How to Get a Derailed Executive Career Back on Track

- Colleen Aylward president of recruiting firm Devon James and author of Bedlam to Boardroom: How To Get a Derailed Executive Career Back on Track (www.devonjames.com).

Executive recruiter Colleen Aylward wanted to figure out how many executives had been displaced by the poor economy over the last few years, but before she got her numbers, she discovered something else even more troubling.

“No one actually keeps track of those stats,” says Aylward. “When I tried to look it up with the Bureau of Labor Statistics and even talk to some of the bureau’s staff, I couldn’t get a straight answer.”

Instead, Aylward took the bureau’s 2010 figures for layoffs in all categories and cherry-picked the job categories that she knew, as a recruiter, to fit the executive profile. Her top line figure – 2.5 million executives out of work – is both troubling and telling of the depth of the current economic crisis.

“Many of these are not the high-priced CEOs that are being criticized for taking too much money in salary and bonuses,” she adds. “These are the managers in the trenches, who spent decades in the corporate world making the trains run on time, and have since been displaced by younger, cheaper executives who lack the experience and institutional memory of those they replaced.”

Aylward’s specialty as a recruiter is to help those displaced executives find work and she has figured out a few key tips to help those who were insiders for so long, but now find themselves on the outside looking in. Those ideas include:

Be a Specialist – For many years, an executive’s resume was an exercise in being all things to all people, but that’s not what corporations want these days. They don’t want a general manager of all things executive, but rather, specialists who have niche expertise that can be applied immediately. It’s a culture shift for many executives, so it may seem difficult at first. However, everyone has at least one, maybe even two areas in which they could lay claim to being a specialist. Highlight those areas in your resume and you’ll find a lot more opportunities open to you.

Be Creative – Hiring an executive is a big commitment for many companies, as well as an expensive one. Don’t be afraid of creating a situation that puts you back in the saddle while at the same time mitigating a company’s risk. If a company is on the bubble about bringing you on full-time, offer to take on a specific project as an outside contractor and then tie your compensation to the completion of the project. If you screw it up, that’s on you. If you succeed and deliver, not only will you get paid, but you might also win a full-time gig.

Get Out and Network – The days of working for one company forever until you retire have been over for a while. Executives have to view even their full-time jobs as freelance gigs with a limited shelf life. In that respect, displaced executives should look toward more project work instead of just waiting around for that dream job to drop in their laps. They need to get out, network and use their days not to root out jobs, but rather to talk to individuals in companies that might have a problem your expertise could solve. More often than not, one well-executed project will turn into more.

“The old ways don’t work, anymore,” Aylward adds. “In fact, they haven’t worked in a while, but the executives who have been laid off over the last few years never had to read that particular news update. They are still vital and have plenty to offer, but they need to find new ways to show it. The dream job doesn’t look at all the way it used to look and executives need to change their perspective if they are going to have a shot in the corporate world of today.”

Tips for Aligning Data Center, IT and Organizational Goals

- Andy Woyzbun, Lead Analyst, InfoTech Research Group (www.infotech.com), says:

Ensure that you have some real measures of current capacity and performance, not just impressions. IT must make infrastructure changes to address anticipated increases in capacity and performance. To identify infrastructure gaps, IT must quantify capacity and performance requirements and measure their current capability. It’s hard to align expectations and performance with prudent expenditures if IT is flying blind. Changes should be implemented before poor performance creates user complaints. And IT should avoid overbuilding infrastructure to address non-quantified risks; it wastes money that you (or the organization) could use somewhere else.

Look for cheaper, less functional solutions to get approval. Getting a yes for an imperfect solution is better than getting turned down on a perfect solution.
Technical staff often recommend the best technical solution (greatest functionality and lowest risk) when faced with the need for infrastructure change. They should be expected to identify and examine options that address fundamental needs for no cost or low cost. In some cases, these options will be enough. In others, the analysis will confirm the need for a more comprehensive solution. Improve the credibility of proposals for large scale changes by evaluating lesser options.

Tips: IT and Business Alignment

- Vikas Aggarwal, CEO of Zyrion (www.zyrion.com), says:

1. Get management involved and engaged by focusing on business-level monitoring.

It’s best to illustrate the effectiveness of this philosophy by way of example. A US-based managed services provider has implemented a holistic monitoring solution that enables senior management to have simplified business service views (and dashboards) that span multiple departments, whereas the technical staff members have detailed views of the specific devices for which they are responsible. Most outage notifications in the fault-tolerant configurations that have localized alarms are forwarded directly to front-line technical staff to handle, without troubling senior managers. On the other hand, issues that impact mission-critical or cross-departmental aspects of the business are immediately escalated to senior staff so that resources can be allocated and decisions can be made quickly and effectively to prevent subsequent problems. Managers have immediate visibility to the impact on the business, and technical staff do not have to spend an inordinate amount of time justifying remediation investments.

2. It’s time to move beyond just monitoring technical data and metrics.

Legacy network management solutions are centered on monitoring the technical metrics and trends of IT infrastructure and applications. Most organizations continue to rely on these traditional tools for network and enterprise infrastructure monitoring. These solutions have enabled the network operations team to identify problem areas from a technical point-of-view for a given component in the infrastructure, but significant gaps exists in their capabilities to determine the business impact of the identified issues.

IT needs to take a more holistic and service-oriented view of monitoring the enterprise network, server and applications infrastructure, and needs to break free from the “silo” monitoring mentality. Unfortunately, most IT operations teams are not geared to operate in this way. They do not have the required monitoring and enterprise network management solutions to bridge the gap that currently exists between understanding the business service/process impact of problems, and the IT team’s view of what is going on at the technical level. Legacy network management systems and technology-centric monitoring approaches are incapable of determining the business impact of an issue in a complex IT environment, one that may include external cloud services and components as well.

IT and Business Goals: Better Alignment

- Todd Merrill, Spokesperson for Network System Architects (www.nsai.net), says:

There are always several points of contention between the Business and IT. But IT needs to remember that the reason they are there is to support and enable the Business. The Business wants things done quickly, IT sees a need to test and “get it right” first.

There are several courses of action that IT should follow to better align themselves with Business needs:

Training: With the constant stream of new and changing technology, a well trained IT staff is critically important.

Keep the environment current: Test and install patches and new releases on at least a monthly basis.

Governance: IT and the business must sit down once a month and review the results of the past 30 days, review any incidents and their resolutions, chart time to repair, and compare results to the documented goals or SLAs. The motive for these meetings is not punishment or rationalization, but rather constant improvement.

Consider Managed Services: Many SMB’s would do well to consider out sourcing to a good Managed Services organization (such as NSAi). They receive 24X7 monitoring and support from highly certified and experienced staff, and all of the previous 5 points, for a fraction of the cost of employing and maintaining in-house resources.