As many of you know I am a IRL I am a recruiter. I spent most of my time recruiting financial service sales people. I am in a pretty dead end job right now and looking at an IT Recruiting Agency. There focus seems to be on PMP’s which is not a cool way to say pimps. I need to learn the basics ASAP to be able to hold a conversation and not look completely stupid. Does anyone have a good “go to” site that might help me out?
[quote]TheKraken wrote:
As many of you know I am a IRL I am a recruiter. I spent most of my time recruiting financial service sales people. I am in a pretty dead end job right now and looking at an IT Recruiting Agency. There focus seems to be on PMP’s which is not a cool way to say pimps. I need to learn the basics ASAP to be able to hold a conversation and not look completely stupid. Does anyone have a good “go to” site that might help me out? [/quote]
I know a little IT speak but see if this link helps:
http://www.jcfswinnipeg.org/documents/informationtechnology-terminology.pdf
Good luck.
I’ve taken 3 grad course in IT fields (IT infrastructure, system development life cycle, and database management) and still sounds like an idiot trying to talk about it.
Most recruiters don’t speak English very well so if you can you have a leg up. I would just Google the terms you don’t understand on the job description. It’s good to know the different level of jobs and fields. PMs, techs, developers, admins, engineers, architects all do different things even though it’s all in the tech field. You don’t necessary need to know all the details, that’s why they pay people. But be able to match up applicants with appropriate job descriptions is key. People that work as developers may get annoyed by recruiters contacting them about help-desk jobs.
A PMP is just for generic project management. There’s probably just as many folks doing construction project management as IT. There’s also a huge crossover between tech and finance, so I wouldn’t sweat it.
The big thing these days in IT PM seems to be agile project management. I don’t have a PMP (though, I probably will), but am a Scrum of Scrums Master for one of the largest IT architecture projects in the country. These agile folks get all secret squirrel with their nuts, but it’s all BS. Not one of my scrum masters had education or experience in IT, but we all knew how to make things happen, and my scrum master training lasted about an hour (though, my duties fall on the softer side of things). Hell, you can probably watch a 5 min. youtube video and learn what you need to learn. None of this is to say that project management is easy, resource and risk management are quite important, but you’re a recruiter. They want to see if you can talk to the IT folks in a way they can relate to.
PMP stands for Project Management Professional. It is a certification created in response to the poor performance of IT projects. Not construction, not engineering projects, not NASA projects. IT projects.
There is a US version and a UK version of the cert. If you are in the IT field, you should have a good understanding of the history of IT projects in general. They basically go horribly. COming in on time & on budget is just not heard of.
Thank you for the responses
Polo–that link helps
USMC, that seems be the consensus, a complex multifaceted business, but they want me to be able to keep up.
CEZAR–I don’t get the whole English as a second language deal in recruiting other than they are treated like sweatshop labor i.e., low overhead/labor cost, long hours and being an immigrant they are typically determined as hell which is a good trait for a recruiter. I get calls from them too for contract recruiting gigs, and as annoying as they are the one I responded to got me in front of a company I always wanted to interview with.
I’ll have my final interview with the regional manager (probably regional director) later this week and we’ll see where it goes. I avoided going back to agencies for a while, but this corporate life is grinding my soul away. The hijinks I’ve seen from behind the “velvet rope” is sickening.
PMP is just a set of letters someone can put after their name so that people know that they spent some money, took a test, and are officially qualified to fuck up a schedule and budget.
[quote]SteelyD wrote:
PMP is just a set of letters someone can put after their name so that people know that they spent some money, took a test, and are officially qualified to fuck up a schedule and budget.[/quote]
+100000, being a PM for a while now, I’ve found no value whatsoever in pursuing a PMP certification, especially having worked with dozens of PMP’s who show no greater value or acumen to the profession than those who do not.
[quote]TheKraken wrote:
As many of you know I am a IRL I am a recruiter. I spent most of my time recruiting financial service sales people. I am in a pretty dead end job right now and looking at an IT Recruiting Agency. There focus seems to be on PMP’s which is not a cool way to say pimps. I need to learn the basics ASAP to be able to hold a conversation and not look completely stupid. Does anyone have a good “go to” site that might help me out? [/quote]
You’re not going to get a PMP with some IT jargon. It’s a project management cert and project management, especially in IT SUCKS. PMP’s are a pain in the ass to get. I have avoided it like the plague.I work in IT and manage my own projects, but you don’t need a PMP to do that. Project managing IT is like herding cats. Nobody does what they are supposed to by the deadline, half the IT folks don’t really know what they are doing because they were thrust in to the position by a company that thought it didn’t need a bunch of IT folks, so the laid them all off and have some poor secretary pulling double duty as a server manager, LAN\Network admin, and SQL admin all at the same time.
Here’s a site that might help.
All you have to do to impress somebody is talk some UNIX terms, though. If you know just a tad of UNIX, people who don’t work with it all the time, will think your a genius. Real UNIX people will think your an idiot, but since most people work with Windows, UNIX makes you look like you know what your talking about.
[quote]JLD2k3 wrote:
[quote]SteelyD wrote:
PMP is just a set of letters someone can put after their name so that people know that they spent some money, took a test, and are officially qualified to fuck up a schedule and budget.[/quote]
+100000, being a PM for a while now, I’ve found no value whatsoever in pursuing a PMP certification, especially having worked with dozens of PMP’s who show no greater value or acumen to the profession than those who do not.[/quote]
X3. PMP doesn’t mean shit. I have worked with PMP’s who couldn’t manage a project to operate a blender.
[quote]Stoney56 wrote:
PMP stands for Project Management Professional. It is a certification created in response to the poor performance of IT projects. Not construction, not engineering projects, not NASA projects. IT projects.
There is a US version and a UK version of the cert. If you are in the IT field, you should have a good understanding of the history of IT projects in general. They basically go horribly. COming in on time & on budget is just not heard of.[/quote]
Yup and that’s if all your resources are in the U.S. It’s damn near impossible if you have resources in India.
The good news for me is that the project I manage I also do the work for, so I have a staff I can trust 100% since it’s me. If I have to drag in other people from other departments it becomes a drag real fast.
[quote]CEZAR wrote:
Most recruiters don’t speak English very well so if you can you have a leg up. I would just Google the terms you don’t understand on the job description. It’s good to know the different level of jobs and fields. PMs, techs, developers, admins, engineers, architects all do different things even though it’s all in the tech field. You don’t necessary need to know all the details, that’s why they pay people. But be able to match up applicants with appropriate job descriptions is key. People that work as developers may get annoyed by recruiters contacting them about help-desk jobs. [/quote]
True.
Like I said if you need to just sound smart to somebody and don’t need any real content, say some UNIX shit they’ve never heard of and you’ll sound smart.
Don’t try it on people who know their shit though. Just being moderately decent at UNIX/ Linux has gotten me past a lot of road blocks. But I can legitimately talk the talk and walk it. So I can get past the tougher audiences. This trick is to be used on managers and and HR folks who know how to send emails and update spreadsheets. If you can make it past them, then you need to be more proficient. Sadly, I don’t know any book or website that can replace experience.
Being thrown in to a blazing fire you have no choice but to put out is the fastest way to learn, but it’s EXTREMELY stressful and has a high margin for error. I don’t know how you replicate that in a test environment.
[quote]TheKraken wrote:
As many of you know I am a IRL I am a recruiter. I spent most of my time recruiting financial service sales people. I am in a pretty dead end job right now and looking at an IT Recruiting Agency. There focus seems to be on PMP’s which is not a cool way to say pimps. I need to learn the basics ASAP to be able to hold a conversation and not look completely stupid. Does anyone have a good “go to” site that might help me out? [/quote]
Perhaps I’m dense, but are you considering moving to an IT recruiting agency as a recruiter and you need to know how to talk to the IT folks about the jobs available? Or are you looking to become an IT project manager?
I have my PMP and it is, essentially, worthless. The test was brutal and the whole thing (by PMI) is a racket in a lot of respects. Might open some doors, but sure won’t keep you in the room. If I were to do it again, I’d probably just go with Agile; PMPs are a dime-a-dozen these days.
If you do want to be a PM (I’m one), you need to be extremely detail oriented and be comfortable being a complete pain in someone’s ass without them thinking you are (in most cases).