Hot Jobs
Sun Herald
Sunday March 5, 2000
Remember that kid who dropped out of school to be a cleaner? He's a millionaire, along with the computer geek who now calls himself a "netrepreneur". And that girl who got a job as a cook hasn't done too badly, either. Maybe it's time to switch careers yourself...
Lee Valentine's story will either inspire or upset you. As the Internet business developer for Carlton and United Breweries, he advises the company - which last year made a profit of $466.3 million - on how to replicate that success on-line. He has no formal qualifications in either business or computing. It's his first full-time job in over a year and it pays a six-figure salary. Oh, and he's 29.
Valentine likes to spend his hard-earned on good wine and gadgets - a Palm Pilot, a WAP-enabled phone - but describes his car as "nothing flashy". "When I've got a few million behind me, I can worry about a nice car."
While such riches may lie a few years down the track, what Valentine has now is far more valuable: knowledge. He has an understanding of Internet technologies few other people in Australia possess. In the so-called information age, knowledge is power ... and it also pays the bills.
A high-school drop-out who grew up in Liverpool in Sydney's south-west, Valentine worked part-time as a consultant for IBM before joining CUB in Melbourne three months ago. One of his areas of expertise is known as information architecture. It involves laying out information within websites with the same logic and order that a conventional architect might use to lay out rooms and spaces within a building. His computer skills are largely self-taught - he's been mucking around on them since he was 16 - but information architecture's not the kind of thing you can get a degree in anyway. Twelve months ago, the job title didn't even exist. Its name may sound unfamiliar but one thing is clear, the job itself is very, very hot.
Such "hot" jobs are being created continually within the fast-evolving information technology (IT) industry. Some - usability specialist, cold fusion developer, ASP developer - are just as new and sound equally as foreign to anyone outside the field. Others - on-line call centre worker, executive producer, content editor - sound more conventional. All are in big demand from an industry that will need 200,000 more workers by 2002.
"Most of the jobs we work on today didn't exist 12 months ago," says Debra Harding, of Internet recruitment firm, Mills Harding. "The online industry has evolved so rapidly that the opportunities for people with the skills and passion look pretty endless. In our Sydney office, we've got 350 to 400 Internet jobs available. In Melbourne, there aren't as many but it's growing. It's finding people that's the hard part.
"A lot of these roles evolve as a need is identified. It's very competitive for firms because there aren't many qualified people around. Companies need to have a very good story to attract the right person. It's not just dollars that attracts them, it's the project they'll be working on, the company itself. Is it new? Does it have good backers? Who will they be working with? Then come the dollars and share options. But I think we'll end up like the States where the dollars being paid are just over the top."
"I describe these people as 'gold-collar' workers because you really have to look after them," says John Shuttleworth, co-founder of XT3, a Sydney firm that advises companies on how to adapt their business for the online economy. The rise of business-to-consumer electronic commerce (e-commerce) and the emergence of business-to-business online transactions has seen the company's revenue increase by 600 per cent in the past 18 months. In the same period, XT3's staff has grown from four to around 60.
"We refer to our guys as knowledge workers because we're hiring them for their knowledge," Shuttleworth says, taking a break from drafting six job ads for the Saturday paper. "The Internet is re-pricing the workforce based on what the rare skills are. If you can find good people, you do what you can to keep them. It's not just about money. We've got a couple of people in the organisation who wanted to bring their dogs to work. So they're sitting there now cutting code and doing software development and they've got their dogs sitting next to them. We're hiring them for their brains not because they wear the right suit."
Elizabeth Grey is the model knowledge economy worker: her skills are in demand, she's under 40 and she earns a higher than average income (the median salary reported across all IT jobs is $68,000). Six months ago, she ditched her corporate job for the flexibility and freedom of consulting. She dreads answering the question: "So, what do you do for a living?"
"Do you want the long or the short version?" she asks. An honours graduate in psychology from Monash University, Grey is a usability specialist. It's a job that's long been around in the automotive and retail industries but in the past six months it has started to attract the interest of Internet companies. Grey's understanding of human behaviour enables her to assess websites by testing their users' ability to complete an intended task: to check their bank balance on-line, say, or to buy a book.
Internet users are notoriously fickle. If they can't work out how a website works within a couple of minutes, they give up and won't go back. Of course, the companies that operate these sites would prefer that didn't happen. Grey can charge such firms $700 a day to help them get it right. Her clients have included the Commonwealth Bank, Coles Myer and Telstra. At the moment, she's consulting for a stockbroker. "It was a lifestyle decision to become a contractor," she says. "I can work for a range of different industries and choose not to work when I feel like it. I don't have to ask permission from anyone."
A hot job is a job in demand but the people who can't tell a good website from a bad one or even tell you what a website is can take comfort from the fact that strong demand exists outside the IT world. Labour market analyst Rod Stinson says health professionals, accountants, electronics tradespersons, plumbers and the hospitality trades are all areas that will continue to enjoy above-average job prospects. But a job in demand isn't always such a hot job, he warns. "A number of service jobs that are growing rapidly are low-status, low-pay and might not lead anywhere. Things like waiter/waitress, kitchenhand, sales assistant, checkout operator.
"My view about the shortage of high-skilled IT jobs today is that by the time someone is trained from scratch, the demand may have dissipated or no longer be strong. Anyone making a decision as to what course to do, particularly if it's longer than six to 12 months, should be looking at career resources that give you a broader perspective than what's the hot job of the moment."
Almost 400,000 people work in Australia's IT industry but their number pales beside the 4 million who provide domestic services. The household services sector is also hot and said to be worth more than $33 billion a year. "One of the things happening is niche marketing within the personal service economy," Stinson says. "It was once largely restricted to house cleaning, catering and gardening but it has become a lot more fragmented. Certainly dual-income, middle-class families, particularly those that work long hours, are making much more use of these relatively expensive services. Getting someone to do your ironing for $25 a week amounts to $1000 a year, which isn't cheap by anyone's standards.
"Personal services are becoming more common but I've been caught out before predicting the ones that will take off," Stinson says. "Two years ago, I said personal shoppers would emerge as a growing specialisation and it hasn't. The Internet has taken over from that. You don't need to have someone go out and do your shopping when you can order it on-line."
And you don't even need to order your shopping on-line when you can use the Internet to order a week's worth of meals with the click of a mouse. Sydney sisters Janel and Nicole Horton are behind Gourmet Dinner Services, which delivers pre-cooked meals to around 200 homes in Sydney's eastern and northern suburbs each week. The pair have 1700 clients on their books, who order pre-cooked meals over the Internet or by phone and spend, on average, $110 per order. Think of it as an upmarket version of meals on wheels, with its well-heeled clients too busy, rather than too old, to cook. The majority of clients are professional working couples either with or without children, work 10 hours a day and outsource more than one domestic service. A former fund manager, Janel came upon the idea six years ago after returning home from the pub after work to an empty fridge. "I was working long hours and so were most of my friends. I wondered what they were going to do for dinner, saw an opportunity and took the leap." Six years on, the company's annual revenue is $1 million.
Success stories like the Horton sisters are what David Woods hopes to hear from his clients in future. Woods operates at the other end of the booming personal services spectrum. He's what's known as a life coach. "I help people get clear about what they want," he explains. "It could be organisational skills, to de-stress or improve personal relationships. I help them to get it by developing strategies and providing them with the support and motivation to get there."
He does this from a shaded hammock in his backyard, which overlooks the Lane Cove River on Sydney's north shore. He currently has 18 clients, all of whom are professionals, and he counsels them by phone for four 30-minute sessions a month. Clients pay between $250 and $500 a month for his time and work with him for an average of 12 months. "People who have had life experiences and learnt from those experiences make good personal coaches," says Wood, a former actuary, management consultant and graduate of CoachU - an on-line "university" based in, where else, America. CoachU's website claims there are an estimated 10,000 part-time and full-time coaches worldwide and that the number of people entering the field of personal and business coaching has doubled in each of the past three years. Wood estimates that there are between 400 and 500 life coaches working in Australia. So what advice would he give to anyone wanting a hot job?
"A good thing to do would be to interview people who already do that job," he says. "Why guess how to get there? Find someone who's already got what you want, who's already been through the learning curve and ask them how they got there. Some people don't take the first step because they don't know where the steps are. The first step is to find the steps." Thanks, coach.
IN DEMAND: THE TOP 10
1Child care worker The money's not great but there's a lot of work out there. Child places continue to be hard to come by and the number of children spending 35 hours or more a week in formal child care is still rising, up by 22 per cent in the last three years.
2 On-line customer agent The call centre industry is growing at 40 per cent a year. The newest thing is Internet call centres. E-mails hit a customer service agent's screen accompanied by everything from a contact history to a choice of relevant pre-formatted responses.
3 Hospitality workers The industry continues to experience staff shortages, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne. Waiters, waitresses, kitchen-hands all in demand. Eight thousand chefs' positions went unfilled last year.
4 Household services A sector estimated to be worth more $33 billion a year and growing as Australians work more hours and experience less guilt about having someone else a) walk their dog b) mow their lawn c) cook their dinner d) ...
5 Day spas Places offering fast facials are tipped to rival fast food joints in number. They offer beauty therapy for time-poor execs in need of a pedicure, haircut, Turkish bath, facial or waxing, all in a lunch hour. The number of beauty therapists and weight-loss consultants has increased by 72 per cent in five years
6 Netrepreneur Follow the lead of Gourmet Food Services and greengrocer.com and start your own web business. US magazine Entrepreneur suggests on-line education, hobby and craft supplies and niche auctions. Electronic commerce is expected to reach $70 billion this year. Grab a slice.
7 Information Technology workers Eighty-five per cent of IT graduates find jobs in an industry that will need 200,000 more workers by 2002, according to the Australian Information Industries Association.
8 Cybercops Keith Inman of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission's on-line fraud squad describes crime on the Internet as old wine in a new bottle. Child-porn gets the headlines but on-line investment scams and fraud are keeping those with a background in policing busy.
9 Life coaches A two-year, on-line course with Coach University, based in Utah, costs around $5600 but once you've graduated you can charge others $500 to help them get organised, get the girl/guy they want or even to get a hot job.
10 Anti-ageing centres People will make routine visits to "longevity centres" - one- stop health and healing sites that are part spa, part hospital, part health club, part detox centre, part fat farm and part spirituality camp, say futurists Ira Matathia and Marian Salzman.
HOW DO I GET A HOT JOB, THEN ?
Webcaster master
Name: Stephen Said, 29
Job description: I'm responsible for all aspects of webcasting infrastructure for Internet content producer Whoopi! Ltd, including live webcasts, video and audio on demand.
Salary: $50K plus equity/profit share.
How I got into it: I didn't have any formal tertiary qualifications but I did have a smattering of industry-recognised ones. I worked for two years on a help desk, two years as an IT coordinator, three years as a network manager and five years in system/network administration.
How you can get into it: ongoing short specific courses are a good idea. You need programming ability and to get some experience with video hardware/software.
Redwood Anti-Aging Clinic co-ordinator/supervisor
Name: Leanne Wilks, 39
Job description: my role at Redwood is to ensure efficient day-to-day running of the clinic. I manage information resources, stock and client files but my primary focus is on the client.
Salary: $35,000 to $50,000.
How I got into it: I qualified for the job because of my interpersonal skills, experience in dealing with people, coordination skills and my ability to set up workable systems. My previous employment was at a software training organisation as a course coordinator.
How you can get into it: management courses and client services courses would be a good place to start, with an active interest in health and natural healing. Read as much as you possibly can about safe natural nutrients.
Health spa manager
Name: Gavin Haughain, 25
Job description: staff rostering and giving body treatments such as facials, waxing, manicures, pedicures and massage to VIP clients.
Salary: $40,000 to $55,000
How I got into it: I did an 18-month course at the Queensland School of Beauty and then worked for three years in different salons before starting at the Joh Bailey Day Spa. A spa is like a beauty salon but provides wet treatments as well like hydrotherapy baths.
How you can get into it: you need to do a course in beauty therapy at a private college. Product knowledge is also important as new products are released all the time.
Pre-school mothercraft nurse
Name: Johanna Schiller, 24
Job description: I run the two to two-and-a-half year-olds room and I have two childcare assistants under me.
Salary: approx $27,000.
How I got into it: I'm from a large family and I had a lot of experience baby-sitting my two younger sisters and their friends. After finishing high school, I decided to become qualified by doing an associate diploma of social science in childcare at TAFE.
How you can get into it: having a love of children is the main thing. There are different courses you can do at TAFE and university but the first thing is you really have to want do it. There are a lot of magazines and support groups to keep you informed.
Systems architect
Name: David Forster, 32
Job description: I discover what a client wants from their website and find a technology-based solution.
Salary: $80,000 to $150,000
How I got into it: I have a degree in computer science and worked for six years as an information technology officer with the public service in Canberra then for two years with the Internet division of Aspect Computing, before joining XT3 Commercial Internet Solutions around two years ago.
How you can get into it: Programming is about problem-solving. You have to be constantly adapting so it's not about what you know but how quickly you can learn.
© 2000 Sun Herald