If there was ever a time to do an awareness check on your situation and make sure your career – and employment – is in the “safe and moving forward” zone, it is now. 

“In this economy” has become the preamble to all sorts of reminders of good advice on how to survive and thrive.  Let this be another one!  With that said, here’s four ways to keep your job and maybe even do a little advancing this year:

Dust off your communication skills.  It’s time to start speaking up in those horrifying status meetings.  A sure sign of being overlooked by management is to glaze over like a donut in the back of the room while they drone on about what features are being pushed to phase two.  Ask questions, make suggestions, and bring new ideas.  It matters less what you say and more that you try.  Trying gets noticed, and the noticed get remembered.

Improve your visibility.  Meet and converse regularly with the key decision makers in your department.  Ask your boss how else you can help.  Keep your ears out for opportunities to pitch in on other projects.  Keep the project manager updated on your status.  Be positive in all interactions while you’re at it.

Ask for feedback – and use it.  Ask your project manager and/or boss how you’re doing.  Ask what can be improved or what skill sets your department needs to sharpen or gain.  If you’re not sure how to obtain those skills, ask for training.  Even if you are sure, ask for training.  If you get feedback of a personal nature, do your best to make the changes suggested (or implied).  Overall, it is important to show that you are acting on feedback instead of just soliciting it.

Continually educate yourself.  Start by making sure you are staying current in you field.  It could be as simple as attending the right conference and taking a few online courses each year to stay up on trends and keep sharp on new industry developments.

Next, look to add to your skills.  A great way to add texture to your skill set is by obtaining project management skills.  The new protocol in IT as of 2011 is to diminish costs and increase efficiency, and producers who are trained in project management are sure bets on how to do that.  Why?  Because chances are high that a project could be taken on by as little as one to three people and there aren’t enough project managers to be had for such small teams.  If you’re a hardware or development geek who was just handed a two-week or two-month project to work on you need to be your own project manager – and you better know how to do it well.

GogoTraining can help with a catalog of over 140 outstanding IT training courses and a free library of podcasts regarding IT topics (with over 500 entries).  Some particularly hot areas include:

• Our brand-new Android Development Training Program.
• ITIL training courses.
• Project Management Professional (PMP) certification exam prep courses.
• Oracle training courses including Data Guard, Grid Control and Application Express.
• Our list of IT certification paths and included courses.

In recent years, Java was on the potential down slope as advancement on the language was lacking and developers started investigating languages that would run atop Java environments.  Despite the OpenJDK continuing to be attended to and Java tools continuing to grow, Java seemed to be shuffling about with uncertain direction.  Now, thanks to a new generation of big developments, the venerable language is proving its mettle as a backbone for innovation.

Take cloud computing for instance.  Amazon and others have launched major hiring sprees for 2011 to bring in software engineers in order to support development of their cloud computing services.  In particular, Amazon’s Elastic Complete Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3) and Web Services divisions are looking to swell by at least several hundred software engineers alone.  What skill is in demand? Java.

Next up: operating system development.  What platform has erupted as the next big deal for smartphones? Android, Google’s operating system that took top spot for smartphone market share in the fourth quarter of 2011 (with 32.9% of global market).  Android’s software stack is made up of Java apps running on a Java-based object-oriented application framework.

Being integral to next-generation operating systems easily demonstrates Java’s continued fitness as a powerful and reliable foundation.  On top of it, application development continues to benefit from Java with mobile app development for Android being done primarily in that language.

Devices like Amazon’s Kindle, Sony Ericsson’s line of web-enabled media phones, and the Blu-ray Disc format all benefit from Java.  Software such as Alice, Carnegie Mellon’s free programming environment to Google Maps (who hasn’t used that?) to Nuesoft, the leading web-based medical management software (and one of the pioneers in SaaS) all found their foundations in Java.

If considering a programming language that will sustain years of productivity and innovation and can demonstrate a history of doing the same, programming professionals should look to Java.

GogoTraining provides the following Java training courses taught by industry experts:

Java Programming
Introduction to Groovy
Introduction to Programming in Java 5 Part 1
Introduction to Programming in Java 5 Part 2
Programming in Java 6 with Swing and Servlets Part 1
Programming in Java 6 with Swing and Servlets Part 2

Java EE Training
Developing Java Server Pages (JSPs) using Eclipse and Tomcat
Developing Servlets Using Eclipse & Tomcat
 
Java Frameworks and Platforms Courses
Introduction to Hibernate
Introduction to Struts
Java Development with JBoss Application Server

The healthcare industry recently started clamoring to meet requirements for data handling to avoid financial penalties.  Those who aren’t EHR/EMR (Electronic Health/Medical Records) compliant by 2015 will still have to do it AND pay fines.

According to Dice.com, the recent expansion of specialized datacenters to facilitate a move away from low-density server and storage to Tier IV is expanding the job market.  IT staff including virtualization engineers, SANS experts and system architects are being sought after to fill out the expanding field.

Join the emerging Healthcare IT field with networking, programming and management training from GogoTraining.  Start today to take advantage of special offers.

According to Deloitte, more than 25% of all tablets sold in 2011 will be purchased by enterprises and that figure is expected to rise in the following several years.  Four factors are cited as being responsible for enterprise adoption.

1. Consumer cross-over: As consumers continue to purchase and use tablet devices they inevitably discover their usefulness in the context of work such as email, network access and so on.

2. Tablet-Friendly Industry Adoption: Industries that lend themselves to tablet use in the context of their day-to-day operations will mean a strong uptake of the device into their workforce.  This includes verticals such as retail, manufacturing and healthcare.

3. Ideal Form Welcome at C-Level: Where laptops and smartphones create an actual physical block between the user and someone else, tablets lie flat on a table and can be used without interfering in that critical personal space – something noticed by executives.

4. Enterprise Software Providers Already Responding: The big names in ECM, CRM, ERP and other enterprise applications are already addressing requests by Fortune 500 customers asking for software and interface upgrades that enable tablets in the workplace.

What does all of this (particularly number four) mean for mobile application development?  More jobs! With such a mass scale adoption already started, development of apps for tablets – including integration with existing enterprise applications – is set to see a strong growth curve through 2011 and 2012, and likely longer.

Interested in Android programming? Coming in February:

– Introduction to Android Programming

– Advanced Android Programming