Marketing Yourself as an IT Jack-of-All-Trades? 169
ultimatemonty asks: "As an IT professional looking for a new job, I'm trying to figure out how to market myself as a 'jack-of-all-trades' IT worker. I'm currently employed at a medium sized university as a video conferencing specialist. I'm good (competent) at many IT related tasks (Linux server management, programming, Windows/Linux desktop support, video conferencing support, etc...), but specialize or excel in none of them, sort of like the lone IT manager in a small shop. What kinds of jobs would the you look for with this kind of work experience, and how would you market yourself (design your resume, cover letter, and so forth) to prospective employers so they get the full-breadth of your capabilities, without over-stating your abilities?"
Pick one and become an expert (Score:4, Interesting)
Also be honest when you get interviews. There is nothing wrong with saying you have recently decided to aim at a particular area in which to become an expert.
You are worrying more about the problem than just getting on with it.
Network Administrator (Score:4, Interesting)
Some places think a Network Admin is someone who administers a network. They're wrong.
Those are called Network specialists or something like that.
Generally a company of 20 to 100 employees hires one IT guy to support all desktops, the servers if any, the website, Internet connection, managers' blackberries, the occasional phone issue and the president's home computer (and his children's Xbox). That my friend, is a network administrator, occasionally called a system administrator.
IT Technician, IT Administrator or IT guy are also used. As soon as you hit 2 IT employees, you are called an IT manager and everyone stops worrying about what to call you while you start looking for IT Director jobs on dice all day.
Re:Overstate your talents (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a tone of stuff on my resume. I have never had a job with just one responsibility, and I always go out of my way to do new work. That means I got a lot of things on my resume.
So when some one starts asking questions expecting me not to actually know things, I blow them away.
A good question to ask is "What they learned from what they have listed."
Aim higher with your job search (Score:1, Interesting)
There's enough technical work to be fun, enough control to be satifying, and enough really smart people working with me who are experts in each of THEIR fields, but I'm responsible for the overall architecture, budget, schedule, and any problems during and post implementation. We form a team, work together, I document what we plan to do, how much, how long, and present it to upper management for approval/rejection. The end customer usually works a business case, unless this is something like an email server migration, or other enterprise infrastructure project.
And the paycheck isn't bad either.
Re:That's what I've been billed as... (Score:3, Interesting)
It better be short, it better list what they are looking for at the top, and your first sentence needs to make them want to read more.
A JoaT needs a long resume if they want to demonstrate the range and flexibility and variety of solutions they can bring to the company. The solution is the split resume: a summary with the major hit points, ideal for the 12-second scan, followed by the 2-3 page compendium that prepares the interested employer for the interview.
Maybe you haven't done any hiring, or work at unimaginative corporate hives, but that 12 seconds is generally used for sorting, and the short list candidates get the long treatment, where the laundry list resume is more than useful.
I've been hired as executive director of an organization that required me to build turnkey editing systems and assist with IT in the parent organization, do creative design and production, marketing and admin and business planning work, design curriculum, speak at conferences, and competently address social justice issues. Very, very few eligible candidates. Similarly, I've worked at startups where the JoaT position was a necessary evil at first, and the long resume clinched those jobs. YMMV.
Re:That's what I've been billed as... (Score:5, Interesting)
It better be short, it better list what they are looking for at the top, and your first sentence needs to make them want to read more.
I believe this might be a US thing. Here in Australia, multi-page Resumes are the norm, and if you don't have enough information on your Resume to give the person reading it a fairly good idea of your skills and experience, they'll just bin it.
As an Australian, working for a US company, that has to interview US applicants, I find the "one-page Resume" to be incredibly frustrating. There's never enough information included to tell anything useful about the applicant unless it's either a) an applicant who's very new to the industry or b) an entry-level job like L1 helpdesk where applicants don't really need many skills past a pulse. This means I have to do, at the very least, a preliminary phone interview to find out whether or not the applicant is even worth bringing in for a "real" interview - an annoying and time-consuming proposition (doubly so for me since I have to line-up timezones appropriately to call people in the US).
Contrast this to the Resumes I receive from Australian applicants, who typically include academic qualifications, industry qualifications and job histories *with details* of responsibilities, achievements, skills gained, procedures, etc. Sure, there's a one-page summary that has a brief outline (what an American applicant would call the whole Resume) but it *also* includes more in-depth information allowing me to get a good feel for how the applicant has spent the last few years of their working life, in terms of gaining/exercising skills and experience.
The end result is that I can spend 30 - 60 seconds looking at each Resume's summary page, to quickly weed out people who are clearly unsuitable (eg: Electrical Engineering degree, about 30 years old, last 3 jobs in another country, applying for a L1 helpdesk job), then go back and spend 2 - 10 minutes for each Resume in the remaining pool finding the people who actually look suitable for the job, and make the shortlist for interviewing. Thus, by the time I actually get around to calling them in for an interview, I am already reasonably confident they have the requisite skills and experience, and the interview becomes about a) *verifying* (as opposed to discovering) their technical abilities (easier, relatively speaking) and determining whether or not they have the right attitude and personality.
I have yet to see a "single page Resume" that has told me anything truly useful about an applicant. A page's worth of bulleted previous employers, boilerplate "skills" and "responsibilities" one-liners, and "achievements" of maybe a sentence or two each, just doesn't have enough meat in it to determine whether or not an applicant is capable (purely from a skills and experience perspective) of doing the job. Subsequently, I've ended up getting in further contact with some applicants who were clueless and, I'm sure, missing a few that would have made excellent employees.
Slashdotters, what's it like in the UK, Canada, etc ? What style of Resume is typical in those places - just the one-page summary, or a one-page summary backed up by a relatively detailed explanation ?
Re:Don't do that (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing that helps in cases like this is to use different identities for your different personas. Most recruiters index their databases based on email so have your Unix persona CV with a "unix" email address, Network persona with a CV with a "network" email address and software development persona with a CV with a "software" email address. Amend the relevant CVs so that the "primary" skills look "primary" and are not muddled by the "secondary" ones.
And overall, being the jack of all trades in nowdays IT is bad for your career.
From a guy who was once in your position (Score:1, Interesting)
Bill yourself as the guy who can do everything. More importantly, convey your ability to learn new things, how flexible you are and how you can cut across different areas of knowledge and come up with novel solutions. But most of all, let them know you're the guy to go to. That you can be responsible for a project and see it through.
I started out in a small shop working for an extremely smart guy who believed in my potential. And while I left after six months, and went through a series of jobs where I fell in to half through dumb luck, the other half by marketing myself the way I told you to, and a myriad of consulting jobs picked up by both reputation and more dumb luck
What did take awhile to develop was the attitude and the accumulated experience to get recognized. It mostly happened for me around year 7 - everything began to change. Not only was I starting to look at work not as something to be suffered through and where I was underappreciated - but that it was a place where I could benefit by 1) making money 2) learn how to take care of business and 3) execute. This is also when the big money offers started to come in, for strange sounding or odd positions you can't find a million people to fill such as Technical Account Manager, Operations Expert etc.
Looking to hit a small shop where you're the jack-of-all-trades IT manager might not be a bad place to start. It'll help get you get used to being responsible to a T.
Always remember: you will be limited only by your imagination and the integrity you keep not only with others, but with yourself. Good luck.