Happy Holidays!

We put up our office Christmas tree last week and thought we’d share the pictures with you – TriCom themed in blue and silver, of course!

Are you connected?

You’re reading our blog, why not keep up with us elsewhere?

We’ll keep you informed about today’s IT world with news, articles, blog posts, and available job opportunities.

Become a fan of our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter, or join our LinkedIn group. You can also sign up to receive our monthly e-newsletter, IT Connect.

And if you’re actively or passively searching for a new job, be sure to check out YourTriCom.com. It’s a career portal for job seekers which provides countless tips, trends, and articles designed to support your efforts as we connect you to the next step in your career.

Stay connected with us; let’s share and pick each others’ brains.

The 11th Annual TriCom Golf Benefit for MOCSA

September held TriCom’s 11th Annual Golf Benefit for MOCSA, our community partner and beneficiary, and it was a great turnout! Since 2001, we have been a proud supporter of this Kansas City non-profit’s mission to lessen the ill effects of sexual assault through prevention, education, intervention, treatment and advocacy.

We raised just over $40k with 27 teams (more than 100 golfers) in attendance. Congratulations to the winning team – David Hunt and Friends!

TriCom Appreciation Happy Hour – Take 2!

Last night we held our second Appreciation Happy Hour in homage of our candidates, consultants, and clients at TASTE in Overland Park, KS. We had a great turnout! A big thanks to all those who attended – we look forward to seeing you all at our next event!

Proud to Sponsor KCDC

This Saturday marks the third annual Kansas City Developer Conference at Johnson County Community College, and we are proud to be a silver sponsor.

Check out the day’s procession of events below. To register, visit http://kcdc.info/schedule/ and click on the button in the right column.

KCDC Schedule

• Keynote – Matt Cavallari

9:15am-10:15am

• Overview of Agile Approaches – Martin Olson
• Learn MVVM Basics – Kevin Griffin
• Architecting Applications the Microsoft Way – Clint Edmonson
• TDD techniques – George Westwater
• Reporting in SharePoint 2010 with TFS 2010 and SQL Reporting Services 2008 – Bringing it all together – Karthik Venkataraman
• SQL Injection and XSS: How they work and how to stop them – Rob Kraft
• Exploring Domain Driven Design Implementation Patterns in .NET – Steve Bohlen

10:30am-11:30am

• Values to Value – A Values Based Introduction to Scrum/Agile – James Pekham
• The Low-Hanging Fruit of HTML5 – James Eggers
• Real World, Large Scale Applications Using S#arp Architecture and ASP.NET MVC – Geoffrey Smith
• Getting It Right With BDD – Wes Garrison
• MongoDB – Brian Wigfield
• Windows Phone and Windows Azure – Mike Benkovich
• Exploring Domain Driven Design Implementation Patterns in .NET (cont.)– Steve Bohlen

11:30am-12:30pm

• Lunch

12:30pm-1:30pm

• Scrumbut and Fragile – Mark Randolph
• Javascript for the .Net Developer — Brian Moon
• The Case for CQRS and Event Sourcing – Tyrone Groves
• Mocks in Testing – Phil Ledgerwood
• Building webapps for the Cloud with Python and Google App Engine – Juan Gomez
• Programming for Windows Azure – Leslie Koorhan

1:45pm-2:45pm

• Guerrilla Kanban – Troy Tuttle
• What’s New In Silverlight 5 – Kevin Grossnicklaus
• Building Distributed and Scaleable Architectures – George Westwater
• Unit Testing Patterns and Anti-Patterns – Steve Bohlen
• Moose:  A new ORM for Node.js – Douglas Martin
• MonoTouch/MonoDroid with Data Services – Patrick Leikhus
• Silverlight with RIA Services – Yair Segal

3:00pm-4:00pm

• Story Points & Sizing Explained – Frank Rios
• jQuery – Getting Started – Shawn Mehaffie
• How Ruby is Making Me a Stronger C# Developer, and a Better Man – Darren Cauthon
• Dependency Injection for Dummies – Phil Ledgerwood
• FREE as in BEER!!! Manage Your Packages w/NuGet – Rob Reynolds
• Scala Development in an Existing Java Development Team – Sean Griffin
• Silverlight with RIA Services (cont.) – Yair Segal

4:15pm-5:15pm

• Mercurial: Tales from the Trenches – Russell Ball
• Script#: Javascripting with C# – Sky Morey
• The Little Wonders of .NET – James Hare
• Paradoxes and Ironies of Testing – Mark Randolph
• Writing Faster SQL Faster – Bill Graziano
• Startup Tips and Tricks: Getting s Small IT Shop Off The Ground – Kevin Grossnicklaus

5:30pm-6:00pm

• Closing Ceremonies

http://kcdc.info/

TriCom Appreciation Happy Hour

Wednesday night we held an Appreciation Happy Hour for our candidates, consultants, and clients at the Marquee Lounge at the AMC in downtown Kansas City. It was a blast! Thanks to all of you who made it out, and we look forward to seeing you all at our next event!

For even more pictures, visit us on Facebook.

Introducing YourTriCom.com

We can’t always help every person who comes to us looking for an IT job. In the past, we’d collect their information and keep them informed should a position arise that would be a good fit.

Now, along with this process, we can direct those candidates to our new career portal solely dedicated to people actively seeking new employment – YourTriCom.com.

This portal will be a one-stop-shop for those who need help finding new employment. Now, every person TriCom can’t fit into one of our current needs will have a place to go and have access to over 1000 different job boards, weekly free job-seeker webinars, videos, a web-library full of articles on job hunting, as well as have a free, comprehensive, and personal resume review.

TriCom’s “very unscientific but interesting” I.T. trends survey for the Kansas City marketplace:

Here are the “take-aways” from January’s “Trends” survey:

Male dominated?

Still tough out there!

• 17% of the responders were currently unemployed, 60% were in full time employees, 21% were either in contract or contract-for-hire engagements, and 2.5% were part-time employees.

Higher Ed Degree’s the norm

• 76% of the responders had a Bachelor’s degree equivalent or higher

A mixed bag when it comes to “certifications”

• 46% of the total number of responders had some form of certification within Information Technology. The most common certification being that of a Microsoft Certified Professional (21%), followed by some form of Network-related certifications at 13%, MCSE at 11% and PMP certified responders were 9% of the total group.

Most in K.C. are working in the private sector

Still A LOT of “fluidity” in the I.T. marketplace

• Only 60% of responders were in the SAME job a year before, 40% in a different job than one year prior
• Most answered “how long in current job” question in MONTHS – only 6% responded in “years”

“SHOW ME THE MONEY!”

• 38% of responders are making the same as last year
• 62% are making different money – and 64% of those folks are making more money than last year, 36% are making less money than last year
• Median income of responders who were employed was $75k – $80k

Happy?

Note – 99% of the unemployed responders either skipped this question entirely or answered “extremely dissatisfied” (for obvious reasons). Almost all of those answering “Extremely dissatisfied” were unemployed responders.

How likely are you to leave your current job?

Over half of responders indicated they are at least likely, if not very or extremely likely to leave their current position in the next year.

To find more results from our survey, click here.

It’s Tough Out There…

The following guest post is authored by Matt Sharples, Owner and CEO of TriCom Technical Services

It’s tough out there…

One of the most difficult things about TriCom’s staffing/consulting business is that we simply can’t help the great majority of people who come to us for help in finding Information Technology (I.T.) work. It’s heart wrenching at times, there are so many good people out there who are still unemployed and have been for some time now.

The main issue we run into is this; when any organization comes to TriCom for help in staffing a future, or ongoing I.T. project, they almost always need someone that can come in and “hit the ground running”. Mostly though, the specific I.T. skills this Consultant needs to “hit the ground running” with, are almost always at the very elite of the skill-set hierarchy (.Net, Java, Oracle, etc). So any organization that is going to pay an hourly contract fee to TriCom, is going to demand that any professional who’s engaged from TriCom, already has an extensive background in the technical skill they are being contracted-in to perform. So there’s simply no “learning curve” expected or granted. On top of that, the person with the hiring authority for these organizations typically expects to see demonstrated past experience with the given I.T. skill they’re seeking. When a hiring authority first glances at a resume, the immediate place their eyes go is to what this person has been doing for the last few months and years. If the most recent couple projects an I.T. person lists on their resume doesn’t precisely reflect the exact skill with demonstrated “hands on” work, the resume usually goes to the bottom of the pile. As unfair as that may sound to some, that’s just the way it is today’s world of I.T. staffing and consulting.

So, many times here at TriCom, we find ourselves in candid conversations that are difficult. Having to tell the vast of majority of I.T. people who we genuinely WANT to help, that we simply can’t place them with the current job orders we’ve been engaged to fill by our corporate clients.

“…be helpful, that’s the mission!”

Having said all this, back in October of last year, I went to a conference put on by the American Staffing Association in Las Vegas and the very first session I attended really made me stop and reflect.

It was a session put on by Eric Gregg of Inavero (www.inavero.com), a customer survey, research, and satisfaction firm that had done extensive research with both organizations that hire staffing firms like mine and with what Eric termed “the talent” (meaning the general population of I.T. candidates we talk to and try to help).

The session, called “Marketing and Sales Metrics: How Does Your Firm Match Up?” relayed some hard-hitting and pretty sobering facts about how our corporate clients and candidates (talent) view staffing and consulting firms today.

Inavero research showed:

• 27% of client organizations can only name their primary staffing firm
• 35% of talent can’t name a single staffing firm
• Most staffing firms are failing to engage both client organizations and talent with social media efforts
• Clients differentiate between staffing firms using three main criteria; past experiences, quality of candidates, and reputation and focus less on bill rates, relationship with sales representative, or referrals.
• “Talent” is looking for two main differentiators when deciding which, if any, staffing firms to work with – reputation in the industry, and helpfulness in overall job search.

Towards the end of the presentation, Eric talked about “dissatisfies, satisfiers, and exciters” and he went on to say that it’s not enough to stop at “satisfiers”. To go beyond to “exciters”, and then he said something that I scribbled at the very top of my legal pad. I don’t remember his exact words, but I do remember him blurting out this specifically: “Be Helpful – that’s the mission!”

As I sat there in this enormous and fancy meeting room at The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, I reflected back to when I first started this little company called “TriCom Technical Services” out of my one bedroom, studio apartment (circa 1994).  I vividly remember one of the things I always tried to do is just keep things very simple. Back then, there was an acronym about being in sales called “K.I.S.S.” which stood for “Keep It Simple Stupid!” I already had the stupid part down pat (and probably still do todayJ) and perhaps it’s my grade school understanding of the world, or perhaps it was something else, but I always felt that at the end of the day, it was about “being helpful”. So Eric’s words rang in my head for the next few days and I thought about all the people we don’t help: The I.T. folks that don’t have the top-tier technical skills, the unemployed, the people just getting started out in Information Technology.  I then thought about all the “talent” that is currently on our staff, or have been on our staff in the past, I thought about our customers, past and present, and what would really, truly “help” them…

Next steps

Once I returned to Kansas City, and after just pulled through one of the worst economic recessions ever, and finishing 2010 with growth over 50% and things beginning to thaw out somewhat, I decided that I wanted to make “being helpful” matter more at TriCom. As we put together our business plan for 2011, there was a very strong emphasis on finding ways to help people on both sides of our service transaction.  So, we have decided to take some active steps this year to provide better care for all those who TriCom “touches”, just to help people, whether they make us money or not!

Below are just some of those “next steps” we are taking:

1)      We are currently in the process of rolling out an eTimesheet system that will dramatically improve our current consultants’ hassle of dealing with physical timesheets, as well as our current customer’s ease of approving of those timesheets. It’s also the “green” thing to do!

2)      We hired a Social Media Marketing Manager earlier last year, Jennifer Kurzava, who you probably know by now if you’re reading this. She has been diligently building TriCom’s online presence thru the various social media outlets (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc). We task Jennifer daily with finding “helpful” articles, surveys, and information for anyone who happens upon our website www.tricomts.com or reads one of our monthly newsletters, or this blog.

3)      We will soon roll out a career portal on our website called YourTriCom.com which is a portal solely dedicated to people actively seeking new employment. This portal will be a one-stop-shop for those who need help finding new employment. Now, every person TriCom can’t fit into one of our current needs will have a place to go and have access to over 1000 different job boards, weekly free job-seeker webinars, videos, a web-library full of articles on job hunting, as well as have a free, comprehensive, and personal resume review.

4)      We will provide our own, TriCom based research of the Kansas City I.T. marketplace to our corporate clients and candidates. We initiated our first survey last month, and while it definitely wasn’t perfect, we did gain some insights that we think will be helpful to share with talent and clients alike. Next month, we will present some of our findings

5)      Last, but definitely not least, a week ago we hired a “Customer Care Manager”, Lindsey Blakeman who used to work at TriCom a few years ago. Lindsey will be the dedicated point person for all our current consulting staff. She will handle all issues related to someone’s employment and satisfaction with TriCom, including on-boarding, timesheets, benefits questions, exit interviews, etc. Her sole focus will be on “being helpful”. We think keeping our current consulting staff happy will not only add to their experience but also make them more productive for our client organizations.

There is more (“happy hours!”) but that’s most of it. In general, I’ve always felt a deep need to be of help, especially today, when you see so many people who are really struggling. I know quite a bit about struggling myself… it brings out the best and the worst in life, so starting this year, I want it to bring out what’s best about TriCom.

My most favorite fortune I ever got from a fortune cookie that I still keep in my desk today reads “The best times in your life have not yet been lived”. I know that’s true for me – I truly hope this for you too, but mostly, I hope we can be of some help to you.