Hiring Disparity
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@scottalanmiller said:
I've never met a person that wasn't trying to promote their own title that disagreed with the concept that a manager is a manager of people.
I'm not trying to promote anything. I manage people and I couldn't care less about job titles. I'm just telling you that in the UK this is not the definition.
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@Minion-Queen said:
Part of the other issue with most IT Jobs is you aren't wearing just one "hat" or title either, so it makes it even harder to describe what you do.
That's why it is important to have defined Generalist titles for IT Pros. The Specialists have these titles. Generalists often covet them and use them when not appropriate (helpdesk people using "System Admin" for example.) This causes no end of problems. There need to be good, standard, universal titles for Generalist IT Pros, mostly for those working in the SMB.
The problem still arises that the Generalist at company X with three years of experience and Generalist at company Y with three years of experience will be so vastly different that there is often no simply way to exchange them. Each company is so completely unique. Even if both companies are 65 people and have the same budgets. One might work on AD and Windows and have a ProSafe filewall and a flat network. The other might spend their days tweaking Cisco on their all Mac network without any servers. One might spend all day walking the halls talking to users, finding tweaks, making things smooth. The other might be putting out infrastructure fires and not even know what people do there.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I'm not trying to promote anything. I manage people and I couldn't care less about job titles. I'm just telling you that in the UK this is not the definition.
So what are US managers called in the UK? What is the title for people who manage people as a profession?
What in the US is called a "management professional" or a "career manager."
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@scottalanmiller said:
Director is certainly a looser term than manager.
My understanding is that a Director is simply someone who is a member of the company's Board of Directors and doesn't relate to their actual role. They have to be declared to the government (companies house) and their names and titles are on public record. Not my area though, so I'm not claiming anything here.
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@scottalanmiller said:
What is the title for people who manage people as a profession?
I'm guessing there isn't one. We use the term Line Manager all the time, but that's not someone's job title, it's just their role.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Director is certainly a looser term than manager.
My understanding is that a Director is simply someone who is a member of the company's Board of Directors and doesn't relate to their actual role. They have to be declared to the government (companies house) and their names and titles are on public record. Not my area though, so I'm not claiming anything here.
That's called a Board Member. A company director isn't a board member. And I've worked much of my career for the UK. When, say, Barclays or HSBC lists their Directors, those are just normal executives and nowhere near the C suite or the board room. Many SMBs have "directors" and aren't even corporations with boards to have them on.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
What is the title for people who manage people as a profession?
I'm guessing there isn't one. We use the term Line Manager all the time, but that's not someone's job title, it's just their role.
If someone asked someone what they did, and they said Line Manager, just because they don't receive business cards saying that doesn't mean it isn't their job title. I don't see how you can call that anything but a job title.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Director is certainly a looser term than manager.
My understanding is that a Director is simply someone who is a member of the company's Board of Directors and doesn't relate to their actual role. They have to be declared to the government (companies house) and their names and titles are on public record. Not my area though, so I'm not claiming anything here.
That's called a Board Member. A company director isn't a board member. And I've worked much of my career for the UK. When, say, Barclays or HSBC lists their Directors, those are just normal executives and nowhere near the C suite or the board room. Many SMBs have "directors" and aren't even corporations with boards to have them on.
Exactly.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I'm guessing there isn't one. We use the term Line Manager all the time, but that's not someone's job title, it's just their role.
We use that too but only as less generic than a normal manager. That's a manager who is over a specific product line, for example.
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That's not to say that a Director is legally barred from being on a board, but there is nothing to tie them together either. Just as any employee has a legal right to be named a board member, even the janitor.
A Director might commonly be on an Executive Board, rather than the Board of Directors. It is awfully confusing that it is called a "Board of Directors" and then Directors are somewhere completely separate in the hierarchy.
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Fine, not my area like I said. I don't see IT Director being a common job title here at all. I've never seen it. My old boss was Technical Director, but he was a co-owner of the company.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Fine, not my area like I said. I don't see IT Director being a common job title here at all. I've never seen it. My old boss was Technical Director, but he was a co-owner of the company.
In the US it is super common as a "fake" title that IT people give themselves in the smallest companies or that companies bestow upon IT pros who aren't good enough to make more money but they don't want them to quit. I've even seen a small business IT manager (loosely a manager, had two reports I think but was full time non-manager and not sure if he was really a manager or just their lead) get the title of "Director of Operations" as a fake title. Not a director nor in operations! At very most a part time manager.
Director of IT has become a joke of a title in the US, but it is super common and seems to be growing more and more. I bet if you got a survey of people in SW you'd find that something like 5% or more of SMB people use that title to mean "the lone IT guy doing helpdesk." It's often a flag for the very lowest IT jobs, rather than the highest.
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I've not seen "IT Director" in the UK, but a Directory within IT I've seen all over there. But real Directors with SVPs under them and hundreds or thousands of total staff with hundreds of millions in budgets.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Director of IT has become a joke of a title in the US, but it is super common and seems to be growing more and more. I bet if you got a survey of people in SW you'd find that something like 5% or more of SMB people use that title to mean "the lone IT guy doing helpdesk." It's often a flag for the very lowest IT jobs, rather than the highest.
Can confirm... this is the title given to me because they wanted someone over the current IT Manager. It is a joke... I would have much preferred System Admin or IT Generalist.
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@coliver What they call you you probably can't control, but what you call yourself you can. I don't put my director title on my resume, I just put something practical instead.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver What they call you you probably can't control, but what you call yourself you can. I don't put my director title on my resume, I just put something practical instead.
So what would be a more effective title? I have one report but do pretty much everything related to IT (except web dev/marketing which this company thinks is an IT job).
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@coliver that's tough, but not systems admin. That's a very specific role and if you are going to an SMB, they won't care, and if you are going to an enterprise they will and they will have expectations on what you were doing (full time operational management of servers, generally scores or them or more, hundreds being not uncommon in the US.)'
IT Generalist, LAN Admin, it's hard to say which titles will sound and look best and best reflect what you feel is the "focus" of your work.
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Coming up with titles for generalists has been a major problem that we have been discussing here and elsewhere for quite a while. This ties in with the "What IT Needs" thread. We need industry standardization around generalist titles.
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I think it has something to do with the fact that all IT people are weirdo losers
Actually my real thinking is that the field is so new that hiring managers don't know how to hire well for it.
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@Nic said:
Actually my real thinking is that the field is so new that hiring managers don't know how to hire well for it.
That's a big factor. Even in 1994, when I was first doing IT work and not just development work, the term "IT" wasn't used yet. I'm sure someone used it, but it wasn't common. The system admin (of the one server that they had) was called an operator (SysOp) and that was it. The term IT didn't start appearing commonly till a few years later. By the late 1990s it was common and the idea of LANs at work was common in larger companies and everyone knew that that was the future.
So IT, as we know it more or less, is only twenty years old at a maximum and really is closer to fifteen years old!
