Like many in the tech world, enterprise document management organizations suffer from massive shortages in qualified IT personnel. Even in today's tight job market, there just are not enough top-tier developers and database administrators to go around.
The tech industry has long tried to increase the number of highly trained, competent IT professionals, but efforts still fall short. There is now a move to approach this challenge from the other end, with more versatile, easier-to-use platforms that empower businesses to do self-service IT work without a staff that can afford to devote thousands of hours a year to complex programming. Companies adopting these solutions have a source of talent they may have overlooked: the "Facebook generation" of young professionals.
Just as Gen Xers learned Excel macros in school and their first internships, the next generation of professionals are graduating with HTML5 skills from school, work and from making websites for their friends and families. Fortunately, those HTML5 skills translate into a number of document management tasks.
Make your personnel search count
If your efforts to land the next great Java superstar have hit a standstill, and you are looking for new talent in your organization that can keep things running smoothly and efficiently, advertise and interview for young professionals who can address these 5 HTML5 skills.
If your efforts to land the next great Java superstar have hit a standstill, and you are looking for new talent in your organization that can keep things running smoothly and efficiently, advertise and interview for young professionals who can address these 5 HTML5 skills.
- CSS 3.0: Experience with this style sheet language—a tool meant to simplify HTML—will mean your candidate will have a good handle on handling content characteristics and formats, as well as re-purposing content for different formats.
- jQuery: Another offering meant to simplify programming. Mastery here means a candidate should be able to maximize what he/she does with HMTL by creating more dynamic web pages
- jQuery UI: Does your candidate know how to use jQuery UI's helpful shortcuts? If so, it means much less time creating the simple, basic site interaction features, such as sliders, tabs and dialog buttons, and a little more time for more advanced features like drag-and-drop capabilities.
- Backbone.js: A great skill to have for single-page web applications and a time-saver in web application synchronization.
- Mobile User Experience (UX): HTML5 offers a better interface for mobile, and a worker with a good foundation in the language can offer added benefits for any mobile services you may offer.
Again, it is a matter of streamlining what a worker has to know to do a job correctly. In the case of mobile, it is a matter of having someone know one HTML5 platform well and making it compatible with just about all mobile devices, as opposed to having to code each application in iOS, Android and the new Windows 8 platform. Just as important, you can attach it to existing, native-application web content to make existing web applications mobile-friendly.
Hire along these lines, and your organization will have a better footing to stay productive using newer software and SaaS solutions that are designed to minimize businesses' programming time. You'll be better at mobile, too, and you can reasonably expect your new staff's talents to only increase over time.
SANJAY BHATIA is the founder and CEO of Izenda, the market leader in embedded business intelligence for business applications built on the Microsoft platform. The company's cloud-optimized HTML5-powerd self-service reporting technology provides flexible forms, ad-hoc reporting and interactive dashboards. Prior to founding Izenda, Mr. Bhatia worked in engineering and consulting positions at Radiant Systems, Trilogy and Microsoft. You can contact the author at sanjay@izenda.com.
