Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Happy New Year

Goodbye 2008, Welcome 2009!! Yes, the old is nearly out and tonight after the stroke of midnight, the new will be ushered in with billions of ‘Happy New Year’ wishes.

We wish you a wonderful, thrilling, successful new year and look forward to your continued readership :). Cheers and Happy New Year!

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Search for Jobs Online

Just because you’re using the internet does not mean it’s going to be easy. The internet has everything readily available, but the catch is that it’s always there if you know where to look.

Google is fantastic when it comes to top of the line searches conducted, and I myself am an absolute fan of the Google search engine and their other internet services (like Gmail, Gtalk, Google Chrome, etc). But no matter how fantastic Google may be, if you don’t know how to do an internet job search for your job employment options, you will get little further then seeing an excellent search-engine at work to the best of its abilities.

When it comes to doing a career job search, there are job websites galore and many, articles on how to do a job search, and still there are a few simple steps one must follow in order to ensure their job hunting success.

The first step is to decide on what type of job employment you are looking for. Are you a fan of books? Maybe you would suit a job as a librarian. Do you just love learning new programs and designing software? Maybe you would suit being Software Engineer. Choices in the market are limitless; it is just the job logistics you need to finalize.

The second step is to understand what makes the job search complete and workable. Unfortunately, there are many who believe that by solely reading the classifieds they would be able to get quick results and are often disappointed with the slow progress they seem to be making. In all of that, they end up spending all their effort on very few results.

You and I both know that we live in a very modern world, and much of our daily interaction with others, our jobs, lifestyle, etc relies on none other then the internet. There are many job sites as I’ve said before, and you can log on to just about any one of them in order to receive job availabilities, but my advice would be to look for the ones which have resume services as they normally have some combo packages for both making your resume and opening your account. Some even have job

Remember that there is no use in putting all your eggs in one basket so to speak, and you will get the most results if you apply to more then one website that caters to the local area in which you live, or as per your job location needs.

An important thing about searching for jobs on the internet is that it never takes a holiday and is ALWAYS available to you…unless of course – true to Hollywood style - America (God save her) is going down and the rest of the world with her.

But internet or no, we’ve already established the need to not ‘put all your eggs’ in the same basket, and that includes not giving up on those oh so faithful classifieds.

All the best with your search for jobs, good luck!

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

What’s new with India’s Employment?

Employment in India is at an all-time high despite the dullness of the global market as a whole and the employment opportunities are expect to only grow from here with companies in the south creating a number of jobs.

The IT and ITES boom has not gone out of style, and are still growing steadily. They in fact, are the primary hires right now. Other hot hires are those with telecommunication jobs, health care jobs, etc. Those in the retail industry are relatively safe as well thanks to the many middle class folks who give them power as a result of their purchases.

Another quickly growing field is that of medical tourism. Many come from abroad to get their medical treatment done here as cost for medicines and treatment in other countries is easily several times the cost here.

I have even heard from some friends that booking the round trip ticket, plus booking a hotel and paying for all hospital treatment and bills still works out to be cheaper than driving down to your local doctor in places like the States, Europe, etc. Another reason this happens is possibly due to the fact that Indian doctors are held in high regard. It is perhaps because this is a quickly growing trend that the tourism industry is promoting is along with their other endeavors.

Employment services tell us that the entertaining jobs, publishing jobs, media jobs, etc have a very fast growth in salaries and rumor has it that the Indian textile industry will be creating nearly 5 million jobs by 2010!

The goal to attain to in all of this is to register yourself with a good employment site. Why, you may ask? Because even as the market is currently going down, what goes down must sooner or later come up! And you want to be in on the action when it happens. It’s not only India that is doing well. Employment overseas is also on the rise.

If you are one of those that are looking to get into a good job and are not exactly sure of what you want to do, you may want to explore various possibilities such as legal employment, part time employment, etc.

But most importantly, do NOT forget to read up on the employment laws of the country in which you live. Many layoffs are happening now and that too to people who are largely unaware of what their rights are as employed laborers. Every country has a law of the land, and you would do well to read it. Did you know they cannot fire you on the spot, unless there is a breach of policy, misconduct or unless your contract specifically states otherwise?

And, did you know that under the Payment of Gratuity Act which was created in 1972, all workers are entitled to 350,000 gratuity after 5 years of continuous service? Ipto.co.uk further added to this: The Payment of Gratuity Act, 1972 requires employers to pay a gratuity to workers earning less than a certain limit upon termination of service. Well! If more people would have know about even just these laws, it may have made their work easier.

Monday, December 1, 2008

Recession Resilient IT Jobs

In October 1929, the world rocked with a financial crash that led to severe depression and the naming of Black Friday. They say history repeats itself and never has it proved to be truer then when The Great Wall Street Crash was reenacted nearly 80 years later.

But, the good news is that, despite the rough market situation, and the rumors that things haven’t been this bad since 1929, ITians need not career swap, for there are still IT recruiters who are bold enough to hire those of you looking for an IT job.

Who says that just because there are depressing surveys and predictions on budgets and IT careers, there is no room for IT employment? It is a farce – nothing more.

If those hiring are upbeat about the IT job vacancy, then so can we be. The reason they are giving for the positive outlook is that technology is something that every company needs, in every sector. They say that IT is the winning career for the day.

The jobs that experts find at risk however are the networking jobs. In a recently published list of jobs that are supposedly recession-proof, the IT jobs were toppers on the list. Other job streams that were seemingly safe were: networking and system administration jobs, software jobs, design jobs, QA jobs, testing jobs and more.

Apparently, the demand for people who can work with AJAX, Ruby on Rails, etc is high up there.

If you are a consultant, consider getting a full-time employee status. While you can be an outsourced aid if you work on the lower-level IT projects, you cannot move to higher levels unless you are a full-time employee.

If you are looking for a full-time IT job, you should consider if there is also scope provided for any hands-on training or new experiences and new projects. If there is such possibilities, you would do well to take the job while it is still available as training and experience is the best way you can get into higher-paying jobs. Earn while you learn should be your mantra. It is priceless!

Although companies are falling and the economy is sliding, companies still have to function. It is because of this that those with good training and experience will keep their jobs, especially so if you are an IT person. Companies need their core activities to stand strong and as we are in an IT world, this is one battalion that cannot fall unless of course the company is shutting down either temporarily or for good.

But in all this talk, we will not underestimate the skills that are not technical. All have something to contribute to the overall success of the company. If you have soft-skills such as being a people person, if you’re soft spoken, or can handle stress well, you will be the last to go even if the company is sinking.