Certification - November 2008 - (Page 50)

IT CULTURE IT for Free: Volunteering Today WAYNE ANDERSON Entry-level programmers and administrators have been turning to volunteering to build the basic hands-on experience that leads to future opportunities. “Sorry, Mr. Smith: You have a great resume and the school you graduated from has an excellent computer science program, but we just need someone with more experience.” “Nicole, you have a lot of potential and I would love to hire you, but without more experience you may not be able to keep up with the needs of our department. Come back in a couple years.” These conversations, and so many like them, are all too familiar for novice IT professionals. It’s a catch22 situation: Companies are looking for experienced professionals, even for entry-level positions, but it is difficult to obtain experience without being able to work for these larger firms. This is especially true in today’s competitive marketplace, where jobs are increasingly scarce and the race for each available position is increasingly tight. For years, entry-level programmers and administrators have been turning to volunteering to build the basic hands-on experience that leads to future opportunities. In the lexicon of many new graduates, the word “volunteering” may conjure images of community service with children’s groups, picking up trash or other such activities. But in today’s technology-integrated society, there are many opportunities to put professional-level technical skills to use for nonprofit and commercial groups in the form of internships with an organization or lower-rate contract work, as well as making unsolicited services offers or potentially taking part in opensource projects. 50 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE November 2008 It is critical that young professionals hoping to break into the field of IT understand the ins and outs of volunteering. Internships Internships offer young IT professionals the opportunity to work for an organization either on an unpaid or below-market-rate basis, often with more guidance and mentoring than the organization may provide to full employees. Typically, these internship roles partner the newcomer with a more senior member of staff to serve as a direct assistant, a junior administrator or developer within that team. Development internships tend to focus on the testing or repetitive coding needs of a project. Such a specified, repeatable process can easily be learned by the intern and applied with quality. However, this kind of development task may not be the kind of experience the new intern is interested in targeting. In this case, there are other internship opportunities, particularly with larger firms, where the developer actually is provided limited-scope sections of code to write. Infrastructure-focused professionals may find a similarly limited scope to work within. In many engineering- or infrastructure-focused internships, the professionals may find themselves building servers, cleaning server roles or arranging or reconnecting hardware. These steps form the building blocks of a stable, well-used environment. Although some of this work may seem relatively trivial to a professional anticipating more involved

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Certification - November 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Tech Careers Dear Techie Virtual Village Data Stream Academic Connection Troubleshooting What We Like Look Ahead The Gender Gap: IT Lacks a Woman’s Touch IT for Free: Volunteering Today Interface Technical Architect: Learning, Growing, Innovating Inside Certification Endtag Ad Index

Certification - November 2008

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