What are your advantages as DePaul CTI graduates?

1). Sense is very important to your life in US

Competing in US, we have to have very strong SENSE, sense of competition, sense of survival. It is very important feature in western market society. One word, you have to find food yourself by all means. Somebody thinks job searching is only writing and casting resumes. You should know studying hard is for job, so job searching should be much harder than study. It is the bout of survival competition.

2). Marketing elements for job searching

US is an unique market society, there are many kinds of markets, Futures market, stock market, retail market, even congress is a mass opinions and interests market. But for job searching, we need to treat ourselves as products in a special market - talent market, as it is market category, so in marketing concept, you have to make clear following things:

-         What is your unique quality and what Market positioning for yourself, i.e. Market positioning (It is very straightforward and easy to tell. what is your background, learning, experience and skill, all are unique to others. It determines what level position you will pursue, high, and middle and entry levels? Fortunately there is pyramid structure in talent market demand, the lower the position, the higher market demand. So do not be shy to say that I am entry level. On the other hand, if you boast too much for certain low position requirement, “over qualified” has the same result as “not qualified”. (Discuss more on this later)

-         What are your advantage, interest and disadvantage? i.e. find your market customer and competitor (What are your weaker and stronger points in talent market, you have to take your advantage of, but avoid competing with others with your disadvantage. For example, although you may graduate as master and be skilful on computer technology, you may not like coding. Then your computer skills can be treated as plus to your other major ability. I never treat myself as future scholar, as I know it is not my forte. Otherwise my whole life will suffer. You will make faster progress if you work on the way of your interest. Otherwise you will lag behind and take painful life. The way to find your advantage is to find where you can receive most active feedback and get most praise.

-         What target market you will work on and fit your situation? i.e. find target market (Once you know your advantage and disadvantage, based on your background, you can look for certain field for your job searching direction. It needs deeper research, some fields may be very good, but may not fit you well, for example, some new born company which is planning for funding in stock market is not good to foreign students. To foreign students, the stability is always overwhelmingly important. This kind of company is not very stable in competitive IT field. Even though they can successfully get the support from stock market, most of them will be reorganized to cater stockholders’ interests. As result, most foreign workers will bear the brunt (shou Dang Qi Chong) and be laid off.

-         How to approach the target market? i.e. marketing plan and strategy (It is very important, once you decide where to go, if you don’t know how to approach market and get useful information, it is still nothing, just as last time when I explained the role of job fair, the most important is to get very personal information in HR department of companies. Catching people and market attention and setting up your friends and relation circle for market information are two important aspects)

-         How to evaluate accurate feedback from your action? (You may have done what you think right, but your feeling may not be necessarily correct, try to evaluate the results of your action and change or improve it next time)

-         How to keep position in the market share? How to corroborate your advantage and position after you get first successful interview.

2). Market positioning for CTI graduates

First of all, we discuss what is your advantage as CTI graduate students? It is the first question you have to answer before you enter into job market. As once you know your advantage, you will increase the probability when you send a resume.  Somebody says I have “cast” over 1000 resumes to companies for any opportunities. It is wrong way and time and money consuming. Nobody treat you as their needs for special concern, as Your resume does not pinpoint to certain company and position.

What is CTI special and what is its competition level?

As you may know, currently CTI has over 2200 enrolled students. It is called the largest graduate schools on Computer Science in US. Its wonderful course designs not only create good environment to attract more students but also create unique advantage for its graduates. It is not simple phenomenon but represents market demand.

- Competitive advantage

Most computer science schools in US have fairly small programs with less than 500 students. The top computer programs such as MIT, UC Berkeley or Carnegie Mellon rarely produce master degree. (They produce PHD). Because they focus on basic academic level research and education instead of business level one on which CTI focuses.

What’s difference between research on academic level and it on business level? Traditional computer as academic science includes Algorithm, Computer Architecture, Database, Data Structure, Concept of programming, Operating system, software engineering...then contents in PHD level in other schools will be only more difficult and deeper than those in master level. Most programs treating the education as science need a lot of math deduction and logics calculation for new methodology or theory. But most business level treats it as technology, which need to grasp tools, methods or theories already there (you use the tools to develop a new application).

So the market you will compete is so different than the market the top school graduates concentrate.

- Comparative advantage

Computer in business level is different. Most are the practical technologies developed from the science. If you had learned TDC463, you would know, currently, computer become distributed network. Most subjects in science are very basic and deep system and structure design in the networks. In OSI model, it mainly covers at bottom system layer design, data storage and transfer, and system efficiency. In the pyramid market, there are very few demands on basic research, except in university, research institutes and research agents in big companies. You may not know, most computer schools in US (no matter whether good or not, whether master or PHD) still produce these kind graduates for bottom research. There are few positions but a lot of graduates. So it is talents competition at bottom layers and academic level.

In OSI model, the top layer is application layer, comparatively and technically, it is fairly easy and surface design, simple website design, simple coding belong to this category. Most certificate schools can give you this stuff. If there is any project in the business, there are hundreds of companies (such as dot com) competing for it, but only one can get the business, the people in other groups without it will be re-adjusted or laid off. So it is market competition on this upper application layer.

The advantage of CTI learning is that it just escapes above two competitions. Most CTI’s teachings are in middle layers technologies. No matter whether you are information system, software engineering, TDC, DS or computer science (more choices) students, as I can understand, most of my learning focuses on middle layers: data link, network, IP, TCP, deep application. We learned a lot of protocols, technologies, tools and related systems among the layers. For example, se452 (servlet, JSP, J2EE) is something between TCP and application layers. TDC 561 network programming in C is the thing between network and IP layers, but se550 distributed programming in Java and DS520 (CORBA) is the thing between IP and TCP. Or some modern tools for example XML or database is newly deep application layer data storage and markup treatment. (Hi, forgive my stupid explanation in terms)

Why is it the advantage? Because most of these are in the form of protocols or technological standards, once drafted and recommended, all technologies will develop along the guideline, some even developed under traditional technology power, so it is fairly stable. Most technologies from different vendors under same protocol and standard are more or less same, you do not need to “change your mind” very often. And furthermore, there are large demands in market but few schools teach it. Many business applications have to use these technologies to connect with bottom system layers and need its solution at the core system design. For example, CORBA (or RMI or new SOAP) is an Internet technology supported by over 800 global largest IT companies. Middle layers technologies are CTI advantage, so will be your technical advantage as well.

What make CTI special?

Why other schools cannot do so? There is some internal reason making most computer schools in US (no matter whether good or not) only can produce bottom research graduates. As most computer science schools are less than 200 students, very few teachers can satisfy the students’ needs. Most teachers are tenures in the school with fixed positions. Their “old” knowledge and skill (mostly follow the traditional contents of computer science) cannot catch up with new developments. Meanwhile, as few teaching position (already held by old tenures) need for little program, newly graduated PHD or teachers cannot come into class. So most graduates from those schools still hold very old and traditional computer stuffs when they graduate. CTI is different. There are around 80 full-time and over 100 part-time faculty professors. Big student pool makes it easy to hire many new professors and part-time company staffs to offer state-of-art technology to the classroom.

Clearing understanding your advantage in talent market is very important to your job searching strategy. With it, you will know what kinds of target companies should be looked for mainly, what content should be weighted in your resume, what information should be conveyed to HR during interview to strengthen your position. What you can do, whether you fit this position requirement and whether you are better than others for certain position are all from this aspect. Please note in the market, your skill, experience, background are always unique to others. The most important is how can you dig it out and how can you promote it in right way.

If you are in different major and school, the sense of market and marketing way are the same. You can analyze in the same way as mine.

Next topic is how to determine target talent market as foreign students.