[Sigia-l] Lack of Opportunities for IA

[Hankinson, Jody]

Leonard -
The market does seem to be improving, but there is nothing more frustrating
than job fairs and recruiters. These folks are screeners. They often have no
idea about IA. Rarely will you have a positive experience when speaking to
this layer. 

I'd encourage you to do some refresher reading about job hunting practices
in general. Word of mouth, informational interviews, industry events, etc.
Also, there are very reliable stats that show job hunting online does not
improve your chances, and may even hurt them. I'd say all of these
challenges associated with job hunting are especially true about our field,
because it is still in a development stage.

- Jody

Jody Hankinson | Information Architect
212.852.5051 | jhankinson at girlscouts.org
GSUSA | Where Girls Grow Strong | 420 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY 10018

-----Original Message-----
From: Hongming Leonard Liaw [mailto:hmliaw at mail.utexas.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2004 12:48 PM
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: [Sigia-l] Lack of Opportunities for IA

I just had a very unpleasant experience at a job fair and led me to wonder
if
there's really any job opportunities out there for IA people despite all the
assurances we hear in the classes.

I'm a grad student at the School of Information (UT Austin) studying
Information
Architecture. Recently, our school informed us that since they can't seem to
put together a job fair on their own, we have to go to other schools' job
fairs. 

So today, I went to College of Natural Sciences job fair. This college
includes
bio, chem, biochem, physics, math, cs majors. I went there because I thought
IA
is somewhat related to computer sciences however remotely it might be. And I
don't really have a lot of choices if I want to find a job.

At the National Instrument table, I talked to their rep their and gave him a
copy of my resume. I also told him my main interest is IA and Usability
engineering. After he learned that I do not program (JAVA or C++), he then
said
"Well, you're probably in the wrong job fair." with a tone of slight as if
saying "What, are you stupid! This is a CS only fair! Why are you even
here?!"
I felt so insulted but yet I had to keep on smiling just to be polite. 

Other tables were at least polite and nice when they were trying to turn me
down. 

This unpleasant experience really made me wonder if there's really any IA
jobs
out there right now. Of course, all of your jobs are IA related, but is
there
any job OPENINGS out there for us the new graduates, and also if there's any
job fairs for IA people? I really don't want to go to another job fair just
to
be insulted by an egoistic CS-centric jerk. 
 
Leonard
-- 
H. Leonard Liaw
MSIS Candidate, May/Aug 2004
University of Texas at Austin
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