Sarah K. White

Author Archives: Sarah K. White

4 tips for job searching this holiday season

You may have heard that it's not worth your time to look for a new job during the hectic holiday season. But according to Ford R. Myers, author of Get the Job You Want, Even When No One's Hiring, and president of the career consulting firm Career Potential, there are a number of ways to make the holiday season work for your job search.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

How to get creative with your digital transformation strategy

Digital transformation can mean many things and encompass many areas of technology, it will look entirely different from one company to the next. However, there is one common theme -- it requires that creativity and innovation be tailored specifically around your business' needs.But many companies suffer from, what Chakib Bouhdary, digital transformation officer at SAP calls, "corporate cholesterol." In other words, businesses are often entrenched in "rigid processes, risk avoidance and a mindset of 'it's working, why change?'," which can limit an organization's ability to quickly adapt.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 companies with employee benefits you won’t believe

Startup culture introduced a lot of change to the traditional workplace by normalizing open office plans, fun break rooms, free food and flexible schedules. Part of these perks are a way to compete for the top tech talent, but they also serve as a way to keep current employees happy, encouraging them to stay with the company for the long haul.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

IT Resume Makeover: Presenting an executive image

If you're going for a role that is technically a step up from your current position -- for example, in executive leadership -- you need to get strategic to make your resume stand out. That was the case for resume makeover candidate William Torres (whose name has been changed for this article). He wanted to demonstrate his suitability for senior executive leadership roles, but wasn't sure what to include and what to leave out. When Stephen Van Vreede, IT and technical resume writer at ITtechExec and NoodlePlace, saw Torres' resume he knew he wanted to rework a number of things to better reflect his qualifications as a technology leader.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

5 apps to gamify your personal and work lives

Gamify your personal and work livesImage by ThinkstockIf you're struggling with motivation or productivity at work, the answer might lie in gamification. Gamification turns your boring to-do list, mundane chores or healthy habits into a role-playing (RPG) game where you can earn points, collect badges and level up. If you've ever used a fitness tracker, it's the same concept -- you can earn badges and rewards for your workouts and healthy lifestyle goals to help you stay motivated. PokemonGo, designed as an augmented reality game, even managed to gamify walking for a lot of players, with researchers at Stanford and Microsoft suggesting it helped significantly increase physical activity for users. Gamifying your life might be the answer to staying motivated, productive and to develop new habits; these five apps will help you make your everyday to-do list fun again. <A HREF="https://habitica.com/static/front" TITLE="Habitica website" TARGET="_blank">Habitica</A>Image by HabiticaTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security budgets continue to grow, but is it enough?

Cybersecurity is an increasing concern in the enterprise as the number of high-profile breaches reported only grow each year. In 2015, there were a reported 781 data breaches in the U.S., making it the second highest year for security threats, according to data from the ISACA. And 40 percent of those data breaches happened in the business sector.So it's no surprise that Business Insider Intelligence reports an estimated $655 billion will be invested in cybersecurity initiatives between 2015 and 2020. However, in 2015, worldwide cybersecurity spending reached only $75.4 billion, according to Gartner, jumping to an estimated $2.77 trillion in 2016. Those numbers suggest that businesses are only just catching on to the importance of cybersecurity in the workplace, but are they too late?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security budgets continue to grow, but is it enough?

Cybersecurity is an increasing concern in the enterprise as the number of high-profile breaches reported only grow each year. In 2015, there were a reported 781 data breaches in the U.S., making it the second highest year for security threats, according to data from the ISACA. And 40 percent of those data breaches happened in the business sector.So it's no surprise that Business Insider Intelligence reports an estimated $655 billion will be invested in cybersecurity initiatives between 2015 and 2020. However, in 2015, worldwide cybersecurity spending reached only $75.4 billion, according to Gartner, jumping to an estimated $2.77 trillion in 2016. Those numbers suggest that businesses are only just catching on to the importance of cybersecurity in the workplace, but are they too late?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gamification can improve employee engagement

Engagement isn't something you only need to worry about during an employee's onboarding process, says Tom Gimbel, founder and CEO of LaSalle Network, a professional staffing and recruiting firm. Instead, he says that engagement is a metric you need to track and measure throughout an employee's career.He says that during an employee's first year with a company, they're typically performing at their highest levels -- they're excited about the opportunity and constantly learning new things. It's the "sophomore slump" stage that employers need to worry about the most. After an employee, has been with the company for a year or two, "it's lost its glamour and that excitement fades," he says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fight the talent shortage with citizen developers

If you want to become a developer, it turns out you might not need a background in computer science as more companies are looking to "citizen developers," says Karen Devine, vice president of marketing at QuickBase, a company that develops business apps."Not only do citizen developers exist, they are becoming more and more prevalent. In fact, according to our latest State of Citizen Development report, only 15 percent of citizen developers have basic coding knowledge, yet 76 percent consider app development part of their daily job tasks," says Devine.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

4 employee benefits that will improve retention

Most businesses offer no shortage of benefits to employees, but what happens when your employees aren't aware most of those benefits exist? While free lunch and snacks in the break room are easy enough to spot, and appreciate, there are plenty of overlooked benefits hiding in your onboarding handbook.Dean Aloise, global HR consulting leader at Xerox HR Services, a division of Xerox focused on HR consulting, says that businesses are looking for more "value" in their benefits beyond flashy perks that get people in the door. But what employees value is going to vary depending on factors like age, demographic and personal view point. Aloise says the only way to understand what most your employees want from their benefits package, is to ask them and then communicate those benefits regularly to the workforce.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Employees feel pressure to use personal smartphones at work

Eren says that businesses typically approach BYOD from the perspective of hardware security. But instead of worrying about security on devices and peripherals, Eren says businesses should focus on securing the corporate data that resides on the devices and creating policies around what can and cannot live on a personal device.Eren says it's not hardware and devices that are the security threat, it's the apps that host corporate data, which is what hackers are after. Your BYOD strategy doesn't need to be overly complex, he says, but it does need to work within the parameters of your business and be something that can grow and adapt as technology evolves.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why employee experience trumps company culture

There's been a lot of talk about engagement in the workplace -- whether or not employees are happy and satisfied, and what that means for their work performance. In a two-year study of the American Workplace, Gallup found that as much as 70 percent of the U.S. workforce is not engaged at work. This isn't a recent trend, either. The report indicates that over the past 15 years, engagement has consistently held under 33 percent.Engagement is often tied to company culture -- the idea being that providing the right perks and environment for your workers will boost engagement. But the stats suggest that the past few years of focusing on company culture hasn't done much to boost engagement. That's why Aye Moah, chief of product at Boomerang, a company focused on productivity software, suggests backing off company culture and focusing on the "employee experience."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 screen-sharing apps offer easy collaboration

5 collaboration apps worth a lookImage by ThinkstockThe modern office has changed drastically in the last 10 years, which means the way we collaborate has evolved as well. Whether your company has remote workers, international offices or employees who are always on the road, you need fast and easy ways to stay connected. There are plenty of apps that promise to help you collaborate with colleagues, whether you need basic messaging, video chat, remote access or screen-share capabilities. We previously wrote about these 15 apps for collaboration, but here are five more worthy contenders to consider.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT Resume Makeover: Highlighting business and technology leadership

Not everyone has a typical career trajectory where titles, skills and promotions all line up into a neat, concise story. That was the case with Keith Evans. He held varying CIO roles with the same company and had skills that set him apart from other CIOs, which caused some confusion and resulted in a dense resume. Laura Smith-Proulx, career and resume expert, knew that the goal with re-writing Evan's resume was to organize the existing information to build a clear picture of his extensive skills and experience as a CIO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Robots and AI won’t cost you your job anytime soon

MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference is all about looking to the future of tech and what's more futuristic than artificial intelligence? If you are up to date with the latest news on AI, or maybe you've just watched a few episodes of HBO's Westworld, you might be wondering how soon your job will be replaced by a robot. But if the presentation at MIT 's EmTech conference this year is any indication, while artificial intelligence is at an impressive point, we're still far off from robot domination.To emphasize that point, Dileep George, co-founder of Vicarious, an organization working on next-generation AI algorithms, showed video of robots falling over in silly situations in his presentation, Artificial Intelligence at Work. The footage not only got some laughs, it also highlighted the vast limitations of current robotics. According to George, it's not that we don't have the hardware to create intelligent robots, it's that we don't have the software to make robots intelligent enough to do something as simple as fall down correctly. Instead, most robots unnaturally tense up and fall to the ground from a mere push.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cybersecurity staffing issues may be putting you at risk

A study from Spiceworks found that even though 80 percent of organizations experienced a "security incident" in 2015, only 29 percent of companies have a cybersecurity expert working in their IT department and only 7 percent have a cybersecurity expert on their executive team. And a majority -- 55 percent to be exact - said that their business didn't have "regular access" to any IT security experts at all, internal or third-party, with the majority of companies also reporting they had no plans to hire or contract one within the next year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cybersecurity staffing issues may be putting you at risk

A study from Spiceworks found that even though 80 percent of organizations experienced a "security incident" in 2015, only 29 percent of companies have a cybersecurity expert working in their IT department and only 7 percent have a cybersecurity expert on their executive team. And a majority -- 55 percent to be exact - said that their business didn't have "regular access" to any IT security experts at all, internal or third-party, with the majority of companies also reporting they had no plans to hire or contract one within the next year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

6 tips to create your online career identity

Just like companies need to maintain their public image and protect their brand, so does anyone with a career in technology -- or any industry, for that matter."Your online identity is a form of capital, much like your intellectual capital and financial capital. To that end, it can be grown slowly and steadily over time, which will eventually produce the positive results you want," says Ford R. Myers, career coach, speaker and author of Get the Job You Want, Even When No One's Hiring.Technology has changed the way people find jobs and that it's become easier than ever for hiring managers and recruiters to search for top talent, rather than wait for them to submit a resume, according to Myers. That means, your dream job could easily come knocking at your inbox, but that is only true if recruiters and hiring managers can actually find you. By taking time to carefully craft your online identity and brand, Myers says you will stand out as a "tech-savvy, smart self-marketer." He offers six critical steps in crafting your online brand, so you can put your best professional foot forward and create the career you want.To read this article Continue reading

Top 10 jobs in IT and engineering

Best jobs in IT and engineeringImage by ThinkstockMany jobs fall under the umbrella of tech these days, each with its own unique focus and skillset. CareerCast looked at the wage potential, growth outlook and relevance to the constantly evolving job market to determine the best jobs in tech market. With a growing interest in analytics, data, cloud, hardware and software in the enterprise, technology jobs are at the forefront of job satisfaction and growth, making it a great time to get into the industry if you have the right skillset. If you're looking to get into tech, or make a change, or want to see how your current role ranks, here are the top 10 jobs in IT and technology, according to CareerCast's data. Data scientistImage by ThinkstockTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here