IT skills shortage

IT skills shortage

Find out which specific IT posts are yet to be filled in the current job market...

141,000 IT and Telecoms recruits are needed annually to satisfy industry demand.

The Financial Sector is crying out for people equipped with IT skills. It might have seen a downturn in its fortunes in recent months and no longer be brimming with the limitless pots of gold of yore but it still presents an Aladdin’s cave of opportunity for those who have the necessary skills.

In the 2008 silicon.com Skills Survey, results showed 54% of respondents working in financial services said their business had IT positions it was unable to fill. The IT skills most in demand are programming languages, IT management and Linux.

The same barren technology landscape exists in the public sector as well, with a shortage of those skilled in IT management, programming languages and web services/SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture). In the telecoms vertical, the most in-demand IT skills are: applications development, programming languages and networking/messaging. The same can also be said for the retail sector where there is a lack of trained individuals with database, ERP and web services/SOA skills. A shortage in IT skills also exists in the hi-tech sector with programming languages featuring once again along with web services/SOA and Linux.

The benefits of a career in IT:

• Job and work opportunities abound for competent IT professionals.
• The digital revolution has also created a global market for qualified professionals. You have unlimited options as to where you live.
• IT work is interesting and challenging as it often involves innovation, problem solving or income generation.
• You can shape the future. Some IT careers allow you to work with and develop the latest technology.
• Flexibility. It is an area that allows you to balance your personal lifestyle and your professional needs.
• The pay is good. It is a question of demand and supply. Professionals are needed to create, operate, maintain and programme computers. Demand far outstrips supply. Businesses are willing to pay well for competent IT professionals.

Cyber security: a well-paid, challenging job that’s always in demand

Cyber security: a well-paid, challenging job that’s always in demand

Cyber security is a way of fighting against and preventing cyber crime. It’s a field that’s growing rapidly as the techniques to create cyber attacks become more and more advanced.

As attacks grow more common, cyber security professionals are increasingly in demand. But in the UK, there are not enough qualified experts doing the job.

This means it’s a great career to think about.

Why should you work in cyber security?

• It’s in-demand: big businesses, governments and websites such as Facebook and Twitter all want skilled cyber experts.
• It’s well-paid: this demand means that even 21 year olds can earn up to £350 a day!
• It’s challenging: cyber attacks can take many forms, so security professionals are constantly learning and improving their skills to keep up.

Who works in cyber security?

People from many different backgrounds and with different qualifications all work in cyber security. Watch our new video to see who they are:

The Hidden Benefits of Social Media Marketing: Why Your Strategy May Be Working Better Than You Think

Most businesses venture into social media expecting to see a big return on investment. The hope is that new customers

Image via CrunchBase

will come in droves, and that the benefits and revenue generation will be huge. However, this is rarely the case. It takes time to build momentum with social media, and the benefits aren’t always as obvious as we would like.

If you’re feeling a bit skeptical about social media marketing and whether or not it’s worth the effort, following are some reasons why it may be working better than you realize.

1. Brand Recognition – One of the most powerful ways to use social media is as a brand-building tool. With social media, you get to decide how you want to position your company and what you want people to know about what you do. With consistent effort and great content, you can build a reputation for your brand around your company’s values, benefits, and advantages.

2. Community – There is nothing like social media when it comes to cultivating a community. When your followers become part of your community, you gain instant access to them. That means you can find out what challenges they are facing and what they like and don’t like about your offerings. You can engage in ongoing dialog that can be more valuable than any kind of paid market research.

3. Repeat Exposure – There is an old marketing adage that says it takes six to eight exposures to a product before a customer decides to buy. A clear benefit of social media is repeat exposure with your network. You have the opportunity to remind them over and over again about what you have to offer, which can shorten your sales cycles dramatically.

4. Authority – For coaches, consultants, authors, speakers, and other service-based businesses, social media can be very powerful in helping you establish authority in your field—making you the go-to resource for your target audience to seek out for help. Share great content, answer questions, andserve your audience, and you will inevitably build loyal fans.

5. Influence – As your following increases, your influence grows. Having a substantial social media audience creates a snowball effect that can attract new customers, media interviews, joint venture partnerships, and all kinds of other opportunities. It’s a bit like when you see a crowd hovered around something. You can’t help but want to see what all the fuss is about, so a large audience will only attract more interest.

6. Website Traffic – Many people don’t realize that social media can be a leading traffic generator. When you share blog posts, videos and other content from your website, you give your audience a reason to click through and visit your site. Once there, you have the opportunity to inspire those visitors to take action by inviting them to sign up for your mailing list, make a purchase, or call to schedule a free consultation. Install traffic monitoring service, such asGoogle Analytics, and if you are committed to your social media efforts, you will clearly see that social media brings traffic. Also, make sure that your visitors receive a clear call to action when they visit your site so that you can convert that extra traffic into business opportunities.

7. Ahead of the Curve – Whether you realize it or not, your prospects and clients are checking to see if you are engaging in social media. I always find it a bit odd when I’m investigating a potential service provider online and I can’t locate a social media presence or worse, I find Facebook pages that haven’t been updated in months, empty Twitter feeds, and a clear lack of interest in engaging. Social media isn’t a fad and it’s not going away. Even if it’s not your top priority, if you stay current with activity, your prospects will notice.

8. Mindshare with Lurkers – There may be days when you wonder if anyone is paying attention to your social media networks. But if your efforts are consistent, I guarantee that more people are paying attention than you realize. Give it time and you’ll start to understand what’s happening behind the anonymity of the internet. You will eventually hear from people who say, “I’ve been following you on Twitter for ages. I love your posts!”

9. Competitive Advantage – The reality is that most of your competitors aren’t likely doing a very good job with social media (most companies aren’t), which gives you the chance to stand out. Also consider the flip side. If you avoid social media, you leave a big opening that allows your competitors to capture your audience.

10. Big Wins – While many businesses large and small are trying to justify the cost and time investment for managing social media marketing, an important benefit often gets overlooked: Big Wins. For example, if someone from LinkedIn connects you with a significant government contract, then that would certainly qualify as a Big Win. If a major media outlet finds you on Twitter and interviews you for a national article, then that is also a Big Win—one that you can’t measure based on revenues directly generated.

Big Wins don’t happen often, but when they do, they make it all worthwhile. It’s easy to forget results like these six months down the road you’re trying to assess whether your social media efforts are paying off. But that one contract you landed could cover your social media marketing costs for years. And that major media interview could lead to subsequent interviews and a line item on your resume that impresses a corporate sponsor three years from now. Never forget to factor in the Big Wins in social media.

How to Make Your Facebook Marketing Work for B2B

How to Make Your Facebook Marketing Work for B2B

#1: Understand Your Audience

It’s important to recognize that your audience on Facebook may not be the same as your audience on LinkedIn.

Knowing your audience—what resonates with them and what their expectations are—is always your first step to success. When you know what your audience wants, you can give it to them (without guessing).

So how do you find out who your Facebook audience is? Use the tools available to you and look at the data. Check Facebook Insights, Google Analytics and even your own database to get a clear picture of your audience.

Facebook Insights tracks how your audience engages with your page. You can trace their preferences, see how your audience demographic compares to Facebook as a whole or track which user segments you’re reaching and engaging with most often.

Facebook Insights offers a range of audience data.

If you’re using Google Analytics, I recommend upgrading to Universal Analytics so you can use the affinity categories data. This data tells you what interests your audience interacts with most and you can respond accordingly by providing relevant content, launching targeted ads, etc.

Inside Google Analytics click on Admin to upgrade to Universal Analytics.

The best data of all, though, is the data you already have. Your customer database can tell you a lot about your customers in terms of what they buy, the services they use and more (all depending on your business and how up to date your database is, of course).

Once you’ve got your audience data together, create personas that reflect your ideal audience members. What kind of problems do they need to solve? What content is most interesting to them in an informal atmosphere? What content can you provide to help them grow relationships?

Developing these personas really helps you focus as you define the Facebook audience you want to engage.

#2: Create and Curate Thoughtful Content

Your tone, the type of content you share and even the way you target advertising will be different on Facebook. It’s a balancing act to provide content that’s both business-related and interesting enough for your audience to engage with.

The key is to avoid the hard sell on your page. Don’t try to convert fans into leads or sales immediately. Instead, create and curate a healthy mix of content that takes your users on a journey with your brand over time.

The New York Times‘ study The Psychology of Sharing found that people share content they perceive as valuable. That value could be marketing for a cause, providing entertainment or nurturing relationships.

ShortStack posts links to other resources their customers will find useful.

Anything that helps your audience define themselves for their own audience (whether that’s friends, family or colleagues) is appealing. In other words, your B2B audience is probably trying to promote themselves as experts and will share content that helps them achieve that goal.

When you understand how your B2B audience reacts to content on Facebook, you can start creating content they want to share—the kind of content that lets them reinforce their own interests and expertise.

#3: Publish Updates on Your Audience’s Schedule

An important tactic for increasing the performance of your B2B Facebook page is tothink about when you’re publishing content. It may seem obvious, but many pages miss this opportunity.

Facebook Insights shows you when your fans are online. It makes sense to post updates when your fans are most likely to be on Facebook, right?

Posting when your fans are most likely to see it boosts engagement.

Timing isn’t everything, though. If your content isn’t great, no one will engage with it, no matter when you post it. Be sure to look at the big picture when planning your content and timing.

Use Insights to track post time, type (e.g., text, link or image) and engagement. When you’re just getting started, look at what’s worked for you in the past month. Going forward, export your Insights data to an Excel spreadsheet and track topic and engagement trends over several months to fine-tune your content.

In my experience, B2B pages tend to get the best engagement rates from 12:30pm-2:00pm and 4:00pm-6:00pm—the times when people are either on lunch break at work or are starting to wind down at the end of the day.

Those times aren’t a hard-and-fast rule, but they give you an idea of where to start. Your data and time will likely vary based on your company, content and audience.

#4: Target Your Advertising

Whether you’re trying to increase page likes, send traffic to your website or boost your reach, the goal of any advertising campaign is to attract the right people whilemaximizing your ROI.

Technology Rules and Rocks the World

Technology Rules and Rocks the World

Giving people licence to develop, to build, is incredibly empowering and the root of real innovation.

Advances in technology are no yawning matter…

For years the very mention of a career in technology raised little more than eyebrows, induced yawns and generally brought conversations to an abrupt end. It conjured up images of moustached and middle aged men (like your Dad) fiddling with computers. The mention of the word ‘programming’ or ‘microchip’, ‘database’ or ‘server’ would send a geeky shiver down your spine. IT was not cool.

If you let slip to your friends you were considering a career in this insipid, colourless, decaying world you would never again be asked about your ambitions or later your job. You were labelled the toe curling-ly ‘boring’ one who always wore anoraks (regardless of whether you did). BUT THIS IS ALL MYTH. This is all misguided, inaccurate, ignorant folklore of long ago…

Technology INSPIRES, CREATES, SIMPLIFIES, BREAKS RECORDS, ACHIEVES THE IMPOSSIBLE, SAVES LIVES…

A few examples of how technology is quite simply the coolest thing…

The world’s brain…

Think of technology as the world’s brain, its powerhouse, the means by which the planet we live in develops and progresses. Imagine if a person only used about 20% of their brain? Think of the waste, the untapped resources. Well, that is what the world is doing - only using a small percentage.

Medical…radical…

A cheap chip has been developed which rapidly identifies cancer proteins in a drop of blood – what normally takes multiple technicians hours to do now only requires a single drop of blood and can be analysed in a matter of minutes.

Key Facts

• A cheap microchip has been developed which rapidly identifies cancer proteins in a drop of blood in a matter of minutes.
• An iPill which delivers medicine in your body in the right place at the right time.
• Electricity from soil-dwelling microbes!

Pedal-power…

In remote and rural areas where electricity is a scarce or unknown entity, 12-volt batteries can be charged by pedalling. 6 hours can create and store enough electrical energy to light 6 homes for 30 days!

Energy in a bucket of dirt

Imagine soil-dwelling microbes which digest organic materials and naturally produce a small current which can be harnessed with a simple device consisting of 2 electrodes and a small circuit board. Well, this is exactly what a Harvard team of faculty and African students have tapped into…Technology takes dirt to a whole new level. Imagine the benefits this could bring to remote communities all over the world.

iPill

We've all heard of the iPod and iPhone, but probably not the iPill. And no, it’s not made by Apple. It is in fact designed by Philips and promises to deliver medicine in the right place, at the right time, inside your body. It consists of a microprocessor, battery, wireless radio, pump and a reservoir for medication. Once swallowed it allows researchers to keep track of its location through a wireless transmitter.

    HARD DISK CONTROLLER

What does Hard Disk Controller (HDC) mean?

A hard disk controller(HDC) is an electronic component within 

the computer hard disk.

that enables the processer or cpu to access,read,write,delete and 

modify to and from the hardisk.

Essentially,HDC allow the computer or processer to control the hard disk.

Explains Hard Disk Controller (HDC)

  

A hard disk controller's primary function is to translate the instructions received from the computer into something that can be understood by the hard disk and vice versa. It consists of an expansion board and its related circuitry, which is usually attached directly to the backside of the hard disk. The instructions from a computer flow through the hard disk adapter, into the hard disk interface and then onto the HDC, which sends commands to the hard disk for performing that particular operation.

                                                                     HDC CARD

HDC can be inside the hard disk or it can be outside the hard disk which is place on Expansion slot.

Apple’s iOS 8 Will Track Your Breathing

Apple continues to beef up its iOS 8 beta, and the latest update is all about your health. Among other changes, the latest iteration of the iOS 8 beta allows the upcoming HealthKit app to measure the way you breathe.

Dubbed iOS 8 beta 5, the new update adds support for spirometry data, which measures lung quality by tracking how much air you inhale and exhale, as well as how quickly you do it. Obviously, your iPhone or iPad can’t track your breathing on its own, but this update opens the door for doctors to use professional medical tools with iOS devices.