2012 : World Ends, Malware Continues

While we're all vaguely worried about impending doom per the Mayan calendar,
2012 has been recognized as a banner year for malware. As social media gain
more steam, they attract more attention from the forces of evil.
Many people are in the midst of gaining sufficient experience with the likes of
Twitter & Facebook to make good use of the opportunities these tools offer.
This makes them particularly vulnerable to attacks that will not work so easily a
few months from now, when expertise is consolidated.

Even the government has been put on notice that cyberAttacks are
underway.

Wouldn't it be loverly if the start of the next long count coincided
with the demise of all forms of malware ?

Take a look at this article for details on what the bad boys are
up to these days :

The Year In CyberSecurity

The Work, Repurposed
Sean Nelson

Employable professional seeks repurpose of transferrable skills
into sustainable occupation.

If you really examine a resume or a job requisition, you’ll probably agree that 

these are not ordinary documents.  They are precisely crafted expressions of 

an idea directed towards  a specific audience, presenting one part of a puzzle 

and seeking an exactly complimentary  piece.  

A good place to start your transformation is to discover just what your skills really 

are, how they are described in the jargon people use today and where those skills 

are used. 

Discovery:  An objective view of your skill set is needed because it can
be difficult  for us to see what  we really have to offer. Seek out a former colleague
or business associate  familiar with your line of work. Interview them about you and 

the skills they have seen you use  on, and off,  the job.  

Ask them what stands out when they think  about you. 

This may seem an embarrassing exercise,  but it can also be a surprising one.
Be sure  to write out the questions you want answered and seek honest responses.
Spend some time organizing the answers and thinking about the skills discovered.

Expression: Identify some industries, or types of organization, that look interesting.  

Read some news articles and job descriptions in these industries, paying particular 

attention to the wording  that is used. Map as many of your ‘discovered’ skills onto 

the job descriptions you’ve read as  possible: 

Use their words to describe what you know how to do.

Refactory : Now that you have some new fangled ways of expressing what you
are, you need some new ways of thinking about what you do. Concentrate on
the value that your use of the skills,  the ones the interview discovered, bought to
the organizations you were part of and how that might  fit into the organizations you’ve
been reading about.  

For example, say you had been a systems administrator working for widget
manufacturing company.  Your industry reading indicates that many manufacturing
concerns are interested in cloud computing. Your ‘discovered’ skills include
 knowledge of servers, applications and operating systems, dealing with vendors of
computer services, assisting internal customers, persistence and raw diplomacy. 

These are all skills needed in by companies as they implement and support cloud
computing.  You are already half way to cloud computing expertise. Start thinking
about your resume and your accomplishments such that cloud computing is the
next and most obvious next step in your career.

Update : In the course of your industry and job description reading, you will probably
have found a set skills that are usually required. You may not have some of them and this
ruins yourall your good Imagineering. So. Ruthlessly seek out and 
consume any sources of enlightenment on these topics.  

Sources include  online training courses, meetups, trade shows, industry association
web pages,  Dr. Wiki and of course, Professor Google.  If software is involved get
hold of demo versions and try them. Doing these things will increase the depth of
your knowledge in these areas and your ability to speak intelligently about them.  

You may think you are a well versed expert, but you can sound, and be, more 
like one than you may realize.

That is more than half the battle because we often  
become what we play at.

The EP and the Golden Tagline

Sean Nelson 

Ah, elevator pitch, you inevitable tool of those seeking the grail of
imminent employment, you are often repeated, carefully constructed,

quick, concise and hopeful.

EP, you are most certainly memorized, but not necessarily memorable.

Alas.

There is often a distinct lack of sparkle, creativity, 

humor or imagination in an EP. 

Many are sufficiently boring as to induce yawning in the

45 seconds it takes to deliver them. Let's not waste such a good opportunity
to make a memorable impression, and have a bit of a laugh while doing so.

For instance:

I know a fellow that is an experienced and superior financial analyst.

He is a true expert at excel. He often teaches people like me how to use it better,

so that our tables actually pivot when we want them to. Sadly, he has not always been
as fully employed as he would like.

The most powerful nugget from his elevator pitch is this: “I Make Excel Sing”.

He did once literally embed a link to some audio in a spreadsheet cell.

So yes, Excel sang when he wanted it to.

The line is memorable enough to build the rest of an elevator pitch
around it and that's just what he did.

And here's the tale:

Someone who heard his elevator speech at a routine networking event
later had an urgent need for a financial analyst with strong excel skills.

They remembered people saying that the guy who said he could make excel sing
really could. What they could not remember was the man's name.

Sounds like the story has a less than excellent ending for our friend.

What happened is that the forgetful listener called someone who had attended
the same networking event to see if their memory was any better.  And it was.

That golden tag line ensured that the networking connection was properly

made and this subsequently made everyone's day because our friend got hired.

Two problems were solved with one golden tagline.

The foremost value of a golden tagline is to distill a brand position into concise
and compelling consumer-centric terms.  Focusing on the consumer will likely 

resonate  with their needs and desires.  Supplier oriented statements are less than 

effective: “We Are Expert At Excel” does not have the nice ring to it that 

“We Make Excel Sing” does, even if both display Excel expertise.

What you're after is a good 'hook', just like a chorus in a pop song, that expresses

what the consumer is looking for, the voodoo that you do so well, in a few words..

Another fellow I know was an account manager for “a premier manufacturer, 

installer and  service provider of vertical and horizontal transportation technology”.

 He was recognized for his  positive energy, creativity, leadership skills and all sorts 

of really good things besides. 

Still, he found himself less than wonderfully employed and so needed to craft his EP. 

Like many effective ideas, his appears so obvious, 

that it could not possibly work.

My friend became the Elevator Guy. He was uplifting, safe, reliable and you certainly 

want all of that in your business. There was only a plethora of pithy puns that could be 

bought to bear. Everyone that ever heard his EP remembers him and what sort of 

opportunities he seeks.

Here are some devices that can be used to help in creating your very own golden tagline.

Alliteration:  Branding Bulldog (Marketing), The Compleat Communicator

 (Technical Writing), Bug Buster : Bug Finder : Bug Hunter (Software QA)

Metaphor/ Simile  : IT Swiss Army Knife (IT)

Mastery, with humor : “I bring your dreams, hopes and nightmares to life.” 

(3D Artist)

There are many more devices that can be bought to bear in enlivening the EP.

Many of these are rhetorical devices.  

Rhetoric was, once upon a time, considered an essential part of good education.  

Rhetoric has since seen its stock fall of the proverbial  cliff and is most often 

thought of as a slightly dishonest set of tricks employed by trial  lawyers and 

such.

Not so fast:  Shakespeare and the King James Bible are chock full of artful
use of   rhetorical  devices. If you forgot what a rhetorical device is, take a look here :

  Handbook Of Rhetorical Devices.

In closing, remember, the EP is not a good place to be generic or vague.

There may be other 'products' like you in the marketplace, but you do NOT
want to sound just like them.

Lively up yourself !

Are Coding Schools The Way 2 Go ?

If your job search has yielded little by way of employment, one
 must  eventually ask if the product itself is the cause. Many technical people devote
110% of their  energy to doing the best job they possibly can and so have little left
over for improving their skill sets to keep pace with the times. After only a few years
the sharpest knife now appears dull.

High paying technical jobs are an obvious target for cost reduction by sending
the  work offshore. There's hardly a bean counter or MBA worth their salt that
has not proposed such a move. Their advice is often taken to heart because the
cost savings are simply too attractive to be ignored. The end result for many
technical Used2B_AllStars is a frustrating  period of undeserved unemployment.
The market is quick to detect and  reject trailing edge skills, increasing age and
lack of current employment. If your former occupation  has become an export,
it may even be difficult to maintain the positive references you've actually earned.

The obvious remedy to this situation is to retool. 
This is almost certainly the best investment that can be made.

In other countries dislocated workers find more concrete support from their
governments, but rugged individualists we Americans are, we look after ourselves.
This means that individuals take on all of the cost and risk involved in creating their
own futures : Choose wisely, young Skywalker. Select the training that is inadequate,
or a sector of the technical world that proves to be short lived, and you can lose
your investment and possibly your career as well

The range of choices is vast. There are online courses, bootcamps,
university extension courses and a plethora of certification and degree programs
competing  for your career investment dollars.  If this was not enough to warrant
extensive and serious  investigation, several immersive coding schools have now
joined the fray in San Francisco. Many of their graduates, including those with no
previous coding experience, have gone on to  work with outfits like Facebook,
Twilio and Twitter at enviable salaries.

App Academy, Catalyst Class, Hackbright and Dev
Bootcamp have recently emerged as technical education vendors that promise
 to take you  from zero to in demand, in three months or so. Bear in mind that you will
probably be coding and  sleeping for those three months, but isn't that what software
engineering often looks like ?  These schools are also selective about who they train.
Everyone wants the best chance at success here.  The cost is not inconsiderable either,
with fees running to $12K. This compares favorably to  degree programs and is near par
with many bootcamps and certifications.

There is a legitimate question about such rapid retooling :
Does it really work ?  Having spent more than a few years
writing code myself, I never found a course that did more than get me started
down the road to becoming productive in a given technology.  Application of
copious amounts of elbow grease over a period of several months was necessary to
achieve anything  that looked like routine competency. If there was no relevant project
to work on immediately, then my hard  earned  'extertise' evaporated quickly.  The real
target here seems to be entry level competency in the technology of choice.
Depending on  how prospective employers define the expected skill set at this  level,
this objective is realistic.

One difference in this latest incarnation of the retooling game is that some of the
vendors, such as App Academy, do not charge students anything
up front, opting instead  for 12.5% of the first years' salary once they are hired.
This effectively  shares  the risk involved and  strongly suggests that these vendors
really believe that their training will make you saleable.

This is simply astounding. Education is an unusual product in that it must
be  completely consumed before its quality can be judged. You will always pay for what
you get,  but the obverse is not always true. This is the first group of education vendors
I've ever heard of that proposes such a business model. As a result, I think the answer
is  simple :

 Get Thee To A Coding  School As Fast As Ye Can.

App Academy : Ruby, JavaScript, CapStone
Catalyst Class : Javascript, HTML, and CSS, and server-side Javascript and Ruby on Rails.
Dev Bootcamp : Ruby, HTML5, CSS, JavaScript
Hackbright Academy : Women Engineers.
SF Business Times Source Article 12/14

ScN 12/12