Articles - Career / Personal Development

In part 1 of this series I showed you how to research government data to discern if the job you are qualified for (or studying to get a degree in) will be around later. In this post, I am doing more or less the same thing, but from a computer science perspective.

In other words, if you are a Programmer, Software Developer, Software Engineer, Software Analyst, Hacker, whatever and you are considering a new certification; I suggest that you do a bit of research first before plopping down your hard-earned dollars. Let me share with you a couple of really cool resources.

Recruit.net is a site that (among other things) plots job trends. Here is a quhttp://www.hirecentrix.com/administrator/index.php?option=com_contentick note about what they say they do.

The recruit.net US job index is based on an aggregation of job data from thousands of online sources. This includes jobs posted on corporate web sites, job boards, recruitment agencies, online classifieds and newspapers throughout the country.

Check out what they think are among the hottest IT Certifications these days. (See below) The obvious winner is “java.” If I were a programming whiz, I would get me some of that because according to these stats, Java is where its at.

Demand for Software Skills in usa
java,c#,c++,perl Jobs in usa

 monthly job percentages have decreased by 3.71% .

c# monthly job percentages have decreased by 16.85% .

c++ monthly job percentages have decreased by 20.00% .

perl monthly job percentages have increased by 0.26% .
View the java,c#,c++,perl job trends in usa at Recruit.net.

But I would be remiss if I relied too heavily on one resource, so let’s look at a couple of other things first. Namely, the Tiobe Programming Index. This is their claim to fame…

The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

According to their stats, Java is the most popular programming language with the C programming language becoming a close rival.

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So, if Java is so popular, is it really worth getting a certification? I mean, what is the return on investment? Hmm… According to Indeed.com, the average salary of someone skilled in Java is $91,000.00 and even with the recession being how it is, jobs for people skilled in Java is trending upward. (See below)

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Okay, so I am not an expert in information technology, but I would say that its a safe bet to put some of your eggs in the java basket. So what do you think of my logic? Make sense? Leave me a comment and let me know…

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Biography

Jim Stroud is a “Searchologist” with an expertise in the full life-cycle placement of Executive and Technical personnel, Recruitment Research and Competitive Intelligence. He has consulted for such companies as Google, Siemens, MCI and a host of start-up companies. During his 3-year tenure with Microsoft, he served as a Technical Sourcing Consultant and was a regular contributor to Microsoft’s Technical Careers Blog. He is presently a Social Media Development Manager for EnglishCafe – the premier English learning community for global professionals which has English quizzes, online classes and more.

Jim Stroud is also the Chief Blogger at  The Searchologist where he publishes a website, magazine and online video series dedicated to lead generation strategies for Recruiters.

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