by Michael Skinner

Created on: January 31, 2010   Last Updated: December 24, 2010

$50K per Year or $25/hour

Information technology is supposed to be big in 2011.  And it pays well.  Want a high tech career?  Use DICE.  You can tailor and store at least five kinds of resumes.  You might ask why any honest person would want five different versions of himself.  The answer is more obvious than you think.  Let's suppose you have decided that the best jobs around today for a person of your skills is database programmer.  You have the database programming skills—as most programmers do—but your current resume highlights the computer languages you are conversant with and speaks of your database skills on in passing.  Then you could create another resume that emphasizes what you have done in the database world and only speaks of software skills in passing.  So you would discuss which databases you have used and all about your skill in creating packages in Oracle and stored procedure on SQL Server.

Dice also allows you create up to five job alerts.  You could create the alert you really want to hit that covers an area of say 25 miles of where you live and specifies a very narrow set of skills that you are most comfortable in.  Another alert could cover your state if you don't mind moving too far.  And yet another could cover the country if you have recently become desperate and don't really care where your next job is.  You could also create an alert that only covers telecommute jobs since you don't really like getting out of your easy chair that often and you like programming in your underwear—an affectation your office co-workers never truly appreciated

On Dice you can do some basic research on jobs if you are not quite sure want kind of work you want to do.  For instance, type the word “manager” in the search box and push the button and you may find over 10,000 jobs nationwide.  If you put in the word “sales” you see only half that number of jobs.  If you want to be the man in demand, it's probably better to be a manager than a salesman—at least on Dice.  As a general principle, managers make more money anyway. 

A more specific technical job query might compare being a DBA with being an engineer.   DBA yields a couple of thousand jobs whilst engineer yields over 20,000 jobs.  A number of things are at play here.  For one, Dice is an engineering job site.  DBAs should probably look elsewhere if they want to see more Database Administrator jobs.  Secondly, we did not specify which kind of engineer.  If you are a sanitation engineer then most of those jobs are not for you.

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