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Put down that Stephen King novel! With August at hand, what have you read lately to enhance your career prospects? Here is a list of "Eight Summer Reads for the Career Conscious", courtesy of CareerBuilder editor Kate Lorenz.
(Hat tip: Tom Van Steenberg)
FastCompany has seen the Future, and it looks like an hourglass:
To get a sense of what lies ahead, consider a simple demographic tool: the "population pyramid." Imagine that we took all of the people in a given population and stacked them up by age, putting all the infants at the bottom and all the centenarians up top. For most stable, peacetime societies, the resulting figure would look like a pyramid, with the youngest people at the base and the oldest people up at the tip. And indeed, that is exactly what you see today in a place like India--a perfectly sloped pyramid with lots and lots of babies at the bottom and a handful of the ancient. By contrast, in what passes for a demographic joke (given our fondness for Fritos and Cinnabon), the current U.S. pyramid looks like an overweight contestant on The Biggest Loser, with the giant baby boom billowing out from its midsection.
Starting in the next decade, however, our flabby pyramid is quickly going to slim down. It will assume the form of an hourglass, with the largest number of older people in our society's history, the quasi-retired baby boomers, up top, and the largest generation of young people since the boomers--the millennials, or echo boomers--at the bottom. The beleaguered generation-Xers will form the "pinched waist" in the middle.
This hourglass demographic has major implications for the workforce. In fact, the impending retirement of the Baby Boom generation looms large in the consciousness of workforce planners, as it gives rise to two major challenges for employers:
What to do about it? At New Equities, our view is that a new workforce model is needed, one that dwells less on meaningless distinctions between "permanent" and "contract" employees, and focuses instead on an organization's relationship with mission-critical talent, regardless of its current location or status. We'll be returning to this topic again and again, as we expect it to be front and center for any organization concerned about attracting and retaining qualified workers.
(Hat tip: Praba)
Information Week looks at projected IT spending.
In the most recent Tech Trends tracking study released on Friday, AMR Research Inc. reveals 76 percent of the 200 U.S. executives participating in the survey plan to increase IT spending this year. The average budget is expected to increase by 19.5 percent, up from 5.9 percent in 2005.
The news is especially good for IT consultants and contractors:
Spending is up for hardware, software and outsourcing and services, but not as much for staff. "Companies are reluctant to commit to full-time staff," Scavo said. "It doesn't mean they are not hiring. It just means more money is going toward outsourcing and contractors."
Tonight. New Equities is hosting. The presentation is "Java Service Faces" with Tyler Williams. Details here.
On Tuesday, July 25th, New Equities is sponsoring an event for .NET developers through the Charlotte chapter of the Enterprise Developers Guild: "Wally McClure presents Ajax". Here's the event info:
| Date: | 7/25/2006 |
| Time: | 6:00 PM |
| Location: | Microsoft Campus |
Join us Tuesday, July 25, at 6 PM on the Microsoft campus for an evening with Wally McClure -- MVP, author, and Tennessee neighbor. Wally is working on a new book and is eager to show us how Ajax has progressed for .NET web developers. In case you've been vacationing on the South Pole without an internet connection, Ajax is the technique of getting information exchanged between the client and the server without a post-back and the usual page flash and redraw.
Wallace B. McClure graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. He continued his education there, receiving a Master’s degree in the same field in late 1991. Since that time, McClure has done consulting and development for such companies as Coca-Cola, Bechtel National, Magnatron, and Lucent Technologies, among others. He is the founder and president of McClure Development. You can find Wally’s blog at weblogs.asp.net/wallym.
We have also added Wally's blog from our Tech Links blogroll in the right column.
Directions to the Microsoft Campus can be found here, as well as on the Enterprise Developers Guild website.
Washington Business Journal has an excellent introduction to Web 2.0 concepts and lingo: "Web two-point, oh?"
Web 2.0 is slowly making its way into the business world. But there is a challenge to widespread use: No one knows exactly what it is. There's no official Web 2.0 program to install. The features have to find their way into everyday use, which they are starting to do.
Implementation of Web 2.0 does not require dramatic action but rather a subtle shift in the way users connect to applications. The subtlety of the changeover can make it more difficult to get buy-in from colleagues and clients, but the upside is that many of the applications are free or cost very little. [snip]
Plenty of tech types claim that Web 2.0 is just the buzzword for all things newly Internet, something that gets used ubiquitously and without any real meaning.
John Dvorak, an editor at PC Magazine, decries Web 2.0 as a bunch of high-tech hooey: "Web 2.0 is the latest moniker in an endless effort to reignite the dot-com mania of the late 1990s," he wrote in a March 2006 column.
Dvorak says: If you can get past the buzzwords and conferences, the real essence of Web 2.0 is making the do-it-yourself nature of the Internet more efficient. It's about self-service.
If jargon such as "Ajax", "tagging", "wikis" and "social bookmarking" seems a bit strange, this is a good primer. If you are already fully Web 2.0 buzzword-compliant, but are interested in going deeper, check out this widely-linked article by software maven Tim O'Reilly, "What is Web 2.0? Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software".
(Hat tip: Tiffany Bridge)
