Stories by: Meridith Levinson

While staffing firms report that IT salaries are growing, Foote Partners, a boutique IT benchmarking and research firm in Vero Beach, Fla., has been observing a different trend.

Project management may not be the most exciting job in IT these days, especially when most of the talk about hot IT jobs pertains to software developers, information security professionals and business intelligence analysts.

IT departments may be struggling to support and manage all of the consumer devices infiltrating their enterprises, but there appears to be one unexpected and positive outcome from the consumerization of IT: higher salaries for many IT professionals.

If you're one of the many unfortunate souls who reports to a bad boss, you may think your only options are to find a new job or continue to take crap from your corporate Caligula.

If there were ever an IT Olympics, in which software developers could compete to solve programming problems, the event would likely take place on Gild, an online career development community where IT professionals from around the world do just that.

For CIOs who experience some kind of enterprise IT failure in the course of their careers-whether a high-profile security breach, massive network outage, or multi-million dollar ERP boondoggle-the incident can feel like a career killer. But unless a CIO repeatedly makes the same mistake, or the failure stemmed from some illegal or "just plain stupid" action, it won't end a CIO's career, says Mark Polansky, senior client partner and managing director of Korn/Ferry International's Information Officers practice.

Working life is looking up for CIOs in 2011, according to findings from the latest Harvey Nash Global CIO survey, which the executive search firm released yesterday.

As companies begin to re-invest in capital projects, project management offices (PMOs) need to gear up to facilitate these new plans. But that doesn't mean they need to adopt more methodology, documentation and process. In fact, many PMOs would be better served by taking a leaner approach to project management, according to a recent report from Forrester Research.

When you're involved in a job search, meetings over lunch or coffee with contacts in your network-and with your contacts' contacts-can help you uncover job opportunities or lead you to people who work at desirable organizations. Depending on how you approach these meetings, your networking will be either tremendously productive or a painful waste of everyone's time.

If you've recently begun to update your résumé, you've probably encountered conflicting opinions on how to write a résumé for a CIO position so as to attract an executive recruiter's attention. For example, you may have heard or read that your résumé needs to tell a story about your work experience, and thus needs to include specific details about your professional accomplishments. Yet you've probably also read that a résumé, by nature, should be brief, and that the goal of your résumé is to give the executive recruiter just enough information to make him want to call you to find out more. Such contradictory advice can curse even the most effective communicators with writer's block when they have to re-write their résumés.