In Which Direction Should You Take Your Career

In which direction should you take your career?

You can use a job board search tool to help you answer that question. How in demand are your current skills? What additional skills should be acquired or sharpened? I used CareerBuilder, but other boards should work. The results will tell you what current staffing requirements are popular NOW.  You can get reasonable results, as long as you weed out the fads.

I work in IT (Information Technology) so I am interested in the current state of this field. This technique should translate to other professions.

Below is an example of the technique:

Search Term	Occurrences
Business Process Management	7199
Project Manager	6753
Business Analyst	5737
Use Case	1477
SAP	1012
Visio	920
SDLC	918
UML	447
Oracle 12	210
RUP	150
Rational Rose	40

It was surprising to me that there were more occurrences in job descriptions for “Business Process Management” than “Business Analyst”. BPM is an area I am seeking certification in, so this is reassuring. Learning that you are already doing all you can or learning you need to do more are invaluable insights.

Additional search terms can be found by looking at some of the jobs descriptions for additional required skills.

Here’s a different cut: LAMP (an acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and AJAX (an acronym for asynchronous JavaScript and XML) are popular web development technologies:

Term	Occurs		Term	Occurs
LAMP	170		AJAX	988
Linux	2647		Javascript	2227
Apache	646		XML	2382
MYSQL	778
PHP	696
Python	431
Perl	1151
MS Windows	1245

By the way, there is an interesting web site that looks at tools used in the top 10,000 web sites by traffic (see backendbattles.com ). Here you’ll see Joomla (a content management system) listed as number 18 in their list while in my search it showed up in 22 job descriptions.  Plenty of growth opportunity for Joomla’s developers but not necessarily for me right now.

You are told that your resume should be targeted to the job you are applying for.  Using this technique should give a good first approximation of either how to tailor your resume to the popular keywords (if you have the skill the employer is looking for), or to begin to get the training (if you lack the skill). In my case, I found that I needed to have Visio on my resume, and although I have Visio experience in my past – it was for a relatively short time and that skill may be a little rusty. So I’m using the available on-line training to refresh and make that skill current. Microsoft helps in that they can give you a 60-day trial copy.  The Professional Service Group (PSG) of Mercer County, New Jersey may have a copy in their lab which I can use after the trial period is up, if needed.

Also, this technique should begin to insulate you from HR keyword search tools that are used to weed out applicants.

I think that I have only scratched the surface with this technique and I hope others who may do a similar analysis will publish their results by placing a link in the discussion blog,