The IT Career Builder's Toolkit, Chapter 20: Make Yourself Indispensable

Feb 8, 2008

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Chapter 20. Make Yourself Indispensable

Indispensable Does Not Mean Always Employed

With the advent of outsourcing, increased competition, and a tighter job market, the technology professional struggles to ensure that he remains gainfully employed. Using the techniques and ideas in The IT Career Builder's Toolkit can go a long way toward ensuring your ongoing profitability and growth in the field. This chapter discusses key ideas to increase and ensure your value within the organizations you serve, the goal of which is to make you indispensable.

I would love to tell you that the information in this chapter will ensure that you are never out of work. I cannot make that claim. Too many intangible factors make such guarantees impossible.

However, the ideas that I share in this chapter go a long way toward ensuring your ongoing marketability to a broad range of organizations. Together with strong professional networking, the job/project search techniques covered previously in the toolkit, your ambition, and a strong commitment to excellence, these ideas provide greater overall career stability and growth.

Many of these ideas involve some level of professional risk. However, failure to enact these strategies is equally risky. If you are to build a career that places you at the top of your profession and positions you as a problem solver who has organizational value, you necessarily must incur some risk.

Not doing so means that you are not at the top of your profession and are not perceived as a problem solver who has organizational value. Making one of the following two choices seems relatively easy on the surface:

Incurring calculated risks to achieve dynamic career growth
Assuming the default risks that are associated with more passive career activity

However, you will need to assess this important decision for yourself.

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