Category Archives: Career

Career, Education

Choosing a University Degree Program for IT

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In my last article I looked at the overarching concerns and approaches to an university program and how it would apply to us in IT. Now we will look at individual programs and how to approach the selection of a major and focus area within the university system.

Of actual degree programs we face a world of complexity as universities and colleges often use any variety of names for their programs of study and often attempt to use one program to teach another so a program name will often not match the actual field of study which can be very bad as you do not want to be in a position of needing to explain this discrepancy to potential employers or existing employers. An example of this was a well known northeastern school that lacked the ability to offer an IT program so relabeled their existing library science program to IT and passed that off as such for many years.

The first thing to consider is if we want to have a focused program in our field or one outside of the field. Given what we learned from the last article, that universities excel at liberal and traditional subjects and do poorly at technical ones and that our goals are to be broadly educated and not focused on specific skills, I general prefer to see students or job candidates who have been through non-technical course loads rather than technical ones.

There are any number of good non-technical programs from which to choose. Great examples include communications, business, accounting and psychology. It is good, of course, if any program includes some technical concepts such as project management and systems analysis, but these can simply be addressed through electives. It is also best if any program include studies in math, especially statistics and risk analysis, and general business classes, basic accounting and management. Students, we hope, will leave school with a firm foundation in understanding business context, people and communications because these are the soft skills that are most critical to an IT career and even moreso to an SMB IT career where there is far less departmental isolation between some tech positions and the operational side of the business.

For those that do not want to take the most liberal of paths as described above, universities often offer a large range of degrees within or near the IT discipline itself. This plethora of IT or IT-like options can often lead to confusion and risks making the selection rather dangerous as a highly technical degree that is in the wrong area of study would be the worst possible option – teaching neither IT nor teaching the broad skill set that IT practitioners desperately need. Even worse is going through the wrong field of study will often wildly mislead students as to what to expect when they enter the IT field and may actively look extremely bad on a resume as it can appear (and rightfully so in many cases) that the student did not take the time to understand their chosen field of study, know what degrees would be applicable to it and failed to realize this through years of university classes or did and did not bother to switch to an appropriate program! This is what we most want to avoid, actively bad degree programs.

To make this as challenging as possible, IT degrees often come with a variety of names. And IT degrees may be included under multiple schools or colleges within a university. Some universities have IT degrees inside of an IT school, others may have them within a more general science program, a math program or often within engineering. Some even have IT degrees under a business school. It is not unheard of for IT degrees to exist in multiple places within the same university with different foci depending on which college is administering the program.

We must also address the big question of “is software engineering and programming a part of IT?” In universities, the answer is generally yes even though in the professional world the answer is a resounding “no” – the two are clearly different fields of study and different disciplines. Software engineering is dedicated to the design and building of products. IT is dedicated to the building and support of the infrastructure of businesses. There is some overlap as any two fields might have, but they are very clearly different career fields that deal with extremely different day to day duties and tasks. It is quite common to find software engineering, developer and programmer courses and degree programs lumped into the same schools as IT or even put under an IT umbrella. This is not necessarily bad but can be quite confusing. We must be clear, however, that software engineering is not IT and any degree focused on programming should be avoided for someone with an interest in heading into the world of IT. Any respectable IT program is going to teach programming as a core foundation to the field, but the program will never be focused on it. If it is, this is a mislabeled program and should be avoided.

Proper IT programs should have names such as Information Technology, Computer Information Systems or Management Information Systems. IT and CIS programs are often interchangeable. MIS programs tend to be a subset of IT more focused on certain management-supporting aspects of IT.

Programs that are most insidious and dangerous to IT hopefuls are ones that are most closely named but least closely associated with the IT field: computer engineering and computer science. These two should never, ever cross paths with those looking for careers in IT.

Computer engineering is older than IT and is a subset of electrical engineering. This is a traditional engineering field that focuses on the design of computers and computer components (like processors, chips, boards, peripherals) themselves and has effectively no crossover with IT or any IT-related discipline in any way. Computer engineering and IT should almost never even appear within the same school or college within a university.

If software engineering (which itself is not an IT discipline but is at least closely related) is the programming world’s analogue to the world of traditional product development engineering then computer science is the programming world’s analogue to physics or mathematics. Computer science is truly a “science and math” type field, developing the theories and foundation that is then used by the software engineering discipline to build products often used and managed by the IT discipline. Computer Science, CS, is probably the most commonly mistaken field that IT hopefuls will enter and if a true CS program it is completely inappropriate and a waste of time. This is the program to look out for the most. Avoid CS completely and avoid any university attempting to pass IT programs off as CS, the two never overlap.

Do not take the selection of a university major lightly. My recommendation is to keep your selection as liberal as possible, use electives to introduce IT elements like basic programming and networking into your curriculum, fill your time with mind-broadening classes and learn about business, finance, accounting, communications, writing, speaking and statistics. Attempt to find internships or opportunities in the university to work with IT departments. Actively work to leverage your opportunities at university to make yourself as prepared as possible to focus on the specific skills of IT externally to your university training.

Career, Education

How to Approach the University Experience

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All discussions of university versus non-university aside, once a university (or college as the Americans generally refer to it) is chosen, the next step is choosing a degree program that will fulfill our needs for our chosen profession. This, of course, is based on the presumption that our chosen profession is going to be IT. If you are not interested in a career in IT, this is probably not the article for you.

University programs can be problematic, especially in IT, because they are often mislabeled, students often do not know what area of study they are interested in before beginning their studies and those pushing students towards university are often inexperienced in IT and do not understand the relationship between specific programs and the field itself. So those directing students towards university studies with the intention of a career in IT will very often pressure them into university programs ill-suited to IT careers at all.

Two things that we need to consider when looking to choose a degree program: what universities themselves are good at providing and what will be useful to us in our IT careers.

First, where do universities shine? The university system, its very core goals and values, are often completely unknown to the general public which makes the broad use of universities a bit odd and problematic on its own. The university system was never meant to train students for specific careers but instead to introduce them to many concepts and foundational knowledge (not foundational industry knowledge you must note) and to force them to think broadly and critically. In this aspect, good universities usually shine.

It should be noted that some universities, including a very famous and well respected US university on the east coast openly stated that its mandate was not to educate or service students in any way and that students attended its schools solely to finance the professors who were its actual product – beware that your university choices see education as a goal, not a necessary evil.

Treating a university as a trade school is a fundamental mistake made by many, probably most, students. Course choices are not intended to be focused on specific skills that will be used “on the job” but on skills that will make one a more generally useful member of society. For example the intended use of a university is not to teach someone the specific ins and outs of managing Active Directory design on Windows Server 2016; that would be the job of a trade school. Instead university programs are intended to be more broadly based such as teaching data structures, authentication concepts or even more broadly in areas like writing and communications.

A student leaving university is not intended to be ready to hit the ground running in a real world job; that is not a goal of the system. Instead the idea is that the student be well versed in the necessary skills to help them learn the specifics of a job or career and be overall better suited for it. It is not about speeding someone into a career but preparing them for a lifetime in the field at a heavy cost to the short term. The hope being that either the student has no concerns with finances (the traditional amateur system) or will make up for the cost (in both hard finances and in career setbacks) of university over the span of their careers. Understanding this is key to understand how to approach university education to gain the appropriate value that we seek.

Second, What is useful education to us in our IT careers? At an early stage in our careers it is generally impossible to predict which skills are going to be the ones that we will need to leverage throughout our career lifespans. Not only do we not know what industry niches we will want to pursue, but we also have little ability to predict which skills will be needed or even exist in the future. And even furthermore nearly all people working in IT, if not every field, have little ability to totally pick and choose the area of technology in which they will end up working but will instead be required to learn the skills of the jobs that become available to them, moving through their careers more organically than in a specifically predefined way.

Because of this, as well as because of the university values mentioned above, focusing on specific technical skills would be almost wholly a waste during the university time frame. Of drastically more value to us are soft skills and more broad ones such as developing a great world view, understanding business and accounting practices and concerns, learning psychology and sociology, studying good management practices, communications and, probably above all, becoming well versed in both written and oral business communications. Companies hiring IT professionals tend to complain about the lack of these skills, not a lack of technical competence, especially in smaller businesses where nearly all IT practitioners have a large need to communicate effectively with end users and often even management. Having a broad understanding of other job roles and the overall workings of businesses has great value for IT practitioners as well. IT only exists in a business context, the firmer the grasp of that context the more value someone in IT has the potential to provide.

For the most part, what we want from our university experience actually lines up with what universities are best prepared to provide. What is least useful to us, throughout our lives, would be highly specific technical skills that are overly focused too early in our careers (or even before they have begun) and skills that would rapidly become outdated often even before leaving university.

So where does this leave us? First we should look at the broadest degree options. Whether we are beginning to look at Associates (two year) degrees or Bachelor (four year) degrees we generally have a choice of an “of Arts” or an “of Science” option and, in a few rare cases, an “of Professional Studies” option. Each of these is simply a point along a sliding scale with an Arts degree being the most liberal and focusing the least on the area of study selected. A Science degree is more focused and less liberal than the Arts degree. And the rare Professional Studies option is even more focused than a Science degree with very little liberal studies, basically the polar opposite of an Arts degree.

Of these degree options, almost universally I recommend the Arts approach. A heavy focus on specific skills is generally a poor approach to university for any degree field but in IT this is more dramatic than almost any other. Classes and coursework heavily specific are not generally useful with education becoming overly focused on a single area. A Science approach is a reasonable option, but I would lean away from it. The Professional Studies approach is a clear attempt to mimic a trade school program and should be avoided both because it is a very poor use of university resources as well as being so rare that it would require regular explanation whenever a new person encountered it.

Staying highly liberal with our studies provides the best overall benefit from the university experience. Not only does it let us best leverage what the university offers but it also gives us the best foundation for our careers. There is also a hidden benefit, and that is career risk mitigation.

Career risk mitigation here refers to our university training not being overly specific so that should we decide later that IT is not the field that we want to pursue or after some time that it is not the career in which we want to remain that our education supports that flexibility in an effective way. Perhaps our IT careers will lead us into management or entrepreneurship. Or maybe our IT experience will be in a field that we end up enjoying more than IT. Or we might live in a place where our IT opportunities are few and other opportunities exist. There are myriad reasons why having a broad, flexible education isn’t just the best for our IT careers but also the best for our non-IT careers.

Thinking about how university works and understanding its core goals and how they apply to ourselves is the first step in being prepared to leverage the university experience for optimum value.

Career, Education

Getting Started with IT Certifications

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This question surfaces very regularly: you are at the beginning of your IT career or maybe have not even gotten into your career yet, and are wondering where to get started with certifications. Maybe you are in high school, maybe you have finished college, perhaps you are six months into your first job and feel that having a certification will help to move you forward. There are a lot of options and a lot of information about IT industry certifications out there but pretty regularly the advice around getting started comes down to just a few basic opinions and I will share mine (having worked in the certification industry for many years and having spent time both as a hiring manager and as a corporate career counselor in IT.)

Certifications that often get mentioned for people “starting” in IT include the CompTIA A+, CompTIA Network+ (often called the Net+), Microsoft’s MTA certifications and Cisco’s CCNA.

When just getting started in IT, though, I recommend starting with a firm foundation. Some certs, like those from Microsoft and Cisco, might be great but begin to take you down very specific career paths which may or may not be the right ones for you. We should hold off on those kinds of certifications until we have a little of the basics firmly under our belts. They can be great as a next step, but we do not want to get ahead of ourselves.

It is also extremely important to note that the Microsoft MTA exams are “pre-professional” certs, not certs for IT Pros. They are not meant to demonstrate a level of skill for an existing IT Pro or even to show that someone is ready to work as an IT Pro but instead to show that someone is ready to intern in IT or to attend IT classes. The MTA is targeted at high school students to take after entry level high school classes and are too low level to be considered even at the college level, let alone at the working level. You should never include these on a resume, even if you have them, once you are working in the field. They are excellent for showing initiative for high school classes but should not be used as goals of their own.

CompTIA is a vendor neutral certification authority so tends to be a good starting spot in IT. CompTIA also focuses on more entry level and broad certifications than most other providers. This makes then exceptionally well suited to entry level folks looking to certify themselves before moving into more specific career paths. And because they tend to focus on foundational knowledge the effort spent certifying is rarely wasted at an educational level either.

CompTIA has two major certs that are generally considered here, the A+ and the Network+. The A+ is by far the more well known outside of IT circles, and this is actually because it is not an IT certification at all. The A+ was originally designed to certify that someone had the appropriate experience level of someone having worked on a helpdesk for six months. However the knowledge tested by the A+ generally covers archaic hardware and tasks that generally do not exist in IT at all but belong to another, related, field of “bench work.” No amount of IT experience, even decades of it, would prepare you for the exam. This makes the A+ specifically targeted at bench careers and has become the industry standard in that area – which includes local computer stores, Best Buy’s Geek Squad, Staples and other non-IT computer “fix it” shops. The skills tested by the A+ are too “low” to be useful for testing in IT and focus on aspects of computers that are rarely, if ever, of concern to IT.

The A+ tends to focus very heavily on hardware and physical repair of consumer equipment. It does not cover tasks common to any level or style of IT. While some entry level IT areas would consider the knowledge in it common, most IT disciplines would not see it as foundational or useful and even the most senior IT professionals would often find it obtuse at best.

CompTIA’s other general purpose certification is the Network+, originally designed to represent the level of knowledge expected after “two years” working in IT. Both of these assessments are very poor, the A+ represents general knowledge or low level archaic knowledge that you would hope the general public would have and the Network+ really represents the knowledge level that you would look for a new hire, first IT job person to have. The Network+ is not a differentiator, therefore, between candidates but more of a foundational level of knowledge and a standard requirement. But that does not make it bad to have, it makes it good. The Network+, unlike its counterpart, does indeed focus on common and very important IT knowledge that those seeking a career in the field should most certainly have or acquire if lacking.

The Network+ represents standard knowledge useful for effectively any IT position or career no matter what technology or area of focus one chooses to pursue. For someone looking to go after their very first job or for someone looking to establish that they are well qualified in their first position or even for someone just looking to prepare themselves for the world of certification testing, the Network+ is an ideal starting point.

It is very unlikely that a Network+ on its own is going to lead to a job or promotion, but it establishes a starting point for looking towards other things. It is, more or less, the final “standard” starting point for nearly everyone in the IT field today. Many will not take the Network+ and certainly there are many options to enter the field without it, but I personally recommend it to everyone in every focus of IT. The knowledge needed for it will be useful throughout a career. As a starting point for a certification portfolio it is unrivaled.

The Network+, as the name implies, focuses almost exclusively on networking knowledge. This does not mean that it is only suitable for those interested in networking related IT careers. Networking is a part of everything that we do in IT today and is even important knowledge for non-IT users who want to understand their computers and their networks better. Even very non-network jobs like database administration would benefit from a firm foundation in networking.

Moving forward from the Network+ the world of certifications opens up and this begins a much more complex discussion. CompTIA offers other, good, general purpose certifications, such as the Security+, but at this stage we should be prepared to begin a bit of soul searching to determine exactly what path we want our careers to take from here. There are so many aspects of the IT field there is no way to provide a solid, reliable next step without looking at both short term and long term career goals and interests.

Career, IT Hiring

Why We Avoid Contract to Hire

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Information Technology workers are bombarded with “Contract to Hire” positions, often daily.  There are reasons why this method of hiring and working is fundamentally wrong and while workers immediately identify these positions as bad choices to make, but few really take the time to move beyond emotional reaction to understand why these working method is so flawed and, more importantly, few companies take the time to explore why using tactics such as this undermine their staffing goals.

To begin we must understand that there are two basic types of technology workers: consultants (also called contractors) and permanent employees (commonly known as the FTEs.)  Nearly all IT workers fall into a desire to be one of these two categories. Neither is better or worse, they are simply two different approaches to employment engagements and represent differences in personality, career goals, life situations and so forth.  Workers do not always get to work they way that they desire, but basically all IT workers seek to be in either one camp or the other.

Understanding the desires and motivations of IT workers seeking to be full time employees is generally very easy to do.  Employees, in theory, have good salaries, stable work situations, comfort, continuity, benefits, vacations, protection and so forth.  At least this is how it seems, whether these aspects are real or just illusionary can be debated elsewhere.  What is important is that most people understand why people want to be employees, but the opposite is rarely true.  Many people lack the empathy for those seeking to not be employees.

Understanding professional or intentional consultants can be difficult.  Consultants live a less settled life but generally earn higher salaries and advance in their careers faster, see more diverse environments, get a better chance to learn and grow, are pushed harder and have more flexibility.  There are many factors which can make consulting or contracting intentionally a sensible decision.  Intentional contracting is very often favored by younger professionals looking to grow quickly and gain experience that they otherwise could not obtain.

What makes this matter more confusing is that the majority of workers in IT wish to work as full time employees but a great many end up settling for contract positions to hold them over until a desired full time position can be acquired.  The commonality of this situation has created a situation wherein a great many people both inside and outside of the industry and on both sides of the interview table may mistakenly believe that all cases are this way and that consulting is a lower form of employment.  This is completely wrong.  In many cases consulting is highly desired and contractors can benefit greatly for their choice of engagement methodology.  I, myself, spent most of my early career, around fifteen years, seeking only to work as a contractor and had little desire to land a permanent post.  I wanted rapid advancement, opportunities to learn, chances to travel and variety.

It is not uncommon at all for the desired mode of employment to change over time.  It is most common for contractors to seek to move to full employment at some point in their careers. Contracting is often exhausting and harder to sustain over a long career.  But certainly full time employees sometimes chose to move into a more mobile and adventurous contracting mode as well.  And many choose to only work one style or the other for the entirety of their careers.

Understanding these two models is key.  What does not fit into this model is the concept of a Contract to Hire.  This hiring methodology starts by hiring someone willing to work a contract position and then, sometimes after a set period of time and sometimes after an indefinite period of time, either promises to make a second determination to see if said team member should be “converted” into an employee, or let go.  This does not work well when we attempt to match it up against the two types of workers.  Neither type is a “want to start as one thing and then do another”.  Possibly somewhere there is an IT worker who would like to work as a contractor for four months and then become an employee, getting benefits but only after a four month delay, but I am not aware of such a person and it is reasonable to assume that if there is such a person he is unique and already has done this process and would not want to do it again.

This leaves us with two resulting models to match into this situation.  The first is the more common model of an IT worker seeking permanent employment and being offered a Contract to Hire position.  For this worker the situation is not ideal, the first four months represent a likely jarring and complex situation and a scary one that lacks the benefits and stability that is needed and the second decision point as to whether to offer the conversion is very scary.  The worker must behave and plan as if there was no conversion and must be actively seeking other opportunities during the contract period, opportunities that are pure employment from the beginning.  If there was any certainty of a position becoming a full employment one then there would be no contract period at all.  The risk is exceptionally high to the employee that no conversion will be offered.  In fact, it is almost unheard of in the industry for this to happen.

It must be noted that, for most IT professionals, the idea that a Contract to Hire will truly offer a conversion at the end of the contract duration is so unlikely that it is generally assumed that the enticement of the conversion process is purely a fake one and that there is no possibility of it happening at all.  And for reasons we will discover here it is obvious why companies would not honestly expect to attempt this process.  The term Contract to Hire spells almost certain unemployment for IT works going down that path.  The “to Hire” portion is almost universally nothing more than a marketing ploy and a very dishonest one.

The other model that we must consider is the model of the contract-desiring employee accepting a Contract to Hire position.  In this model we have the better outcome for both parties.  The worker is happy with the contract arrangement and the company is able to employ someone who is happy to be there and not seeking something that they likely will be unable to get.  In cases where the company was less than forthcoming about the fact that the “to Hire” conversion would never be considered this might actually even work out well, but is fall less likely to do so long term and in repeating engagements than if both parties were up front and honest about their intentions on a regular basis.  Even for professional contracts seeing the “to Hire” addendum is a red flag that something is amiss.

The results for a company, however, when obtaining an intentional contractor via a Contract to Hire posting is risky.  For one contractors are highly volatile and are skilled and trained at finding other positions.  They are generally well prepared to leave a position the moment that the original contract is done.

One reason that the term Contract to Hire is used is so that companies can easily “string along” someone desiring a conversion to a full time position by dangling the conversion like a carrot and prolonging contact situations indefinitely.  Intentional contractors will see no carrot in this situation and will be, normally, prepared to leave immediately upon completion of their contract time and can leave without any notice as they simply need not renew their contract leaving the company in a lurch of their own making.

Even in scenarios where an intentional contractor is offered a conversion at the end of a contract period there is the very real possibility that they will simply turn down the conversion.  Just as the company maintains the right to not offer the conversion, the IT worker maintains an equal right to not agree to offered terms.  The conversion process is completely optional by both parties.  This, too, can leave the company in a tight position if they were banking on the assumption that all IT workers were highly desirous of permanent employment positions.

This may be the better situation, however.  Potentially even worse is an intentional contractor accepting a permanent employment position when they were not actually desiring an arrangement of that type.  They are likely to find the position to be something that they do not enjoy, or else they would have been seeking such an arrangement already, and will be easily tempted to leave for greener pastures very soon defeating the purpose of having hiring an employee to the company again.

The idea behind the Contract to Hire movement is the mistaken belief by companies that companies hold all of the cards and that IT workers are all desperate for work and thankful to find any job that they can.  This, combined with the incorrect assumption that nearly all IT workers truly want stable, traditional employment as a full time employee combines to make a very bad hiring situation.

Based on this, a great many companies attempt to leverage the Contract to Hire term in order to lure more and better IT workers to apply based on false promises or poor matching of employment values.  It is seen as a means of lowering cost, testing out potential employees, hedge bets against future head count needs, etc.

In a market where there is a massive over supply of IT workers a tactic such as this may actually pay off.  In the real world, however, IT workers are in very short supply and everyone is aware of the game that companies play and what this term truly means.

It might be assumed that IT workers would still consider taking Contract to Hire because they are willing to take on some risk and hope to convince the employer that conversion, in their case, would be worth while.  And certainly some companies do this process and for some people it has worked out well.  However, it should be noted, that any contract position offers the potential of a conversion offer and in positions where the to “Contract to Hire” is not used, conversions are actually quite common, or at least offers for conversion.  It is specifically when a potential future conversion is offered like a carrot that the conversions become exceptionally rare.  There is no need for an honest company and a quality workplace to mention “to Hire” when bringing on contractors.

What happens, however, is more complex and requires study.  In general the best workers in any field are those that are already employed.  It goes without saying that the better you are, the more likely you are to be employed.  This doesn’t mean that great people never change jobs or find themselves unemployed but the better you are the more time you will average not seeking employment from a position of being unemployed and the worse you are the more likely you are to be unemployed non-voluntarily.  That may seem obvious, but when you combine that with other information that we have, something is amiss.  A Contract to Hire position can never, effectively, entice currently working people in any way.  A great offer of true, full time employment with better pay and benefits might entire someone to give up an existing position for a better one, that happens every day.  But good people generally have good jobs and are not going to give up the positions that they have, the safety and stability to join an unknown situation that only offers a short term contract with an almost certain no chance conversion carrot.  It just is not going to happen.

Likewise when good IT workers are unemployed they are not very likely to be in a position of desperation and even then are very unlikely to even talk to a position listing as Contract to Hire (or contract at all) as most people want full time employment and good IT people will generally be far too busy turning down offers to waste time looking at Contract to Hire positions.  Good IT workers are flooded with employment opportunities and being able to quickly filter out those that are not serious is a necessity.  The words “Contract to Hire” are one of the best low hanging fruits of this filtering process.  You don’t need to see what company it is, what region it is in, what the position is or what experience they expect.  The position is not what you are looking for, move along, nothing to see here.

The idea that employers seem to have is the belief that everyone, employed and unemployed IT workers alike, are desperate and thankful for any possibly job opening.  This is completely flawed.  Most of the industry is doing very well and there is no way to fill all of the existing job openings that we have today, IT workers are in demand.  Certainly there is always a certain segment of the IT worker population that is desperate for work for one reason or another – personal situations, geographic ties, over staffed technology specialization or, most commonly, not being very competitive.

What Contract to Hire positions do is filter out the best people.  They effectively filter out every currently employed IT worker completely.  In demand skills groups (like Linux, storage, cloud and virtualization) will be sorted out too, they are too able to find work anywhere to consider poor offerings.  Highly skilled individuals, even when out of work, will self filter as they are looking for something good, not looking for just anything that comes along.

At the end of the day, the only people in any number seriously considering Contract to Hire positions, often even to the point of being the only ones even willing to respond to postings, are the truly desperate.  Only the group that either has so little experience that they do not realize how foolish the concept is or, more commonly by far, those that are long out of work and have few prospects and feel that the incredible risks and low quality of work associated with Contract to Hire is acceptable.

This hiring problem begins a vicious loop of low quality, if one did not already exist. But most likely issues with quality already will exist before a company considers a Contract to Hire tactic.  Once good people begin to avoid a company, and this will happen even if only some positions are Contract to Hire, – because the quality of the hiring process is exposed, the quality of those able to be hired will begin to decline.  The worse it gets, the harder to turn the ship around.  Good people attract good people.  Good IT workers want to work with great IT workers to mentor them, to train them and to provide places where they can advance by doing a good job.  Good people do not seek to work in a shop staffed by the desperate.  Both because working only with desperate people is depressing and the quality of work is very poor, but also because once a shop gains a poor reputation it is very hard to shake and good people will be very wary of having their own reputation tarnished by having worked in such a place.

Contact to Hire tactics signal desperation and a willingness to admit defeat on the part of an employer.  Once a company sinks to this level with their hiring they are no longer focusing on building great teams, acquiring amazing talent or providing a wonderful work environment.  Contract to Hire is not always something that every IT professional can avoid all of the time.  All of us have times when we have to accept something less than ideal.  But it is important for all parties involved to understand their options and just what it means when a company moves into this mode.  Contract to Hire is not a tactic for vetting potential hires, it simply does not work that way.  Contract to Hire causes companies to be vetted and filter out of consideration by the bulk of potential candidates without those metrics every being made available to hiring firms.  Potential candidates simply ignore them and write them off, sometimes noting who is hiring this way and avoiding them even when other options come along in the future.

As a company, if you desire to have a great IT department and hire good people, do not allow Contract to Hire to ever be associated with your firm.  Hire full time employees and hire intentional contractors, but do not play games with dangling false carrots hoping that contractos will change their personalities or that full time employees will take huge personal risks for no reason, that is simply not how the real world works.