The ACM Career Resource Centre

The CRC will help members and non-members assess and refine their career values. The CRC will also help employers — many of whom are ACM corporate members — find employees. The CRC provides career resources, career questions and answers, insights, recommendations, computing and IT trends, live interactive events, profiles of successful computing and IT professionals, a job database, and many other features. (For more details, see the accompanying text box entitled "ACM CRC Content and Features.")

The long-term goal for the CRC is to ultimately become the premier career web site for ACM members, to attract new computing and IT professionals and students, and to successfully retain its current members. To accomplish this goal, the CRC must be considered a work-in-progress consisting of many phases. Most importantly, we expect many user-driven changes.

The CRC complements ACM's traditional career services, which include job advertisements in Communications of the ACM and on the Web. For student members, ACM has offered a career e-mail helpdesk called "CareerLine," serviced by Jack Wilson, a professional career counselor with a technical background. ACM's student web pages link to helpful career sites such as: "What Color is Your Parachute?," the University of California at Berkeley career resource site (which has some excellent career tidbits), and Margaret Riley Dikel's Career Guide. Jack Wilson also created the "Ask Jack" column that currently appears in Crossroads, ACM's student magazine.

Why create a Career Resource Centre for our members when they can easily find work on their own and are, in fact, often highly sought-after candidates? Our motivation can be traced to responses we received from recent student member satisfaction surveys; students indicated they wanted reliable resources and tools for managing their careers. Both student and professional members look to ACM for objective information so they can understand the overwhelming number of choices that are available to them.

But times are changing and the world of work is changing.

With computing and IT becoming pervasive throughout the world, the possibilities open to students and professionals have become overwhelming. It might be said that our members were experiencing "job overload," and it appeared that students were concerned about what career direction to take based on their objectives. Added to this situation is the speed at which the world of work is changing. And in this technology-driven marketplace, the one- or two-career lifetime will soon be replaced with terms like "careering" or "recareering." It might not be unusual for many members to experience an average of seven careers during their lifetime.

What does this mean for IT folks in terms of career management? According to Mike Stromes of Strategic Insights, a career and organizational development consultant with degrees in mathematics/computer science and organizational psychology, IT folks will need to become, as was coined in a classic Harvard Business Review article, "career resilient" — that is, develop the careering skills to be continuously marketable in the ever-changing world of IT. To do this, IT folks will need to be able to continually make informed career decisions by clarifying and reclarifying their career needs (career values, interests, work-style preferences, and the like). Moreover, they need to be able to continuously develop new skills (both technical and interpersonal) that will enable them to seize the exciting IT opportunities that the 21st century will provide.

Paul Babiak, an industrial-organizational psychologist who also has a background in engineering and physics, says that money alone is rarely the cause for leaving a job. People leave, he says, because of dissatisfaction with an organization's culture or policies, or the relationship with one's supervisor. Seeking and finding the best "person-organization" fit in a new position helps to ensure long lasting personal satisfaction and success.

For the CRC to be unique and successful, ACM will be placing a good deal of attention on developing CRC-exclusive and IT-specific assessment tools that members can use to determine their true career values, interests, and motives. And to meet the challenges that "careering" poses, ACM feels that its reputation as an objective and technically excellent resource will help reinforce the CRC's reputation as a credible and safe career community and holistic career enhancer. Here, members can explore and assess their career needs and possibilities. By creating the CRC, ACM is interested in sharing its greatest assets with its members — its members' collective career experiences, recommendations, and insights.

Organizing Principle of the CRC

The CRC will ultimately become organized around "The CRC Career Development Model" developed for ACM by Strategic Insights. This model consists of three vital questions:

1. Do I know myself?

2. Do I know my direction?

3. Do I have a plan?

The CRC's content and features provide ways for members to answer these career questions. In Phase I of the CRC, members are asked to complete a comprehensive profile to help answer Number 1. For Number 2, the CRC will provide a section on the "Latest Trends in IT" based on member feedback and ACM member recommendations for best web sites/books/courses/tutorials/lists, and so on. Number 3 will be addressed through message boards, special columns, and "Leadership Chats."

Conceived by ACM's Membership Activities Board, the Career Resource Centre will develop into a career community or communities that would provide exclusive IT-oriented career planning services, unique assessment tools, credible advice and recommendations from members, and a job database that would include internship/co-op/summer job opportunities.

The Future of CRC

To maintain the uniqueness of the CRC features, ACM is considering the following:

• Development of a suite of IT-specific assessment tools that will be designed to enable its members to develop and maintain their career resilience. Psychologists and career counselors who have worked with IT professionals will develop these tools. Initially, an IT-specific Career Fitness Questionnaire (CFQ) will be developed; this CFQ will provide members with a personal benchmark on their career fitness. Most importantly, however, as a result of taking the CFQ, members will be able to map out the practical steps they can take, using a web-based career development process, to achieve a more satisfying and successful career.
• Introduction of a Career News Service that would capture information from key computing and IT magazines and journals, business publications, special research reports, and key news and IT-oriented web sites that would provide information via an e-mail Early Alert System on the following kinds of topics: IT workforce trends, great places to work, work styles, hot venture capitalists — what's getting funded and why, mergers, layoffs, IT-related surveys (salary and compensation surveys, for instance), IPOs, new start-ups, dot.com trends, interviews with interesting IT individuals, interviewing techniques, negotiating offers, team building techniques, business insights for IT people, consulting versus full-time, getting an IT job via the Internet, profiles of "people doing the work."

• Formation of a CRC Advisory Panel, consisting of several IT and computing folks as well as career counselors representing the various aspects of career development that would provide members with customized answers to their career questions.

Acknowledgments

As of the writing of this article, ACM has already begun preparation on Phase II of the CRC, specifically on the aforementioned suite of IT-specific Assessment Tools. ACM is proud to announce that Microsoft has graciously indicated its desire to sponsor these valuable "to-be-developed" tools that will help members determine their career values and thus become more career resilient.

DDJ