LinkedIn

A whole bunch of people have suggested I use LinkedIn as a job-seeking resource.

Several have done LinkedIn job searches for me and posted me links.

I have quite a few recruitment consultants who have added themselves to my LinkedIn connections.

So,  why am I underwhelmed so far?

A few days ago an ex colleague from many years ago was kind enough to send me a link to a job posted on LinkedIn.  I followed the link,  and indeed the job seemed ideal.  However,  on one corner of the posting was a link declaring that it was a "hot position" or "on fire" or some such.  I was not reassured by finding out that over 70 people had already applied via LinkedIn. 

Is everyone using this method?  Is there a way I can get ahead of those other 70 people?  I don't know but it certainly burst the bubble of self confidence for a moment. 

The fact that I had been mailed by my ex colleague was an example of the success of the method,  to be fair.  People certainly read the general feeds from their contacts on the site.

Are you someone who is reading this and has found something through LinkedIn?

Perhaps you feel that the 70:1 ratio compares well with the number of applications per vacancy that you would likely get from a job on one of the specialist job sites?

I'm an ex-IT Manager, but hopefully not for long

Well,  a pretty awful thing happened to me a couple of weeks ago. My company (I'm still officially working for them as I type, but I am on "gardening leave") was bought out and sadly, I'm surplus to requirements.

I'm trying very hard to put aside any feelings of being hard done by: true or not it won't be helping me: so that stuff is all officially in the past.  I just need to keep repeating that to myself for a while....

I'm about to find out the real state of the IT job market in the London and Cambridge areas.

My initial feelings are that there are still posts to be had: but that its pretty tough competition out there to get an interview.  I've seen plenty of things I can apply to: but am I applying for the correct posts?  Do I need to do some extra study,  do I need more professional qualifications?

Over the next few weeks or months I will be blogging about the job hunting experience, and if anyone would like to make suggestions or comments please feel welcome.

Hopefully this may be of help to others who may find themselves in the same predicament.

Here are some of the topics I hope to be covering soon:

• LinkedIn
• CV preparation
• Interviews
• Freemind: "mind mapping software"
• Agencies
• JobSearch Websites
• ITIL

Swyx Phone System: a good system but there are a couple of gripes

Swyx Phone System: a good system but there are a couple of gripes

Since I've been working for my current company I have been supporting their phone system which uses software called Swyx.

In general I'm quite a supporter of Swyx. It can run on a cheap server and seems reliable. When I arrived we had quite an old version and there were some issues with wireless connections: if someone had a wireless and a LAN connection (never ideal, I know) the Swyx software phone client would complain and often would not connect. It also had some issues with dealing with out of date DNS entries which could also cause some client connection issues.

Vipre Enterprise

Vipre Enterprise

I recently gave up on McAffee at work. Not that I really have many big issues with it but the software seemed to sit a bit heavily on our admittedly agening laptops.

Instead I went with Vipre and I have to say I've been very impressed. There is only 1 agent process running on clients and its much lighter on client systems generally.

Use Ubuntu to present your SAN to the network

Use Ubuntu to present your SAN to the network

I've recently been working on a way to improve our backup procedures. We back up to the network initially and I had been doing this using windows backup to a network drive.

This does work: but it slow and unreliable: so I decided that a good way forward would be to present the drive to the file server locally via a SAN.