Technology Boom is Making Jobs

It seems that the technology s booming faster than the babies did once upon a time, and leaving some work places short enough on qualified technology experts that they are in some cases resorting to drastic measures to entice the right people in.

The snag in the system is that the lifespan of an employable technology worker is exceptionally short. The following excerpt is from an article in Business Week:

Companies tend to hire people with IT engineering degrees, use those skills for five years, and then they want a new crop, says Cappelli, who researches human resource practices and talent management.

There was once a time when a man working in the tech industry could make a good living and have a steady career - my father was working as a computer programmer in the 1970's and making $100 an hour at it. Today, however, the landscape is changing fast and those working in technology have to move faster to keep up with the pace it is setting.

To stay in the field a person needs to be working in their work time and studying the next big thing in tech programming in their free time. It makes it a job that requires as much dedication as any home based business, so I would think that it would be one that could be very well suited to looking toward as a home business base.

With the evolving technology and the revolving door on big business tech jobs, it would seem to me that the market is primed for those who have the skills to set up consulting businesses where they can work for however long the larger company needs their specialized skills, then move on to the next business in a freelancer style when their skills are no longer what the first company requires.

The freelancing IT marketplace can work to keep the person with the skills working and give the companies the workers they need, when they need them, without the need for hiring and firing regular employees - which can earn a big business a bad reputation.

If you are skilled in IT engineering, or looking for a new direction to go in your education, you might think of how your skills could work in this growing and ever evolving needs market segment.

Confidence - Starting a Small Business

Another question I asked regarding small business owners was "Are you confident in your abilities without being over confident? Do you know that you can tackle a specific task and quickly do a good job?"

I have seen people that say "I can do that!" and then fail miserably at the task. They find out that it is harder than it looks. I have also seen people that will quietly do a task to perfection with no boasting that they can. They knew they were able to do it, and were confident in their skills without exaggerating them.

I think that a important skill for anyone that runs a small or home based business is to be able to confidently do a task that they need to do, and to be self confident enough to know they can do it. If they can't, they need to be able to be honest with themselves - and the client. This does not mean they can not do the parts they know and hire someone else to tackle the parts they do not know, but it does mean that a small business owner should never promise a customer something that they know they can not deliver. Know your skills and have confidence in your capability to do the things you know how to do, but never exaggerate your skills.

Take charge - Starting a Small Business

In the Starting a Small Business posts earlier, I asked "Do you prefer to have someone else tell you what needs doing, or do you step forward and take charge when something needs to be done?"

Someone that runs a small business needs to be able to tell themselves what needs to be done. They can not sit around and wait for someone else to say "You need to do this" because there is no one else around that can tell them that. The owner of the small business or home based business needs to be able to tell themselves what needs to be done and to oversee themselves as they do it, and perhaps most important, they need to assure that they do their best work possible.

Repeat customers and referrals come from happy customers. So early on the small or home based business owner needs to develop the habit of stepping up and getting the work done to the best of their ability, and doing each job as good as or better than the last job.

Self Starters Wait for No One - Starting a Small Business

In my last post I asked if you were a "self starter and problem solver that can tackle a necessary task without being told what needs to be done?"

When it comes to being able to run a home based business, this quality is a biggie, but not necessarily the biggest.

It is essential to be a self starter, someone that can tell themselves to get up from the sofa, sit down at the computer, and work on a specific work related task.

If you can come up with a million and one reasons why the dishes need washed now, the floor needs vacuumed before you can work, the car has to be washed, groceries need bought now... if you can procrastinate with the best of them, then you really should reconsider if running your own business is the right thing for you.

And when I say sit at the computer and work - Farmville is not work. Not unless you work for Zynga and get paid for the game. Neither is Collapse, Tetris, Bejeweled, or solitaire. If your work computer has any games on it, you should consider removing them. If you have a computer that is dedicated to work, that one should never have any games on it. Leave the games on the family computer.

Self starters do not wait for someone else to say "stop playing the game and do that work" they see the work sitting there waiting and make sure that it is taken care of before they move on to something else.

That is part of what makes them a problem solver. I think any self starter is an innate problem solver as well (but not necessarily vise-versa - problem solvers are not necessarily self starters). A self starter can see a task and solve the problems associated with that task, or can find the right person for the task that can solve the problems.

This makes it essential that those who want to run a small business be good self starters that can make sure the necessary jobs get done, that they get done on time, and that they are handled to the best of their capability to handle them.

Starting a Small Business - What you need to know

Do you have what it takes to start up a small business?

There are certain qualities that people that run their own business generally have in common, and those qualities can be used as a basic starting point in determining if someone has hat it takes to start a small business.

Are you a self starter and problem solver that can tackle a necessary task without being told what needs to be done?

Do you prefer to have someone else tell you what needs doing, or do you step forward and take charge when something needs to be done?

Are you confident in your abilities without being over confident? Do you know that you can tackle a specific task and quickly do a good job?

Are you willing to work longer and harder than you would need to if you worked for someone else? (We're talking no weekends here people - I'm writing this post on a Saturday afternoon when the sun is shining and my ATV is begging me to get out and hit the trails for the first time this summer.)

Can you prioritize your spending and separate money that can be spent from money that can not be spent? This is a BIG one.

I'm going to look more closely at each of these, and more qualities of small business owners, in greater detail, but this gives you an idea what qualities go into a potential small business owner.