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Make Yourself Indespensible

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Indispensable Does Not Mean Always Employed

With the advent of outsourcing, increased competition, and a tighter job market, the technology professional struggles to ensure that he remains gainfully employed. Using the techniques and ideas in The IT Career Builder’s Toolkit can go a long way toward ensuring your ongoing profitability and growth in the field. This chapter discusses key ideas to increase and ensure your value within the organizations you serve, the goal of which is to make you indispensable.

Related Book

IT Career Builder's Toolkit, The

I would love to tell you that the information in this chapter will ensure that you are never out of work. I cannot make that claim. Too many intangible factors make such guarantees impossible.

However, the ideas that I share in this chapter go a long way toward ensuring your ongoing marketability to a broad range of organizations. Together with strong professional networking, the job/project search techniques covered previously in the toolkit, your ambition, and a strong commitment to excellence, these ideas provide greater overall career stability and growth.

Many of these ideas involve some level of professional risk. However, failure to enact these strategies is equally risky. If you are to build a career that places you at the top of your profession and positions you as a problem solver who has organizational value, you necessarily must incur some risk.

Not doing so means that you are not at the top of your profession and are not perceived as a problem solver who has organizational value. Making one of the following two choices seems relatively easy on the surface:

• Incurring calculated risks to achieve dynamic career growth
• Assuming the default risks that are associated with more passive career activity

However, you will need to assess this important decision for yourself.

A Word About Value

The idea of value is one that I have attempted to infuse throughout this book. Your value is a central theme in the toolkit approach to career development. Understanding your value to an organization and how to increase that value is critical.

This understanding can help you model your career, actions, and focus. It can ensure that the work you do brings value to the organization that you serve. This understanding also helps you find the right type of employer. Your understanding of where an organization places value can help you determine if you and the company are a good fit—if those items, tasks, and projects that the company values match your desired career path.

This understanding of your value can also help alleviate the frustration I hear many technology professionals express in regards to compensation. I’ve counseled many technology professionals who complain about their low compensation. However, in speaking to them, these professionals indicate that their organization does not pay well in general.

Although salary surveys abound, they do little to help you in your current situation. You will receive the best compensation by finding an organization whose idea of what is valuable matches yours. You might be excellent at user-level automation, and you might be building great solutions for your employer; however, if their perception of the value of such solutions is low, you will remain undercompensated.

I often state that if I take the skills I’ve learned as an IT professional and go to work for a one-person automotive shop, I can still put many of my skills to work, but I cannot expect to be compensated in the manner I desire. Such an organization will not and cannot place a high value on what I provide.

You need to match your skills and desires with an organization that both needs and values those skills.

If you are persuasive, you might be able to help build a case for the value that you and your solutions provide. This is an excellent way to build your career within an organization, but it requires the ability both to quantify the results and tie them to the business case for the organization.

As you read through the ideas in the sections that follow, keep in mind your own career, and evaluate steps you can take to improve your value in your organization.

© 2008, InformIT