Looking for work is only part of what you need to do when you get laid off. Justin James offers some advice for moving forward instead of sinking into the unemployment abyss.

When you’ve lost your job, there is a certain expectation from those who have never been unemployed that looking for work is a full-time gig. The reality is, after the first few weeks, it’s mostly a waiting game: The resume is updated and posted to job boards, you’ve established your various search agents, and you have talked to all the relevant recruiters in the area. So what else can you do with your time to help you get back to work as quickly as possible? These tips will point you in the right direction.

Note: This article is also available as a PDF download.

1: Catch up on your learning

Something I hear time and time again from IT pros is that technology is constantly advancing, but too few jobs give you the training to keep up — and it is just overwhelming to try to stay abreast while working a full time job. This is the perfect time to get caught up on those technologies! Of course, you will want to stick with the ones that require less up-front cost. Your unemployment office may even be able to help get you training. Not only will this keep you from getting bored, but it will give you some talking points in interviews and possibly some new skills to add to your resume. In addition, it looks great to an interviewer that you are the kind of person who keeps learning and growing, even when you are unemployed.

2: Work for free

One of the best things you can do for yourself right now is to start donating some of your skills and time to an open source project or a local charity or to perhaps start a personal project of your own. This will give you the opportunity to do some new things and explore different career directions, and it can also help you network. And who knows, maybe it will blossom into some sort of paid work. At the very least, you will know that you are doing something that helps someone else out and gaining more experience that will enhance your resume.

3: Be flexible on compensation

In a recession economy, you probably don’t have the luxury of holding out for more money than a job offer is for. In my area, for example, there are a fair number of jobs out there, but the pay is about $10,000 less than it was a few years ago. If you want to get back to work quickly, you are going to have to recognize this and be willing to take less money than you were making before, even if you were underpaid at your previous job. A few people with in-demand skills or rare experience may be able to push for a better compensation package, but you need to be realistic about whether you are one of them.

4: Expand your comfort zone

I recently talked to someone who was hungry for some work about giving him a small contract. It was nothing major, but it would have helped him out. He turned me down because even though he was skilled in that general line of work, he had no experience in the exact work I was asking him for. That really is the wrong attitude to have, and it will cost you in this economy. Let’s say you are a system administrator and you have been using Linux for a long time. If someone offers you a job, but their shop uses BSD, you are probably much better off trading your penguin for a little red daemon than holding out a few more months (or longer) for a Linux job. Some folks are very much in demand and have the freedom to stick only with the things they know well. But for most IT pros, being willing to work with a tech you are not familiar with (or maybe even dislike) is a necessity unless you have deep financial reserves you can rely upon.

5: Exercise

Let’s face it: IT jobs are awful for our health, particularly our waistlines. We all know we should work out more, but we rarely do. This is a great time to get in shape, and all you need are some ratty old clothes, comfortable sneakers, and motivation — you don’t even need a gym membership for a basic exercise routine! Why exercise? For one thing, it will help relieve some of the stress you are probably feeling about your employment and financial situation. But it can also help in other ways. It will help you with your self-confidence and self-esteem, which shine through in interviews. And when you return to work, it is easier to sit at a desk for long hours when you are in shape than when you are not.

6: Get certified

One of the common themes in the IT industry is that the workers in the trenches have little regard for more IT certifications. I generally share this viewpoint (although there are exceptions ,of course). But the gatekeepers in the hiring process, like HR and recruiters, place a fairly high value on IT certifications. A certification can make the difference between getting an interview and not getting one. Many states’ unemployment systems have programs that may be able to assist you to get certified; you will want to talk with an unemployment agent and find out what your options are.

7: Become a consultant

Just because companies are laying off employees does not mean that they are not getting anything done. Many times, the decision to cut headcount is motivated by stock price issues (apparently, laying people off raises stock prices) or the costs associated with a full-time employee, not a lack of work. As a result, many companies are laying off employees while hiring consultants and contractors to fill the gaps left by the layoffs. This can provide you with an opportunity to go into consulting work, either for yourself or as a member of a firm. I’ve noticed that the more specialized your knowledge, the better your chances of getting a consultant gig. The odds of landing consultant work also go up when your skills are applicable to one-off projects, not just long-term operations.

8: Consider going abroad

I know, “There’s no place like home,” wherever that might be for you. At the same time, international companies often have a number of jobs in other countries, which they prefer to be done by someone from their home country (or a country in which they have a regional headquarters). There are a number of reasons why a company might need to hire into an expatriate position, but they are usually hard to fill and often pay quite well. Being willing to spend some time overseas not only opens up more jobs to you, but it also will give you a chance to travel. And in many cases, the employer handles your lodging overseas (and even if they do not, it is often quite inexpensive), so unlike a domestic move, you don’t have to worry about trying to sell your house.

9: Don’t neglect your networking

No, I don’t mean TCP/IP and Cat5e cable. I mean talking to other people. Stay in touch with former co-workers and they may pass along word of a position. Another great place to learn about open jobs is at a local user’s group for the technologies you are interested in. Also, sign up for their mailing list! At my local .NET user group, there are frequent job announcements, and the local Ruby group’s mailing list often contains job postings. Even if you don’t hear about a job, you can get a better idea of what the job market is like, which companies are likely to be hiring soon, and so on.

10: Go beyond the job boards

Not all companies post their open positions on the job boards, but they do post them on their own Web sites. Yes, it is a huge hassle to register with dozens of individual companies. At the same time, you are avoiding the issues with the job boards too, like scam sales jobs disguised as real jobs, multiple recruiters trying to hire for the same position, and whatnot. In addition, you actually know what company you are applying to, which is getting rather rare on the job boards. Think of the companies you would like to work for and see if they have jobs on their sites in your area or in a city you would be willing to move to. You will greatly expand your pool of jobs to look at, and if the company does not post these jobs on the job boards, you probably have much less competition for the jobs as well.

By Justin James

Some recruiters are so pushed for time that they won’t even get to your resume. Some will scan your cover letter (or the text of the introductory email in which you include your resume) to see if you’re worthy of an interview. That’s why it’s important to make sure your cover letter is presenting you in the best possible way. Here are some tips:

Determine what the employer is looking for and meet that need. Read the job description carefully and address all the requirements of the job in your application. This is why it’s important to customize a cover letter for each job you’re applying for. If a job description says the ideal candidate will have experience in programming web pages, then it’s really not necessary, nor applicable, to mention your two years as a support pro.

Keep your cover letter short and to the point. It really is good that you have a world of experience over a number of years. But you know what it comes down to? The recruiter’s time and attention span. He or she is looking only to fill a need and the easier the information can be discerned, the better.

Don’t repeat the contents of your resume. Think of the cover letter/introductory email as a synopsis of your work history and a brief introduction to you as a person. Leave out the specifics of work dates and software versions.

Try to remain positive. It’s okay to briefly mention that you were downsized at your last company. But don’t get maudlin or negative about it: “After 24 years with this company I was unceremoniously let go.” It may be true, but the recruiter is not interested in being a therapist. A positive tone also indicates professionalism.

Write in clear and accessible terms. Again, time is of the essence for a recruiter. The easier it is for the recruiter to understand what you’re trying to say, the better your chances.

Write your cover letter, let it sit for a few hours, and then reread it. You’ll be surprised at what a fresh look will show you. If you have someone else who can read it as well, that is a good idea.

Proofread. I’ve heard from a lot of recruiters who say they will toss a cover letter and resume in the trash if there is a typo.

By Toni Bowers

I do not like to exercise for exercise’s sake. In fact, the only exercise I am likely to get would be in fleeing from someone who’s trying to get me to exercise. However, I don’t mind exercise if it goes hand in hand with a productive activity.

In other words, the only way I can exercise is if I’m accomplishing something else at the same time. For example, I don’t mind walking if I can cut the grass at the same time. I will use an exercise bike but only if I can read a book at the same time. It’s more a matter of a low threshold for boredom than it is laziness. (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

So imagine my happy surprise when I read Jason Hiner’s blog called, “Can desk treadmills save the health of knowledge workers?” Exercise while I work? Sign me up!

What attracts me most about this idea is not really the physical fitness but more of the mental boost it gives you. On the occasion when I do walk merely for exercise I find myself coming up with pretty good ideas about how to solve issues at work or at home. (But then I usually just go home and collapse into a wheezing ball of post-exercise resentment.)

So what could I achieve if I got to exercise and work? There’s been a lot of interest lately in what some scientists call the Default Mode Network of the brain. DMN activity is highest during passive activity like daydreaming. Some scientists believe that the degradation in the DMN is a potential marker of diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Autism.

Now the deal is that when a healthy brain is focused on a specific activity requiring focus (like much of the knowledge worker’s day-to-day activity), DMN diminishes rapidly.

A study was done wherein FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) was used to investigate the effects of walking on the DMN in two groups of subjects. Taking benchmark tests at 6 months and 12 months, researchers found DMN connectivity significantly enhanced in a group of walkers as opposed to the control group, workers who just did toning and stretching exercises.

The walkers also exhibited increased connectivity in another area of brain circuitry called the Fronto-Executive Network (FEN) that is known to aid in the ability to perform complex tasks like planning, scheduling, and multi-tasking.

I thought this was pretty interesting and could make a good case for desk treadmills, at least until cost and liability issues gets them laughed out of the boardroom.

By Toni Bowers

The best thing about Word 2010 may be its more flexible — and customizable — interface. It ain’t pre-Ribbon. But at least you can tweak it to fit your needs in ways Word 2007 doesn’t allow.

Depending on what you like to do in Word, you may have cosmetic preferences or functional preferences. Maybe you want the program to work as fast as possible. (Okay, that’s an easy one… who doesn’t?) Or maybe you like to arrange your tools and document details so that you can get to them quickly. Whatever your preferences may be, Word 2010 enables you to tweak some basic settings so it works the way you want it to.

Note: This article is also available as a PDF download.

1: Change up the Quick Access Toolbar

The Quick Access Toolbar is that small set of tools in the upper-left corner of your Word 2010 screen. By default, the program offers Save, Undo, and Repeat (pretty safe bets), but you can click the Customize Quick Access Toolbar arrow at the end of the row to display additional choices. To add a tool to the toolbar, click it in the list. For a little more detailed customizing, click More Commands to display the Quick Access Toolbar category in the Word Options box. Here, you can find and add the tools you want, specify whether they will appear in all documents or just the one you’re working on, and even import or export a Quick Access Toolbar customization for use on other computers.

2: Add your own tabs and groups to the Ribbon

This was the customization lots of us were waiting on — a chance to tweak the Big Kahuna, the Word Ribbon. In Word 2010, you can easily add your own tabs to the Ribbon, complete with tab groups in whatever configuration you choose. To add a new tab group, click the File tab and click Options; then click Customize Ribbon. Word adds the new tab immediately following the tab you had selected in the list (Figure A). Click New Tab in the right side of the dialog box, rename the tab, and add and name the groups you want. Now you can drag and drop the appropriate tools to the new group. Click OK to save your changes.

Figure A

You can add your own tabs and groups to the Ribbon and customize the tools you need for specific projects.

3: Change the Word color scheme

There’s not a huge range of skins to choose from, but if you are tired of the steely gray default of the Word 2010 interface, you can change the look to — hold on to your seat — a steely blue or a sleek black. The color scheme is visible mostly in the Ribbon, the title bar, and the surrounding desktop area of your screen. By default, the program uses the Gray color scheme, which enables you to see the subtle changes in the Word 2010 screen design. A little more white space on the Ribbon, the glows and outlines on selected tools and options, softened gradients, and enhanced use of color help you find your way around the screen. The developers suggest choosing the Black color scheme if your vision is such that having high contrast helps you read; otherwise, the color schemes are purely personal preference. Note that any changes you make to the Word color scheme flow through to your other Office 2010 apps as well, so don’t be surprised when your Outlook window looks different after you make the change.

4: Add to your document properties

The new Backstage view in Word 2010 makes it easy to view and work with all sorts of information related to your file. You can view which of your teammates has access to the document, for example, or add tags so that the document shows up easily in a search. You can see the document properties Word displays by default by clicking the File tab and choosing Info. The document properties appear in the rightmost panel. If you want to add all Word’s document properties to the list so that you can click and update them, click Properties and click Show All Properties. You can also add the properties in a Document Panel at the top of your file by clicking Properties and choosing Document Panel.

5: Create your own Quick Parts

So how many times a year do you type your company’s mission statement on reports you write or documents you send? You can create your own Quick Parts to store that mission statement — complete with the font and format settings you used — so that you can insert it easily in any document you create. To create your own custom Quick Part, first add the text or image you want to include and then select it. Click the Insert tab and click Quick Parts. At the bottom of the list, click Save Selection To Quick Part Gallery. Finally, in the Create New Building Block dialog box (Figure B), enter a name for the Quick Part, choose the gallery where you want it to appear, and fill in the other choices as needed. Click OK to save the item.

Figure B

You can easily create your own Quick Parts to streamline your content creation tasks.

6: Set your default folders

Maybe you get tired of navigating through the maze of folders each time you save a new file. You can easily configure Word 2010 to put the files where you want so you have one fewer thing to think about. In Word 2010, saving to a SharePoint site or Windows Live Skydrive account is a seamless part of the program, so you can also choose the shared folders where you want to store your work. To change the defaults, click the File tab and click Options. In the Word Options dialog box, click Save (Figure C). Click in the Default File Location field and type the path to the folder you want to use or click Browse and click your way there. Similarly, if you are working collaboratively on SharePoint and want to change where Word keeps the new documents you check out and modify, click in the Server Drafts Location field and enter a new path or click Browse to find the spot where you want to save the files. Click OK to save your changes.

Figure C

Set up your preferences for your new documents and shared drafts in the Save tab of the Word Options dialog box.

You can also choose the online server space (or Windows Live SkyDrive account and folder) you want to use when you click the File tab, click Save & Send, and click either Save To SharePoint or Save To Web.

7: Customize your page preferences

Businesses often go for a certain look and feel with the printed and online documents they produce. Your margin settings may be unusual, perhaps allowing readers to take notes or simply to create additional space for design reasons. Maybe the header and footer spacing are the same, the orientation is always portrait, and the gutter allows for spiral binding. Display the Page Setup dialog box and set up the page the way you want it, then click Set As Default. A prompt will ask you whether you want to continue, because the changes will be added to the Normal.dot template. Click Yes if you want to make the change. By default, your new documents will be created using the page settings you entered.

8: Display the style area

If you like to see what’s going on behind the scenes in your document — for example, which styles are used for headings, which are used for body text, and so on — you might want to display the Style area for  your document in Draft and Outline views. The Style area is a vertical column displayed along the left edge of your page, showing you all the styles that are used (and where) in your current file. Turn on the Style area by clicking the File tab, clicking Options, and clicking Advanced. In the Display group, specify the amount of space you want to devote to the area in the Style Area Pane Width In Draft And Outline Views. Click OK after you make the change and display your document in Draft or Outline view to see the change.

9: Organize your styles

Do you love creating and working with your own styles? It’s not a difficult thing to do in Word 2010. Simply format the text with the font, size, style, color, and effect you want. Right-click your creation, point to Styles, and click Save Selection As A New Quick Style. If your styles begin to overpopulate your Styles gallery, you can organize them and make your favorites your defaults. First, click the dialog launcher in the Style group (in the Home tab) and click the Manage Styles button at the bottom of the Styles pane. In the Recommend tab, click the style you want to change and click Set Whether This Style Shows When Viewing Recommended Styles. Scroll through the list and click the styles you want to hide or show. It’s an easy way to weed an over-full Style gallery, and you can always change the settings back if you find you’re missing a style you really need.

Figure D

Display only the styles you want to see using the settings in the Recommend tab of the Manage Styles dialog box.

10: Set your favorite fonts

We each have our preferences when it comes to the fonts we use to write and read. I prefer light, open fonts like Calibri, Footlight, and Palatino. Others can’t take text seriously unless it appears in Times New Roman, Bookman, or New Century Schoolbook. No matter what your font preferences are, you can set up Word to use them in the Manage Styles dialog box. Click the Set Defaults tab and choose your favorite settings for the Font, Size, Color, Position, Line Spacing, and Paragraph Spacing. Click OK to save your settings.

Katherine Murray is the author of Microsoft Office 2010 Plain & Simple (Microsoft Press, 2010), Microsoft Word 2010 Plain & Simple (Microsoft Press, 2010), and Microsoft Word 2010 Inside Out (Microsoft Press, 2010). You can reach Katherine through her blog, BlogOffice or by emailing kmurray230@sbcglobal.net.

By Katherine Murray

Longtime IT leader Julius Tomei has seen the role of IT change drastically over the past three decades. See why he believes IT has moved beyond crunching numbers, spitting out reports, and building applications to become embedded in the business.

Julius Tomei has more than 26 years in IT, working his way up through a single Fortune 100 company. He has a wealth of experience in every possible area, including service delivery, automation, batch-process management, and operations strategy. Before there was such a thing as a PC or client-server technology, he started his career as a COBOL and Assembler programmer, became a programmer analyst, then a systems analyst, project manager, applications manager, director of infrastructure, and CIO. His responsibilities these days include global infrastructure strategy for planning and management, overseeing more than 200 locations in 45 countries and more than 50,000 end users. He talked with me recently about the acceleration of change he has seen in the IT department and how un-departmental it has become.

Note: This article is also available as a PDF download.

1. Jeff: For any CIO, mobility continues to be an important issue in terms of what employees can and should be able to do on mobile phones and PDAs. What has been the effect of the power and prevalence of mobile applications on your business?

Julius: We’ve been able to standardize our mobile platform around smartphones, but we haven’t put a lot of emphasis on developing our own custom mobile applications yet. Most of the heavy applications we use are back-office systems and CRM systems, so the applications that are appropriate for smartphones right now are at the departmental level. People are excited, and rightfully so, about each new generation of devices and what they can do. But securing both the application and the data is still a primary concern for us. For example, any data that gets transmitted in or out on a mobile device is going to have to be encrypted. It’s not that we’re unaware of the value of smartapps. I just came back to Chicago on a flight and checked in by scanning the electronic boarding pass with a bar code on my phone into the console, which worked very well. So it’s not something we won’t be pursuing. But the concern to protect the data in transmission and the ability for people to take data with them are still the sticking points when you’re talking about taking it to the enterprise level.

2. Jeff: What about the new enterprise apps like Google’s? Have you been able to take advantage of any of those tools?

Julius: I see small and midsize businesses using Google Enterprise Apps very effectively to customize their unique business situations and creating competitive advantage with them. But it’s a different situation for a larger company. If you remember, applications like C++ and Visual Basic as the back-end SQL server were very big in their heyday, and people started building their first client-server, multi-tier, N-tier infrastructures and applications. That allowed people to build applications that weren’t available off the shelf at the time. Today those applications you need are pre-built. Coming right out of the box they are beefed up with a broad selection of enhancements, so we’ve been able to focus our energies more on developing business process than on building custom applications. The ones you find with Google or in the Apple and Droid environments are making headway in SMB organizations, but at the enterprise level, the emphasis is still going to be on the large-scale, blocking-and-tackling apps.

3. Jeff: One of the priorities General Motors’ new CIO Terry Kline pointed to recently is creating a consolidated, common view for employees, particularly the view of their customers. Is that an important area for you?

Julius: It absolutely is. One of the key advantages I’ve seen in having a common framework is that you can shift the thinking in the organization from reactive to proactive. You see that most dramatically in companies that spend a lot of time in break-fix, where they are constantly in the firefighting mode. When you have a common perspective, it enables people to change from firefighters into business managers. They see the bigger picture, and they can begin to work with the business on process improvement and adding value. Getting to a single view of our customers and our employees was important, but we had to have buy-in and agreement on a lot of cross-functional data. We had to migrate the data, the ownership, and the processes. We inventoried thousands of applications across our business, many of which were redundant or overlapping. It was more than just a convergence of the applications, but also a consolidation of the processes that support them. Once you bring all those independent internal data applications together, you have things in place for implementing single sign-on, which is a major step toward getting the house in order.

4. Jeff: What have been the biggest changes in the role of IT and its effect on the business over the course of your career?

Julius: From where I sit, IT doesn’t look like it once did at all. Over the last 30 years, IT has come from being a back-office, data processing organization to a center of information management and influencer of the overall decision-making process. IT plays a role in the services that are brought to the company, the infrastructure and applications, where to make investments, and its perception and understanding of the marketplace. The role we are playing now is much more as an ally and partnership with the business in a more consultative function. The other transformation is that we’re getting thinned out; fat IT organizations are becoming very rare. The question now is what goes in the cost bucket and what goes in the commodity bucket in ways that make the most of our technology investments.

5. Jeff: How do you see the transition from enterprise software providers to enterprise service providers affecting your business?

Julius: Like most of the companies I am talking to, we are exploring the cloud-services path more and more. Businesses are asking how much they should continue to invest in their own infrastructure and building all that capability in house versus a service level, possibly even a better one, provided externally at a reasonable price. I don’t know any large companies that have just jumped into the deep end of the pool, because they need to make sure they get it right. The software side is what the business sees and what it runs on, so the business process requires the service levels to be right. The other factor is that going to SAAS should not only be about improving service and speed, but also agility. That is a critical piece of our investment picture. It’s a maturing industry. I don’t see it as fully matured at this point.

6. Jeff: As you look at outsourcing and cloud services, are there specific things you will always want to keep internal?

Julius: The data ownership and the business process optimization still happen inside the four walls. Those are things you can’t hand over and say, “We outsourced it; now it’s yours.” There is a relationship and a process of learning to work in a different way that is more efficient. Someone else can be managing the application and the infrastructure, but no one will ever know the business better than you. The change going on and the improvements as a result of acquisitions of companies with different processes are going to make you better, but it’s going to require work only you can do. Those are the things that have financial consequences if they are not done properly. The oversight of all the key processes that lie beneath the services is still what makes things work. Whether it’s a ticketing system or a “service bus,” there’s a cohesive plan that keeps these pieces working together. No one service provider is going to bring all the applications, datacenter, help desk, desktop services. The gluing together is what IT is going to continue doing; managing that service layer that connects all the pieces that make up “IT services.”

7. Jeff: What kinds of changes have you seen specifically in the datacenter?

Julius: I started out in the days when datacenters were running on mainframes. Then we went to the client-server world and became very distributed. Now what I’m seeing is distributed systems that are becoming more centralized. Back in the old days, we didn’t call it cloud computing. It was timeshare for the mainframe. You went to the green screen and keyed in a command, and it went out and got the information. What I think we’re seeing are familiar concepts reinventing themselves with more speed, processing power, and storage space, but the data requirements are also growing astronomically in most organizations. Our retention policies, for example, how long we are required to keep which data, are coming to the forefront. Most companies have been virtualizing for a while and I see that continuing to be the case. I also see IP telephony playing an increasingly bigger role, and the need for conference bridges from CSP’s declining. I want to be able to use my existing network with any number of subscribers.

8. Jeff: You were leading the pack in ITIL adoption and transformation a few years ago. Has that continued to be a part of your strategy?

Julius: ITIL remains an integral part of everything we do; it’s embedded in our processes. As an IT organization, if you can’t establish a framework of best practices, you are destined to become very inefficient. ITIL allows us to be good at what we do and be a better ally to the business. You have to consider all the components of ITIL and apply the ones that make sense for your organization. It’s also still the best tool out there for giving us all a common language and understanding of defined processes. Even as more processes are outsourced, you still need people to facilitate the information management at a higher level across the organization. IT brings the discipline to break down the business silos by using frameworks like COBIT and ITIL.

9. Jeff: Have you looked at any other sources of best practices and benchmarks?

Julius: SAP has its own set of best practices, so we did use those in the implementation of its solutions and systems. But in terms of infrastructure management, we have continuously stuck with the industry standards of ITIL and COBIT, and in fact, they are embedded in the tools we use off the shelf.

10. Jeff: Over the next few years, it sounds like a leaner IT department will become even more central to the business.

Julius: For those companies that are really going to transform themselves to the next generation, the IT shop is doing more than just crunching numbers, spitting out reports, and building applications. Particularly as business applications become smarter, they will need to be deployed at the product level in many cases. That’s an opportunity for IT to become even more embedded in the business. The main difference is that IT used to be a department. You could go to the IT floor and find the IT people there. Now information technology is everywhere. It permeates everything the company is doing. Because of that, the IT role has become more of a business role than a technical one. In the 90s and early 2000s, this was happening so fast it looked like the CEOs were going to start coming from the CIO ranks. That level of transformation hasn’t happened yet, but we’ve come a long way from the time when the main reason you talked with the IT guy is to see if he could fix your PC.

Julius Tomei is in his third decade in IT as a Fortune 100 executive. He lives with his family in the western Chicago suburbs. You can contact him at julius_tomei@msn.com.

Jeff Cerny has worked in technology and marketing for almost two decades and is the author of Ten Breakable Habits to Creating a Remarkable Presentation. You can reach him at jeff@jeffcerny.com or on twitter @jeffcerny.

By Jeff Cerny

I received an email from a TechRepublic member who is seeking advice about switching focuses in his IT career:

I have been working in Telecom as a software developer for six years now. At the beginning of my career I did work in embedded for about two years. Now I find my self wanting to switch back to embedded/device drivers. Is it advisable to make such a switch after quite a few years of experience in the IT industry? Would it in any way hamper my career with such a move?

In order to answer this question, I began by asking Justin James, who writes for our Programming and Development blog, his opinion.

He said, “Would I call it ‘advisable’? Not really. Unless your current specialty is on the decline, there is no need to make the switch. Unless you see otherwise, the pay rates are probably going to be the same. Up front y0u might have to take a pay cut due to lack of experience in the new field. In the long run, it may pay off to have a broader scope of experience, but that’s long-term thinking and it’s too hard to predict these things more than a year or two out. At the same time, other than having to start in a new industry and learn some new things, it may be worth a bit of a pay cut just to do something new and different. There should not be a substantial negative affect on his career other than the short term pay cut and the loss of seniority in your current job.”

Here’s my opinion: Six years may seem like a lot of time but in the grand scheme of things, it’s really not. Some people make complete career changes to other fields entirely with more time than that under their belts. My advice would be to go where your heart is. If you really think that working with embedded/device drivers is something that would be more fulfilling or that you would find more interesting, then that’s the way I would suggest you go. No one would deny the pleasure of a good salary, but if you earn it doing something you aren’t really invested in, then, believe me, it won’t make you happy.

The good news is that you have already had a taste of the specialty you want to move into. If you find it beckoning you again, then something tells me that’s where your heart and interests lie.

By Toni Bowers

Mac OS X Server has come a long way — and the power and flexibility of Snow Leopard might surprise you. Erik Eckel details the benefits and capabilities of this platform.

Technology professionals, particularly those earning stripes battling Windows tours of duty, aren’t fully aware of the strides made in Mac OS X Server. Snow Leopard extends functionality and performance even further. From a single Mac Mini powering the platform to an Xgrid Distributed Computing initiative, Snow Leopard packs serious potential. Here are 10 things enterprise administrators should know about Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server.

Note: This article is also available as a PDF download.

1: Serious scalability

From a simple chassis, such as Apple’s $999 specially designed Mac Mini, to near state-of-the-art Xserve rack-mount servers, Snow Leopard Server is capable of scaling to most any organization’s needs. Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server can manage the load, whether it’s a small workgroup requiring shared calendaring, email, and file services or large enterprises requiring instant, simultaneous access to terabytes of data in multiple locations.

2: Simplified administration

Apple’s hallmark has long been approachability and the ease with which its systems can be deployed, maintained, and operated. The same is true with Mac Snow Leopard Server. Users and groups are easily managed, thanks to the clean but powerful Workgroup Manager interface. The Server Status Dashboard makes short work of monitoring the server’s health. System Image Utility simplifies the process of creating and deploying system images, while NetBoot permits enterprise Mac administrators to boot multiple systems using a disk-based image hosted on a single server. Snow Leopard also adds iPhone deployment and remote system restore (NetStore) tools, too.

3: No CALs required

Mac server administrators lose the headache that is client access license management. Mac OS X Server licensing does not use client access licenses. Mac OS X Snow Leopard ships for $499, with unlimited clients. So does Apple’s enterprise Xserve servers. Organizations benefit in two ways: lower costs and time saved having to chase down, purchase, and record server, email ,and database CALs.

4: High availability design

Apple engineers have designed Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server for high availability. Organizations can leverage the platform’s automatic recovery, file system journaling, RAID, and clustering capabilities to ensure uptime (including clustering support for email services). Business continuity is further enhanced by Snow Leopard Server’s support for image capturing and deployment, rsync, ditto, tar and asr backups, and even basic Time Machine backup and recovery.

5: Directory services support

Directory services, which track information about users, groups, and their requisite permissions, have become critical infrastructure within organizations small and large alike. Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server includes a broad range of support for existing directory services and authentication technologies, including Open Directory (OpenLDAP, Kerberos, and SASL included), Windows NT Domain Services (using Samba 3), Backup Domain Controller (BDC), and RADIUS, among others.

6: Cross-platform compatible

Snow Leopard Server’s support for numerous directory services technologies enables integration with other network operating systems. Organizations still requiring legacy or Windows platforms to run specific components of their business need not start from scratch when deploying Mac OS X as their NOS or abandon past IT infrastructure or investments. With the server’s support for common standards and protocols (including but not limited to SMTP, POP, SSL, AFP, SMB, CIFS, IPP, DNS, DHCP, NAT, VPN, SSL, WebDAV, and MySQL), Apple’s server platform is compatible with Windows, Linux, and other platforms.

7: Collaboration-friendly

Email is already a critical tool today. Increasingly, organizations are embracing team sites, instant messaging, mobile communications, and shared calendaring functionality. Snow Leopard Server natively supports all these technologies out of the box, with no additional software packages or licensing required. iCal Server 2 powers shared calendaring and meeting and event coordination. Wiki Server 2 provides a customizable wiki-powered Web site for empowering team communication and collaboration. Mobile Access Server securely connects remote users to centralized corporate resources, while iChat Server supports instant messaging.

8: Clustering-capable

Organizations requiring leading edge distributed computing capability can power their networks using Snow Leopard Server. Apple’s Xgrid technology, included within Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server, enables connecting a wide-ranging collection of Mac desktops, workstations, and servers into a supercomputer. Systems need not even be in the same location to join an Xgrid cluster. The Xgrid Admin interface provides administrators with a simplified console for configuring the resulting incredibly powerful clusters. In fact, one of the world’s largest Xgrids is working to cure cancer in TechRepublic’s home state of Kentucky.

9: Superior Web infrastructure

Whether an organization needs to build and maintain a team collaboration Web site (Wiki Server 2), host Web pages or Web applications (integrated Apache), or produce and distribute audio and video programming on the Web (Podcast Producer 2), Snow Leopard Server is a step ahead of competing network operating systems. While many network operating systems simply host content, Mac OS X Server includes features that aid production, workflow, and publication as one streamlined process.

10: Reasonable system requirements

Despite having supercomputer potential, Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server can be installed on a Mac desktop, if need be. Smaller organizations will find they can run the platform on a Mac with a single Intel processor, 10GB of free hard disk space, and just 2GB of RAM. While 8-core Xeon Xserv systems with 48GB of RAM and three 2TB drives are available off the shelf, the platform can be run confidently on a Mac Mini within some environments.

By Erik Eckel

When I was learning to drive, the duty of teaching me fell to my dad because, I suppose, he had actually been through a World War and was less likely to crumble under the stress.

For some reason, during one lesson, my older brother tagged along. At one point my dad told me to stop, and by stop he meant press gradually on the brake until the vehicle came to a standstill. But of course, I instead pushed abruptly on the brake which nearly sent us all spiraling through the windshield. In fact, it did cause my brother to slide forward dramatically until his lower legs were temporarily wedged under the seat in front of him. As he yelped dramatically, my dad told him to be quiet and leave me alone.

There were a couple of dynamics going on here. First, my brother was obviously not seriously injured, and my dad was thinking that mangled shins was scant payback for all the little sister noogies my brother had inflicted on me over the years.

Second, my dad knew that if I got upset or nervous at such a pivotal point in the learning process I might lose what little confidence I had and never get my driver’s license. I learned on that day how to brake properly but not because of all the exaggerated drama coming out of my brother but because my dad was calm and let me figure out what I did wrong on my own.

While I recognize that modern workplaces can be too hectic to take this kind of approach to employee training, I really think it is the best way to go. For an employee to truly develop professionally, she has to learn by her own mistakes. And a manager’s hysterical reaction to those mistakes isn’t going to do any good. All that does is make an employee avoid repeating a mistake because she wants to avoid her manager’s wrath. Isn’t it better for an employee to understand a mistake in terms of procedural problems it caused? Through mistakes people learn the answer to the questions “why?” and “why not?” If the answers to those questions are more meaningful than “because your manager wants it that way,” then the learning is internalized and sticks better.

Of course, you can’t afford to let employees make costly mistakes as part of the training process, but if you micromanage them every step of the way they won’t have the knowledge or the confidence to form opinions on their own or the confidence to carry through on them.

By Toni Bowers

There are plenty of good things about working from home — but for every upside, there may be an equal and opposite downside.

Three years after being released from my daily commute, I find myself reflecting on some of the less appealing aspects of working from home. So I decided to stop working for a minute (see #4) and jot down a few of the negative aspects I’ve begun to notice.

Note: This article is also available as a PDF download.

10: You get lazy

If you don’t believe me, get a pedometer and measure the number of steps you take from the time you wake up to when you go to bed. A consultant friend of mine did that for two weeks and to her horror discovered that she averaged 156 steps a day — nothing more than bathroom and fridge trips. In the office, you generally have farther to go to get food, coffee, and water and go to the bathroom. Plus you walk to meetings, go out for a smoke break, go visit a friend.

9: You become unwittingly uncouth

After you’ve spent some time working alone, you start to lose your normal social inhibitions. You no longer remember to suppress certain crude (and sometimes noisy) behaviors, and you may sometimes pick or scratch various areas not normally picked or scratched in polite company. And then on that one day a year when you’re expected to attend the annual staff meeting, you let one fly during a pause between speakers.

8: Your cats wreak havoc

Cats invariably want to sit wherever your attention is directed, which for most of us means on the keyboard or in front of the monitor. Sooner or later, you’ll get up to fetch a cup of coffee or do a set of squats (yeah right) and the cat will stretch… and you’ll be left explaining exactly how you managed to delete that table from the database or why you sent that particular picture to the CEO.

7: Your neighbors don’t get it

Neighbors: Oh, you work at home, how nice for you. In their mind that means you spend the entire day goofing off because (a) you set your own hours; (b) no one is watching you; and (c) that is exactly what they would do. This translates into frequent pop-ins. How you doing? Working. Oh that’s nice, did you see what’s happening in the park? No, I’m working. Right. I don’t think they should do that, those trees have been there since I moved here in 1953. Um, excuse me, but would you mind leaving? I need to work. Oh “work,” ha, ha, that’s right. Mind if I put the TV on?

6: Your boss becomes a stranger

It’s so long since you last saw your boss, you forget what he looks like. There you are, summoned back to the office for the big upgrade. You pull into the parking space nearest the front door because you’re way too early, as you live in a different time zone. A car pulls in beside you and a man gets out and glowers at you. You’re in my parking space. Is he serious? There are no reserved signs. You break a sweat in the already uncomfortable suit you’re not used to wearing. Then he smiles. Whoa — Steve? Hey Steve, I didn’t recognize you. Wow you got fat! Which takes us to:

5: You forget the unwritten rules of polite interaction

Having had no one to talk to except the cats, dog, and occasional neighbor (who doesn’t employ you so he doesn’t count), you haven’t talked to anyone since your last visit to the office and find you’ve unlearned all the normal rules. Out come the curse words, the borderline jokes, and inappropriate comments. You know — all the stuff you’re used to sharing with Rover.

4: You give in to work avoidance

On those odd days we all have, when you don’t feel like working, there is no one to make you do it. So instead of taking a vacation day, or even pretending to be sick, you waste the entire day staring at the computer, getting distracted by what the cat just hacked up in the corner, staring at the computer some more, staring into space, and then spending the entire evening feeling guilty for a wasted day.

3: Sick days are a thing of a past

Because you can lie down in bed sucking down Dayquil all day and still manage to administer the network, you don’t call in sick. To feel justified in calling in sick, you have to be unconscious or in hospital. And even in hospital there is generally free wireless.

2: There are no departmental lunches

Oh wait, that’s a good thing.

1: You’re imprisoned in your workplace

And the number one worst thing about working from home is that you never, ever leave the office. That report you were meant to write wakes you up at 2:34 AM. Normal people make a mental note to take care of it as soon as they get to the office, after a cup of coffee of course, and go back to sleep. Not you. You sigh, set a reminder on your IPhone, and try to sleep. But your computer is right there, just across the room. You didn’t even bother to turn it off. Oh well, might as well write the report now. Can’t sleep anyway. Next thing you know, your stomach is making odd gurgling noises and you have the beginning of a caffeine withdrawal headache. It’s 1:35 in the afternoon and you have yet to leave your seat.

What else?

Have you run into any of these issues when working from home? What else would you add to the list?

By Becky Roberts