At work I have been building an industry desk. I’m working with middle market manufacturers that have revenues between 50 and 200 million dollars per year. This size company can support the technology that I focus on and pay the fee that we charge for our services. I spend a lot of time looking for IBM AS/400  (iSeries) mini mainframe instillations running JD Edwards enterprise resource planning software or the programmer analysts that works on the systems. The AS/400 is or was the backbone for most manufacturers. Many companies are moving to network based data systems, but the 400 still holds a strong market share in the slower to change manufacturing environment. They are also popular in the insurance industry. The AS/400’s ability to crunch enormous amounts of data makes it perfect for referencing data points in a huge national directory for every transaction made.

I spend a lot of time looking for clues that a company will have an AS/400. A clue may come in the form of a software package, style of programming code (RPG 3, 4, and COBOL) or industry. Clues like these lead to finding hiring managers and employees that have specific needs or the right professional background. From this point, I market candidates to the hiring managers with the intent of landing a job order. Adversely, I can recruit employees from the company to export to other companies.

Moving employees from one company to another or marketing one exceptional employee to several companies is the name of the game. In doing this, it is hard to avoid learning all of the latest technology, news, and rumors within the market segment.  All of the industry data comes in handy when convincing someone to make a major change in career paths. This is all the more important in a shrinking industry segment filled with an older population of programmers, more than 80% of which have 10+ years of experience. However, for as large a decision as this seems to be, I am regularly surprised at how freely people with great jobs jump in with both feet. My developing ability to create the perception of greener pastures is becoming an increasingly important skill.