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Biz - Careers
Hot Spots
The right niche skills (and the right location) can still get a
consultant top dollar, even as many companies are cutting down on contract
labor By Deborah Radcliffe
Deborah Radcliff
11/15/1999
ComputerWorld
78
(Copyright 1999 by Computerworld, Inc. All rights reserved.)
Becton, Dickinson and
Co., a $3.1 billion global health services and products company in Franklin
Lakes, N.J., is looking for a few good consultants to help with its SAP
rollout.
But human resources
director Nate Bellemay would rather hire permanent staff to do the job.
"Some of these consultants can cost up to half a million a year,"
Bellemay says. "Frankly, we can hire them for a lot less."
Bellemay's not alone.
According to a recent Computerworld hiring survey, hiring managers hope to rely
less on contractors and more on employees to fill their technology needs in the
coming year.
And there's bad news as
well for consultants. Some businesses are insisting that in-house staff, not
consultants, lead their information technology projects.
"We don't tend to
use consultants for overall project management. We like to keep a balance,
staffing steady-state work with in-house employees and using consultants for
peak activities or for very old technologies we don't want to continue our staff
on," explains John Bent, director of corporate information systems at
Amgen Inc., a $2.7 billion biotechnology company in Thousand Oaks, Calif.
Sound like gloomy
market forecasts? Not to worry. There's still plenty of work for consultants
who are mobile enough to follow the work and know how to position themselves in
the right niche, says Melinda Oliver, vice president of business development at
Glendale, Calif.-based IT staffing firm Software Management Consultants Inc.
(www.smci.com).
Hot growth areas such
as Southern California, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix and Atlanta are still rich
mining fields for technology consultants. But like Amgen, most employers are
looking for business and industry knowledge and for very specialized skills in
enterprise resource planning (ERP), back-office integration, databases and Web
development projects, say hiring managers and job placement professionals.
Southern California is
one area in which there's still strong demand for consultants. According to
Oliver, the entertainment and banking industries in and around Los Angeles are
expanding their e-commerce efforts. And as long as demand for Web developers
outstrips supply, consultants can bank on lucrative work in the area.
Specifically,
entertainment industries are looking for consultants to help build video- and
audio-capable Web applications. And financial companies are stampeding into
online banking and transactional business, while also integrating mostly
PeopleSoft Inc. ERP suites, according to Oliver.
"Consultants stay
consistently busy in our area. Entertainment companies are looking for Web,
Oracle, SQL and other database developers," Oliver says. "With all
the mergers in the financial services industry, Web, e-commerce, data
warehousing, data modelers and client/server application developers are also
still strong [positions] around here."
Oliver says she even
gets calls from as far north as Seattle for such experience. "Actually,
the entire West Coast is still in pretty strong need of C++ and Visual Basic
programming consultants -- the same thing companies are looking for down
here," she says.
In fact, businesses are
having trouble finding skilled consultants to fit the bill in both e-commerce
and ERP integration, Oliver says.
Jesse Cochran couldn't
agree more. As an IT project leader and owner of a consulting firm 10 miles
southeast of Oliver's Glendale office, Cochran says he and his team spend many
a day cleaning up the work of other consultants. The biggest problems he runs
into are that consultants who have gone before him don't plan their
applications for the future and neglect to update and integrate back-office
operations to facilitate Web-based transactions.
So Cochran capitalized
on those problems and built a niche for himself. His company, FutureWare Software
Consulting Group, specializes in Web-to-back-office development and
integration. That, he says, calls for a combination of highly specialized
skills in database implementation, Visual Basic Script, the Internet
programming language HTML, Common Gateway Interface and "a little bit of
Java."
Cochran has also found
a niche for his 10-person consulting firm in a relatively untouched vertical
market: mom-and-pop retail shops such as scuba stores and art galleries.
"My clients are
starving for e-commerce. Everyone wants to sell on the Web and take orders and
payment over the Web," Cochran says. "Once you have the Web-based
product, you've got to have the back office to support the clientele. But one
of the issues we're finding with a lot of our newer clients is they have older
back-office systems."
Way Down South
Because of its high
concentration of telecommunications companies, Atlanta is also a mecca for
technology consultants, according to Ed Grasing, manager of technical
recruiting at New York-based job placement firm Pencom Systems Inc.
(www.pencom.com).
"Just about every
player in telecommunications, whether wireless or hard-line, is down
here," Grasing says. "You also have a lot of interesting start-ups
down this way like MindSpring Communications Inc. and [Internet Security
Systems Group Inc.]."
But when compared with
more senior techie areas such as New York, Boston and Silicon Valley, Atlanta's
corporate base is about a year behind in terms of e-commerce efforts, he says.
That also spells jobs for skilled Java engineering consultants (the types that
earn $75 to $100 per hour).
"There are a lot
of Java jobs here, but not a lot of talent. Employers are seeking senior-level
talent with five to seven years of object-oriented background and at least one
year of Java," explains Grasing, who in the past 18 months has placed 50
to 60 such specialists in the Atlanta area.
Grasing acknowledges
that IT consultants working in Atlanta don't pull in as much money as their
tech-city counterparts, but he says it balances out because the cost of living
is so low in Georgia. He warns, though, that transplants to outlying suburbs
and townships around Atlanta will face locals who are "very cautious
around newcomers."
Windy City
According to Grasing,
Chicago is undergoing a similar drive to get up to speed technologically.
Ari Kaplan, an independent
Oracle consultant, moved to Chicago in 1995 and has been busy ever since. In
many ways, he says, Chicago is on the leading edge of technology work.
Companies such as Motorola Inc., Andersen Consulting and Jellyvision Software
have a strong presence there.
Kaplan also says large
companies such as McDonald's Corp., petrochemical giant BP Amoco Inc. and
Sears, Roebuck and Co. are in the midst of large-scale e-commerce and data
warehousing projects, all of which call for a quick skill base in those areas.
"I have Chicago's
Silicon Prairie magazine in front of me," Kaplan says. "I would say
that much of the opportunities are for Oracle [database administration] and
development, Unix administration and Web design."
Kaplan has also made a
consulting niche for himself. And it doesn't have so much to do with geography
as it does with business topography. That is, he strikes out for industries
that aren't traditionally technical. As such, he's developed databases and
decision-support systems for just about every Major League Baseball team in the
country.
Until Kaplan got into
the act, talent scouts tracked players on written notes that they later stuffed
into file drawers.
"If a team wanted
to trade a player or recruit a new one, it would take weeks, maybe months, to
get this information up to the team president," Kaplan says.
Kaplan has put some
polish on his niche by making user-friendly interfaces that look like the forms
scouts already use and then training those scouts to use the new system. Some,
he says, are so technophobic that they arrive for their computer training with
chewing tobacco (and buckets) to calm their nerves.
Now Kaplan's setting up
similar databases for dance, theater and ticketing agencies. "So many
organizations are behind the curve electronically," he says. "They
need database decision-support for everything from ticket forecasting to
booking their performances."
Hot Skills
Cities such as Houston
and Phoenix offer great opportunities for consultants because these places are
experiencing an influx in telecommunications, financial and technology
companies, according to Margi Fatcheric, founding president of Relational
Options Inc., a Florin, N.J., job placement firm.
In addition,
traditional high-tech meccas such as Silicon Valley and the Boston area are
still high-volume locations for consultants with cutting-edge skills,
especially in the areas of Internet and e-commerce development and SAP.
Universally, Fatcheric says, "the Internet is a sweet spot right now and
probably will be over the next five-plus years. That requires talent in the
areas of Java, C++, object-oriented tools, Windows and Unix."
Also, SAP skills are
hot everywhere, she adds, and they require more than technical skills; they
require "functional talent" -- experts in manufacturing, human
resources, accounting and so on.
In addition to the
telecommunications, entertainment and financial industries, big accounting
firms and pharmaceutical companies throughout the country are looking for
people with those skills, Fatcheric says.
In fact, the entire
medical and biotechnology industry is under the gun to conform to a Food and
Drug Administration order to establish secure electronic documentation and
auditing, Bent says. The order will increase the need for information security
skills, which Fatcheric predicts will soon catch up with the demand for
Web-development skills.
Because of that, Bent
says he will be looking for consultants with specific skill sets in system
auditing, documentation, security advice and security-system implementation.
He's just waiting for year 2000 work to die down first.
But Bent is quick to
point out that he's looking for skills to do only the coding and integration
work, not project management, which he plans to leave to in-house employees.
Thus, staying on top of
this changing marketplace requires insight and tenacity. Professionals and
hiring managers offer this last bit of advice to those who want to stay ahead
in this declining market: keep your skills sharp, follow the work and build a
portfolio of references. And the best way to gain strong references, Cochran
says, is to "design projects for next year instead of tomorrow." w
Radcliff is a freelance
writer in Santa Rosa, Calif.
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