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Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 004.02373
EAN: 9781587131561
ISBN: 1587131560
Label: Cisco Press
Manufacturer: Cisco Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 312
Publication Date: January 10, 2005
Publisher: Cisco Press
Sales Rank: 173319
Studio: Cisco Press
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Product Description:
Your complete guide to building your information technology career in any economy
The IT Career Builder’s Toolkit features market-focused skills and proven methods you can use to jump-start and advance your career. While other books cover just the mechanics of preparing your résumé, writing a cover letter, and interviewing, this book provides all that plus additional insight from IT career development expert, Matt Moran, to help you plan and create a rewarding IT career over the long term.
The toolkit approach allows you to use this book to suit your unique needs:
- Are you new to the IT field? Benefit by reading the book cover to cover.
- Just need to fine-tune your IT career? Choose a topic and dive in.
Understand and prepare for the various and changing factors that affect your career in both positive and negative ways. Learn how to
- Present the value of your technical skills in the job market
- Position yourself as the primary commodity of your career
- Remove the guesswork out of job searches
- Highlight on-the-job skills and gain meaningful professional exposure
The companion CD-ROM includes career management tools such as résumé and cover letter templates, forms to track important contacts, and self-assessment tools. Start or further your consulting career with sample proposals, opportunity tracking forms, and a time-tracking and billing database. Financial tools, including budget and cash-flow summary worksheets, help you gain financial well-being. Use the Value-Added Technologist presentation to gain a clear understanding of the career-building process and how to use the toolkit to build a dynamic career.
Most of all, have fun! Every year, people advance along the path to career stardom. Let Matt help you to be one of them through his career philosophy “Do not accept mediocrity as a career objective–demand more of yourself.”
“I want you to see the [toolkit] techniques as one more set of skills to adopt in your overall career development program. They are skills, just like your technical skills, that you will use daily during your career. Just as you adopt new technical skills, use the toolkit to define those soft skills that you must learn and put to use. The result will be a more well-rounded and complete professional skill-set.”
~ Matthew Moran, from the Introduction
Companion CD-ROM
The CD-ROM contains valuable tools, forms, spreadsheets, and documents that work with the Toolkit to help you master key areas of your career development.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: 
- A tool kit and not a cookbook . . . which is as it should be
Matt set out to provide a toolkit and not a cookbook and that is exactly what he has done. The difference between the two is that the toolkit provides you with the tools to build/repair almost anything while a cookbook provides you with specific "recipes" that answer very specific questions on how to cook certain things. If you want someone to tell you in minute detail how to get into and prospor in IT with an absolute guarantee that, if you follow the recipe, you will succeed, then this book may not be for you. If, on the other hand, you understand the concept of being mentored and of applying lessons to life in general, this book definitely is for you.
I "met" Matt via his ITTollbox blog and I have followed his blog since I first encountered it. You can learn much from his approach to life, family, and career (which is the proper order for things in my opinion). He seems to have a good grip on reality and to be able to apply his skills and the lessons he has learned across the boundaries between professions, which is probably why several reviewers have pointed out that this toolkit is not just for IT people.
This is one of those books that one should keep handy and periodically reread . . . sort of like "The Book of Five Rings" or "Modern Management and Machiavelli" . . . because it will help one to stay focused and to realize that any career is a path and not a destination.
Rating: 
- HELPFUL
Be sure to also check out Ian Fisher's "How to Start a Career in Information Tecnology, 2nd edition" 2007.
Rating: 
- A return to the basics of career building
Author Matthew Moran provides considerable insight into the world of IT and how to build your career in this growing field. Moran provides foundational information about what a career actually is and the development of a plan to sell your skills and qualifications to an employer. Moran provides some excellent tips on job searching, resume and cover letter writing, and conducting a successful interview. The CD provided with this book offers the reader some valuable templates for developing a professional resume and career plan.
I have used this book for a college class in career and soft skills development and have thoroughly enjoyed the class. Maybe that cannot be completely credited to Moran and his text but he has certainly provided an excellent foundation for study.
Rating: - Great for anyone who wants to move up
The ideas presented were very interesting and helpful in that the author presented a different, active perspective on how to search for a job. The author has been in the IT field for a long time and also knows how the business environment of IT is like.
Sometimes the author seemed to go on and on about a simple topic as if the point hadn't been made already; Doing so made you want to skip a few lines.
If you're in the right environment and have the right resources, you can definitely get into the IT field with the help of this book. And even if the strategies outlined in the book don't help you to get into the field, the strategies will give you an idea of what needs to be done to get into the field.
Rating: - Good book worth the time
I enjoyed reading this book - it gave me a different perspective to my carrier. Especially the part where it recommends concentrating on reusable skills vs. learning one more technology. I wouldn't say it will give you a real toolkit that's why I give it 4 stars.
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