to say certifications aren’t important. Strawmyer said once an individual is hired on, he or she is required to get certified. “We are in professional services, so it’s credentializing just to show that, ‘Yeah, we’ve got that base-level certification and that industry recognition.’ It also just helps to ensure that each person is striving toward learning and growing and developing,” he said. Due to the client-based nature of the company’s business, it depends on an employee’s focus area whether vendor-neutral or vendor-specific certifications are more valuable. “For example, we’ve got a lot of folks who are PMP [Project Management Professional] certified through the PMI [Project Management Institute], which is more of an industry-specific kind of certification,” he said. “[But] if [we have] a Microsoftfocused client, we’ll go after the Microsoft certifications. If it’s someone in the Java arena, we’ll go after the Java certifications.” Once Strawmyer and his team have found a candidate they’d like to interview, they’re thorough to say the least. Before bringing a candidate into the office, Crowe will conduct two on-campus interviews that are entirely behavioral-based, meaning there aren’t any technical questions. “Our core philosophy is you’re coming out of certain programs with certain degrees, so you’ve got an exposure to the kind of types of things that we’re looking for. So our on-campus interview process consists of two 30- or 35-minute interviews [that are] behavioral based, very much example-based,” Strawmyer said. “We’re using that to narrow down http://www.crowechizek.com/crowe/ http://www.southbendtribune.com/includes/rcfavorites/services.html http://www.southbendtribune.com/includes/rcfavorites/services.html

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Certification - October 2008

Certification - October 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Data Stream Virtual Village Tech Careers Dear Techie Troubleshooting Academic Connection What We Like Look Ahead Elect IT: Technology and the Democratic Process Managing Relationships in the Nonprofit Realm Interface VoIP Technician: Answering the Call of the Network Inside Certification Ad Index Endtag

Certification - October 2008

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