Employment outsourcing in information systems
Communications of the ACM
Beyond stereotypes of IT professionals: implications for IT HR practices
Communications of the ACM - Supporting exploratory search
Global Sourcing of Business and IT Services
Global Sourcing of Business and IT Services
Designing a multi-faceted metric to evaluate soft skills
Proceedings of the 2010 Special Interest Group on Management Information System's 48th annual conference on Computer personnel research on Computer personnel research
Do companies look for education, certifications or experience: a quantitative analysis
Proceedings of the 49th SIGMIS annual conference on Computer personnel research
International Journal of Web-Based Learning and Teaching Technologies
Proceedings of the 2013 annual conference on Computers and people research
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Introduction What qualities make a successful it professional? Certainty strong technical skills are sine qua non. As a result, the technology geek remains the stereotype of an information technology (IT) professional. Indeed, when companies hire IT professionals, their focus is often on the "hard" skills needed to perform the work, such as years of Java programming experience. However, there is a growing (and gnawing) awareness that technical skills alone are insufficient for success in IT, particularly in today's dynamic, distributed and complex workplace. Companies are exploring outsourcing and offshoring to become more flexible and contain costs while strategically leveraging IT. Consequently, IT professionals (whether onsite or offshore, in-house or outsourced) must acquire a broader set of skills beyond their traditional technical skills. These broader managerial or interpersonal skills are generically labeled "soft skills." Despite the increasing importance of soft skills, very little systematic research has conceptualized such skills and even less has measured these skills. Given this gap in the literature, this article introduces "practical intelligence" as the overarching concept that could provide a better understanding of this broader set of skills required of IT professionals. We describe the development of the SoftSkills for IT (SSIT) instrument for assessing an IT professional's level of practical intelligence, and report the results of a study that validates this instrument by comparing the practical intelligence of experienced IT professionals versus novices. We conclude by drawing out implications of our study for IT recruitment, training and development, and suggest future research directions.