Linux.com: "The key to being successful in the IT industry is interning while still attending college and taking some certification courses after graduation. Do some research. Find an open source technology company that will provide you with the tools and resources you will need to build your career. Open source spans platforms, middleware and applications from data centers to desktops. There are many companies that offer internship programs and certification courses."

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BusinessWeek: A new survey shows growth across the country, with higher-than-average pay. And with the number of tech grads falling, demand will only rise.

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Baseline reports that demand continues to increase for qualified people in the information technology field.  This demand is in part due to the number of the baby boomer generation retiring within the next 10 years.  Also, the decrease in students choosing a major in computer science, engineering, or mathematics isn't helping either.

In the article, Demand for IT Admins Hits Five Year High , a survey found strong needs and increasing salaries for IT professionals for the following computer administration work:

"Everything I see in Silicon Valley is completely contrary to the assumption that programmers are a dying breed and being offshored," says Kevin Scott, senior engineering manager at Google Inc. and a founding member of the professions and education boards at the Association for Computing Machinery. "From big companies to start-ups, companies are hiring as aggressively as possible."

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"A surprising number of tech professionals are insecure about their business skills, concerned that they don't have the necessary career skills to make the leap from the cubicle to a corner office, finds a monthly outlook on the IT job market released April 10 by technology careers site Dice."

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"Accurate and complete requirements are essential to the success of any software project. Getting this part of the architecture correct requires both people and technical skills to capture and refine the right requirements. Discover the useful skills and tools for modeling requirements, and learn how to evaluate progress in competency."

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The New Workforce: Generation Next (Generation Y) in your Organization

2. Generation Next and Contemporary Work Cohorts

Generation Next defined.

In Generations at Work: Managing the Clash of Veterans, Boomers, Xers, and Nexters in you Workplace, Zemke (2001, p. 19) observed four generational groups currently in the workforce. The identified generational groups (and the year of their births) are the Veterans (1922-1943), the Baby Boomers (1943-1960), Generation Xers (1960-1980), and the Generation Nexters (1980-2000). Researchers may disagree with the time periods for when each generation begins or ends, but are in general agreement that the each cohort are represented by differences in dominant work values and historical background.

Typical for every generation, the work expectations and the influences a generation has to an organization's culture is often a byproduct of their generation's unique upbringing and life experiences. The Nexters "grew up during prosperous times but find themselves entering a post-boom economy" (Robbins, 2005, p. 20). Nexters are considered to be one of the most coddled, well informed, open-minded to diversity, and technically enriched generation America has ever produced (Zemke et al., 2001, pp. 127-134). Dominant core values of Generation Next have been observed to by various authors as including confidence, achievement, optimism, civic duty, sociability and diversity.

Nexters, given their size in numbers, are expected to have a significant influence on U.S. culture. The cultural influence will be greater than the Xers and possibly even the Boomers.

I am proud to say, I have never really worried whether I was certified or not. This Computerworld article gets right to the point:

Depending on whom you talk to, certification programs are either borderline rip-offs that provide little useful knowledge, or valuable hiring tools that make it easier for IT execs to pick the most promising new employees.

Available from vendors focusing on their own products, or outside organizations offering multi-vendor training, these certificate programs are expanding to fill the many specialized technology subsets that have multiplied along with the growth of data storage and other IT areas.

Now this isn't to say that I don't have a few IT certifications under the belt and didn't receive some benefit from them. One of the most intensive IT certifications of recent years was in IT security and another to "please" the crowd was a certification for migration to Microsoft's Server 2003. By the time I was done with those certifications though, I didn't know enough to get the job done.