An article that was posted to CIO on May 1 calls attention to one of the fringe benefits of information technology placements in this day and age. The author recommends that employers seriously consider the offering flexible schedules to employees of their information technology departments. She notes that such an arrangement, including compressed hours, flextime, and telecommuting, can be beneficial to the health and happiness of high-value employees, and that it can also have positive effects on the workplace itself.
The implicit promise of a more manageable work-life balance may be extra incentive for some would-be job seekers to consider entering a certain field, especially when that field comes with the comparatively high salaries and benefits of information technology placements in the USA, and especially in places like the Bay Area that have a highly active IT field.
But at the same time that flexible hours serve as a fringe benefit and a personal incentive, it is valuable for you, the job seeker, to think of them as an earned reward when you are seeking your information technology job placement. In other words, it’s an offer that you can take personal advantage of, but only if you have the skill and the information technology training that will allow you to do so very effectively.
If your employer is going to be flexible for you, then you should be flexible for it. That means having a wide range of training under your belt, including online software training, systems analyst training, and Agile or certified scrum master training. This way, it should be relatively easy for you to demonstrate to your employer that you have the know-how to accomplish relevant tasks from home, to identify any barriers that might exist to telecommuting, to recognize whether the company is in a position to be without on-site IT staff, and to work to the utmost effect in a streamlined IT department whenever you are on site.
And this latter point also indicates that an IT department that offers flexible work hours can be valuable to you even if you aren’t the sort of employee who would take advantage of them. That is, if you plan to be in the office for regular hours, day after day, without fail, your value to the organization is even greater because your employers and colleagues know that they can always depend on you to address problems that arise on-site.
But of course, this is only the case if you’re also the sort of employee who is regularly pursuing online information technology training and broadening your skill set to include such things as PMP training and business data analyst certification. If you are, and you’re also an on-site kind of employee, you can demonstrate extraordinary value and negotiate for your salary accordingly.
If, on the other hand, you value the benefits of flexible hours, you can probably still negotiate for a highly competitive salary. But you may have to put even more effort into your online information technology training to make sure that you can stand up against all your competitors in the workplace, regardless of where and when they fulfill their IT job responsibilities.