Contract developer skills for your resume and career

All the soft skills are important, but a few are absolutely critical in today's hybrid workforce. With the uncertainty of COVID delaying the return to the office, many companies are embracing hybrid work and/or 100% remote for some or all of their employees. Today's employees must be able to effectively communicate over a range of different modalities, both synchronously and asynchronously, while still being able to actively build and maintain relationships as they participate in one or more teams of coworkers, customers, and other stakeholders. Today's IT workers need to be honest with themselves on the work environments they can and cannot succeed within.

Students graduating with Information Systems and related degrees usually have little problem finding employment upon graduation. However, the pandemic upended that paradigm for some. For those who recently graduated and are still looking for employment, keep the faith and develop your technical skills. Developers should show prospective employers that they are familiar with agile programming methodologies and modern DevOps stacks and processes. Data analysts should be focused on presenting their ability to work with structured and unstructured data, effectively query data using SQL & NoSQL, and, most importantly, provide actionable insight by making data accessible and relatable to decision-makers at all levels of an organization. Those interested in cloud architecture and cyber security careers have to keep current on their skills and certifications. Cloud engineers need to stay aware of the constant changes happening at the major providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and, as with all other IT fields, provide tangible evidence of your skills via real projects that you have worked on. Prospective cyber security analysts should first focus on identifying their first specialization because there are too many security roles to learn them all at once, especially as beginners. Two popular entry-level cyber security jobs include information security consultant and Security Operations Center (SOC). Both of these roles require a sound foundation in networking fundamentals, vulnerability identification and mitigation, and an understanding of organizationally relevant security and privacy frameworks and regulations.

There are several areas that are "hot" right now, such as the previously-mentioned data science, artificial intelligence, and systems, but also cybersecurity and databases/data warehousing. That being said, the most important thing for a new graduate seeking employment to do is just to do anything, produce something. Tech employers don't and have never trusted computer science credentialing; that mistrust is the origin of the infamous "tech interview," used to verify whether a candidate actually has the technical skills to back up their piece of paper.

So to preemptively answer that question and get a leg up on other candidates, graduates should be sure to generate some artifact(s) that demonstrate(s) their technical and organizational skills. Show them that you can plan a project, design it, see it through in programming it, and do so in a responsible, organized manner (good coding style, readable code, well-documented, and using proper version control), and you'll have addressed your future employer's greatest worries right off the bat.

If it's a project in one of these "hot" areas or specifically tuned for the work the employer does, all the better, but anything the employer is doing is probably leagues beyond what a fresh graduate can do by themselves in a few months, so ultimately they're not going to be that impressed with your domain-specific technical knowledge. Instead treat it more as an opportunity to show off your "soft" skills, your programming maturity, and your ability to actually produce a product rather than just answer exam questions. And while you're at it, you might as well make it something fun for yourself so you'll be driven to finish it.

As it always has been, the ability to communicate with others would be a critical skill for college graduates. Additionally, it will be more necessary for professionals to work cross-culturally, as the U.S. is becoming more diverse.

Strong database skills including big data and SQL are always valued by local employers hiring our IS majors. While not technical, written and verbal communications skills are always important.