How many people do you know who have gotten a job by sitting around and doing nothing?

None, right?

Getting a new job is all about action. As in taking action. To help you energize your job search, take a look at the five tips below:

1) Take a meeting with yourself and clarify what skills you bring, what kind of work makes you happy and what it is you want to accomplish in your next job and/or career? This will help you focus your job hunt activities and it will help make it easier for you to a) find a job more quickly and b) be the candidate chosen for the job you want.

2) Reach out to others. Get the names and contact information of the people who can hire you in the companies in which you’d like to work. For example, if you’re looking to move into IT management, find out the name of the IT director at your target companies. You’ll also want to get names of the movers and shakers in  your industry in your region and see if you can meet with them for an informational meeting. These meetings can help you stay up-to-date regarding hiring trends and potential job openings.

3) Organize your search. You’ll want to have all your job search materials such as the aforementioned potential employers, contacts, etc., as well as copies of your résumé, cover letters and so on in one place. Get one or more binders and folders to organize your paperwork. Use one of the binders to keep track of your progress.

4) See if you can find yourself a mentor, someone you trust who can help you with your job search. This person should have more experience in your field than you do and should successful in his or her career. Your mentor should provide you honest feedback about your skills and your career goals, as well as offer you tips for you job search. If you can’t find a mentor, consider partnering with a friend who also is looking for work. You can become accountability partners with each other, reporting once a week on your progress from the week before and coming up with the future action steps.

5) Contact The Wellspring Group. If you’re looking for employment as an IT professionals, we want to hear from you! Contact us today.

What is it that enables people to have a long lasting impact in their work, an impact that lasts for many years?  Some business researchers looked at these qualities.

To begin with,  those who found long-term career success looked for a job that was important to them, one that really mattered.  And then this pushed their thoughts to find ways to produce results, and then they acted on those thoughts.

Researchers stressed that finding what really mattered to people, finding real meaning in their work, was an essential first step to create and enduring impact.  Without the meaning, people might experience success for a while, but not for the long term.  It is the passion people have for their work, the importance or meaning they find in it, that sustains them when the going gets rough, when they encounter obstacles.

What the researchers learned is that no matter who you are, you are not going to experience lasting success if you are not doing what you really love.  If you don’t love what you do, you soon will be surpassed by those who do.  People who really care about what they do will outrun those whose heart really isn’t in the work.  To be competitive, you need to love what you do.

If you develop your knowledge and skills and love what you do, you are better prepared to take advantage of unexpected opportunities when they come along.  Moreover, having the passion for your job or career helps you overcome adversity.

When people love what they do, they don’t really think about success. When these people begin their jobs, what they focus on is being good at what is important to them.  When the right timing and situation develops, they get success.  But for these people, success does not mean what we usually define it as – power or wealth – but it means having an impact, an impact that will last. They define success as a commitment to something that matters.  And they don’t blame circumstances or anything else for failures they may encounter. They never see themselves as victims.

If you love working in the information technology sector, we want to hear from you! The Wellness Group can help you take your sought-after IT skills to some of the best companies in the country. Contact us today!

Luck. It is something we all would like to have. Most of us look at luck as something like chance, with the attitude that there’s really little we can do about it.

But two business authors have looked at luck, and have determined that there are certain qualities that help people make their own luck. They talked to people who considered themselves fortunate in life and tried to find qualities they had in common. They looked at people who were not only financially and socially well off, but also at people who had made significant contributions to society, people whose lives were characterized by creativity and self-fulfillment.

What they found is something that many already claim to know – we make our own luck.

There were five major qualities that these “lucky” people had in common.

The first was responsibility. Those who seem to have good luck are those who also accept responsibility for their actions. They understand that their actions have consequences and, if something goes wrong, they look at what they themselves have done that might have contributed to the problem, rather than casting about for someone else to blame.

If they have difficulties, they look at what actions they have taken that might have caused the difficulties, and what they can do to overcome them.

The second quality shared by so-called lucky people is a willingness to learn from their mistakes. They see their errors not as failures, but as an opportunities to learn.

Another shared quality of the lucky is perseverance. But it’s a perseverance coupled with an action-oriented mindset. These people get things done.. They don’t put things on a to-do list. They tackle a problem right away. They either solve a problem, delegate it — or forget about it.

Another important quality of people who make their own luck is confidence. They not only have confidence in themselves, but confidence in other people as well. It’s this confidence that helps them to persevere when things get tough. And it’s confidence that helps them to really picture their goals, to visualize their realization.

Finally, another quality of the lucky is the ability to cooperate. They are able to put their trust in others and to form a network of colleagues they can rely on.

Being lucky is a matter of attitude, the researchers said.  It is having an attitude that we create the conditions of our success.

Add The Wellspring Group to your “network of colleagues” on which you may rely. We can help IT professionals and companies needing top-notch IT talent connect with each other. Contact us today!

Businesses in America are great at handling discrimination problems within the workplace, but lag behind companies in other countries when it comes to helping their workers have a balanced work and home life.

A recent study researched the policies of companies in 173 countries regarding their employees with families, using information from a variety of sources, such as academic, private and government.

When it comes to right-to-work policies and programs that help reduce poverty in  the elderly, U.S. firms came out ahead. But when compared to how well U.S. firms aid their workers in their life away from the office or plant, America’s companies lagged.

The study found that most of the countries offer paid leave to women on maternity leave. As for the U.S.? We’re one of only five that don’t offer paid leave (the others are Sawziland, Liberia, Lesotho, and Papua New Guinea). In addition, 65 countries provide fathers with paid paternity leave. The U.S.? No.

Out of the countries surveyed, one-quarter have regulations allowing employees to take leave for marriage or funerals. In addition, 145 countries have laws on the books that allow workers to take paid sick leave, with about 80 countries offering paid sick l eave benefits for up to 26 weeks. In the U.S.? The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) does give unpaid leave for workers dealing with severe illness, yet FMLA doesn’t apply to all employees.

Study results are important, said the researchers, because of these programs’ — or  lack of the programs — effect on children. Giving workers paid leave to have a child or raise their family improves the health of children because parents are available to care for and bond with them. Paid leave also helps a family keep its finances healthy.

Employers also benefit, researchers said, because paid leave and other family-friendly benefits result in high employee morale, lower turnover and higher productivity.

Contact us at The Wellspring Group to learn more about management best practices, such as helping your employees better balance their work and home lives. We look forward to hearing from you.

Information technology companies need to be aware of the tremendous diversity of motives and attitudes of female workers when dealing with these employees, according to researchers, who based their conclusions on interviews with women from three countries.

The way women approach their careers, home life and motherhood (if applicable) can vary tremendously, according to researchers who looked at this issue. It would be a mistake to assume that in general all women look at work and home life the same way.  The career paths women take are influenced by a wide variety of factors, including gender stereotypes, other messages that society sends and family relationships.

Researchers at Penn State University’s School of Information Technology interviewed almost 200 women in the United States, Australia and New Zealand. The woman came from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds.

Researchers said company managers should not simply assume a young woman will, as a matter of course marry, have children and drop out of the workforce. Human resource policies based on these assumptions may not apply to many women, who are motivated by different factors, such as salary, job security and work environment.

The researchers said women in the IT industry have developed many ways to handle their work and home life duties. Some rely more on work-oriented programs, such as flexible schedules, while others rely more on home-based support, such as spouses or parents. Because each woman may use different support systems and approach her responsibilities in a different way, it would be a mistake for companies to develop a one-size-fits all kind of program.

The researchers gave several examples of how different cultural influences could affect women in information technology. For example, in China, calling a woman a “geek” is seen as a compliment. In Ireland, people characterize information technology careers as “clean” work. And in India, exam scores determine whether a woman will be able to work in information technology or not. The researchers said cultural stereotypes may be part of the reason why there is a relative paucity of women in information technology in the United States.

When you’re looking for exceptional IT professionals, contact The Wellspring Group. We can source, vet and place skilled and reliable workers for your short-term, long-term and direct-hire assignments. We look forward to hearing from you.

If you’re looking for work, it’s critical that you stay optimistic.

Of course, we know how difficult that is, especially if you’ve been looking for weeks or months. But experts report that keeping an optimistic mindset is vital as you continue searching.

By optimistic we don’t mean constantly sunny and Pollyanna-ish. Rather, job search experts recommend an “intelligent” optimism, one that acknowledges the reality of your situation but which refuses to just give up and find life meaningless. This type of optimism — finding meaning and purpose in a world that seems to be working overtime against you — can be learned.

Here are some tips on how to do so:

1) Concentrate on the things you can control. Disregard those you cannot. For example, quit worrying about the unrest in Egypt, Wall Street corruption or the terrible weather in many parts of the country this winter. You have no control over these things. But you can write a letter to the editor of the New York Times regarding Egypt, you can remember that spring officially is less than seven weeks away and you can go out and do what you need to get a new job (network more, learn new skills, contact The Wellspring Group, for example).

2) Refuse to see yourself as a victim. Don’t start making your life a catastrophe (“No one has given me a job today or last week or last month so I’ll never work again!”). Focus instead on the things that are going right (“I talked with five people last week about my search”) and on what you can do (“I’ll speak with 10 new people this week!”).

3) Don’t whine. Just don’t. Stop if you do. You harm no one but yourself and it doesn’t help your situation one iota. In fact, it makes your situation worse, helping you go down that rabbit hole of negativity ever more quickly. Instead, focus on what you do have. Practice gratitude. Be thankful for whatever is going right with your life. You have a loving spouse, you have great kids and great friends, you’re in good health, a new episode of NCIS is on tonight. Take five minutes once a day and write down a few things for which your grateful, no matter how minor they may be. It’s a known fact that thinking of things for which you’re grateful keeps your mood up.

If you’re looking for a new position, send your résumé to The Wellspring Group. We have many IT positions (some of which aren’t even on our website yet) available with some of this country’s best firms. We look forward to hearing from you.

If a new survey is correct, about 84 percent of workers are planning to look for a new position in 2011.

If this is so (and, frankly, 84 percent sounds like a staggeringly unrealistic number to us), companies around the country are at big risk of losing their top employees.

Research on employee motivation has found that a worker’s earnings and the benefits provided by an employer don’t have as much impact on a worker’s satisfaction and engagement as job quality and workplace support.

With that in mind, we offer some ideas below that can help you engage, motivate and keep your top talent.

• Offer meaningful work. Let your employees do what they do best by engaging their top skills and affinities. This is a key to retention and engagement.
• Ask for ideas. Allowing workers to have input into decisions gives them a big sense of control and being a part of something “bigger than themselves.” Soliciting employee input also shows them that their opinion matters to you. It also helps employees accept the resulting decision once it’s been made because they had some say in it.
• Tell people where they stand. Let your employees know how things really are within your company. Ask them to set tough but realistic goals; this actually helps motivate workers, especially when things are tough.
• Keep true to your word and consistent in your actions. When leaders are reliable and accessible, trust builds in the workplace.
• Help employees create personal goals that reflect your company’s goals. This helps ensure that everyone is working toward the same outcome. It also helps employees see how their efforts really affect a company’s success.
• Provide room to grow. How effective are you when it comes to promoting from within? Really take a good look at how often employees have a chance to move up within your organization. Top employees especially want to know they will be challenged and have an opportunity to let their skills shine. Are you truly hiring from within, or are your managers, supervisors and even executives coming from the outside?

Are you prepared for a possible talent exodus from your firm? A call to The Wellspring Group may be in order. After all, if IT employees from your competitors are looking to leave, you’ll want to be ready to entice them join you.  Contact us today.

If you’ve just landed a new IT job and if the position isn’t what you hoped it would be (or even if it is), you’re likely looking to get a promotion and raise as quickly as possible.

Here are some tips to help you.

The more you can show your value to your employer, the easier it will be to get a promotion. Obviously this means you’ll have to work for it. Not only should you do your job, you’ll want to do more.

Sit with your boss and ask him or her about goals for the coming year. What does your boss want and/or need to accomplish? Ask your supervisor how you can help or, better yet, suggest ideas as to how you can help your manager be more successful. If you help your boss be more successful, you will be more successful.

Document. Document. And document some more. That is, write down all of your accomplishments, no matter how small. You could keep these to yourself and then present them to your boss at your annual review, but since you want a promotion/raise quickly, you’ll need to do…more: send a “projects completed” or “tasks update” to your manager each week. Don’t be shy about pointing out when projects are completed ahead of schedule, under budget or otherwise were finished in a manner better than normal.

After you’ve had at least three major successes under your belt (see above) and you’ve been at your position for at least three to six months (three if your accomplishments truly were major, six if they were just better than average), then ask your supervisor for a meeting.

If you haven’t been sending weekly missives to your manager about your accomplishments, be sure to do have them handy for this meeting. Even if you have, bring a listing of your best accomplishments (and have a copy for your manager).

Then, you’ll need to point out all the things you’ve done that have gone beyond your job description and say something along the lines of “Boss, I’ve been performing at the level of assistant IT director consistently for X months. In that time, I’ve [list three big accomplishments] while also [mention three of your major day-to-day responsibilities]. Since I’ve been doing the job of an assistant IT director, I’m here today to discuss with you about my being promoted to the position.”

And then be quiet. Say nothing. Let your boss speak first. Chances are, you’ll see something positive come from this meeting. If not an immediate promotion, at the very least you’ll more than likely come to an agreement to discuss the issue again soon.

You’ve nothing to lose and quite a bit to gain by being assertive and asking for a promotion so long as you’ve shown you deserve it. And by showing we mean, doing the work as well as documenting it.

Good luck!

If you’re looking for a terrific new IT position in 2011, contact The Wellspring Group. We have forged strong connections with firms across the country needing top-notch IT workers. Contact us today!