IT job searching? Here's a cheat sheet! A book skimview

IT Made E-Z: A Guide to the Information Technology Industry
by Patrick H. Bowman ISBN:9780978775308
Electronic & Database Publishing, Inc. © 2006 (114 pages)


This book title came to me in the "new titles" email I get through my corporate subscription to Books24x7. I love this subscription as well as the Safari one, which contains the most awesome of all technical publishers- O'Reilly.

The book is a guide to Human Resources personnel who are recruiting for IT positions. Naturally, it's all dumbed down, yet mostly accurate ("Assembler" isn't a programming language, "Assembly" is) and covers a wide range of issues from various areas of IT.

Why bother with the book?
* If you have trouble conveying your knowledge of IT to non-technical folks, grab this book and see how the author does.
* Use it to create bullet lists of subjects, so that you don't get points deducted for ignoring the obvious.
* Fight fire with fire. The person interviewing you may be using this book. Nobody technical today really cares what ISDN and DSL stand for. But an HR person holding this book might think it's important enough to demand a correct answer. Great for phone interviews where you can just flip to a marked page to rattle off a list of "common databases" ("IMS/DB"? I've never heard of that one! Access on the top of the list? And where the hell are MySQL and PostgreSQL?)

Don'ts:
* Don't use this as a study material. If you don't know better than the text, find a real book.
* Do not use this book with anyone knowledgeable- it's incorrect and being wrong is worse than not being right. They understand where you are coming from, and know you're nervous. Be yourself, be informative but be thorough. Also- try to sound like someone they'd want to work with.
* Don't bring this into a face-to-face interview (just in case someone needs to be told).



Postscript: "book skimview"?

I didn't read the book, I skimmed it. I checked out it's table of contents, read a few pages into a couple chapters. I don't have time for this book, since I'm not looking for a job, nor would I really want to use it.