We all know that this year has been hard for just about every industry. I hate hearing the bad news but I know it’s the reality of today’s world for many of us.
That’s why I loved reading these two articles recently!
The first talks about how the IT industry is actually one of the bright spots in the recent economic downturn. http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20081209-BIZ-812090373 I love hearing anything that talks about our industry growing by 10% next year. We are hearing a lot of positive things from our clients as well that would lead me to believe this is certainly a strong possibility.
One thing I hear again and again is that this particular soft economy is quite a bit different than what happened from 2000-2002 for our industry. The big difference is that the demand for IT project work back then was low – many companies had just spent millions of dollars on Y2K, the “dot-com craze”, etc… and just couldn’t justify spending a significant amount on new IT initiatives. Nowadays our clients have a strong pent-up demand for IT project work that didn’t exist then – the work is definitely there! It’s a matter of getting it funded, which (of course) is a struggle. We’re confident that demand will become so strong that it will break through and create a huge market for IT Consulting work. It’s going to happen – the only question is when.
Another great article I’ve read recently talks about the Twin Cities and how strong our business community is! In fact, MarketWatch recently named our community as the best metro area for business! Check it out: http://tinyurl.com/TCBiz.
Hey, Boston may have recently acquired Randy Moss, David Ortiz, and Kevin Garnett – but I’ll certainly take our #1 ranking in this list ahead of them any day!
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Tech-Pro has made some big news recently!
Earlier this month, Tech-Pro, Inc announced the acquisition of Quantum Consulting and Placement. Some brief press releases can be accessed online here: http://www.startribune.com/business/36658944.html and here: http://twincities.bizjournals.com/twincities/stories/2008/12/08/story5.html (subscription required to see the entire article).
It’s an exciting move for our company! We’ve been one of the larger full-service IT consulting firms in the Twin Cities for some time, and this move has helped us grow our market share a significant amount.
“Tough times present unique opportunities,” said Tech-Pro President Jim Erickson. “Organic growth is by far the best way to grow, but we felt that we could amend that with acquisitional growth.”
We at Tech-Pro are very excited about working with so many strong consultants who were part of the Quantum family and feel this move will open the door to many new opportunities in the weeks and months to come that will allow us to bring in even more talented consultants to our organization!
It’s an exciting move for our company! We’ve been one of the larger full-service IT consulting firms in the Twin Cities for some time, and this move has helped us grow our market share a significant amount.
“Tough times present unique opportunities,” said Tech-Pro President Jim Erickson. “Organic growth is by far the best way to grow, but we felt that we could amend that with acquisitional growth.”
We at Tech-Pro are very excited about working with so many strong consultants who were part of the Quantum family and feel this move will open the door to many new opportunities in the weeks and months to come that will allow us to bring in even more talented consultants to our organization!
Allow myself to introduce... myself....
I figured a nice initial post would simply be to introduce myself a little further. I want to be someone you feel comfortable working with and feel you know fairly well. I appreciate the opportunity to work with you and for the chance to let you know more about me as well!
I am a lifelong Minnesotan, born here in 1976 and have lived here my whole life. I believe the longest I’ve ever been out of the state, consecutively, is about three weeks or so. Needless to say, Minnesota is really all I know and (even despite the weather we have seen lately) I don’t ever see myself being anywhere else!I grew up in Chanhassen and eventually moved to Chaska -- which meant I was always part of the Chaska school district. I think growing up both towns had a population of less than 10,000, which was really cool – I felt I grew up in both “a small town” and “the Big City” since we weren’t THAT far from Minneapolis. I graduated from Chaska High School in 1995 and stayed busy with a ton of sports and activities in high school (one thing you will learn about me is that I really, really can’t sit still for too long).
I moved on to the University of St. Thomas and spent a fantastic 4 years there. I was fortunate to have been involved in both athletics (varsity swimming for four years) and student government (class president a couple years) all while getting out with a double-major in Computer Science and Business Administration / Marketing. After graduating I was extremely fortunate to have jumped right into the IT Consulting Services world. While in college I was an intern at 3M where I picked up Lotus Notes development. For whatever reason it really clicked with me and I was able to earn a few certifications, then leveraged that skill set my first couple years out with BORN, which at the time was probably the largest consulting firm in the Twin Cities.
In 2001, of course the market turned a little soft in our industry and after going through a real tough layoff, I found that development was something I enjoyed but it wasn’t necessarily the thing I was going to excel at the most. I always had more of a knack of working directly with people and my competitive side made it easy for me to get into sales. After spending some time as an account executive with a couple IT training companies (with a short detour into the medical device world) I was extremely blessed to have gotten the chance to get into the recruiting field. I have been in recruiting since January of 2004 and at this point I can’t imagine doing anything else. I love what I do! At some point in the near future, I’ll blog a little more about why I love recruiting so much.
As far as my personal life, I have been married to Kate since July of 2005, about the same time we bought our first home down in Savage. We welcomed our first child, Brady, into the world on October 2nd 2007 (his birthday is one day before mine!) So we’re still getting the hang of the parenthood thing but Brady is absolutely the joy of our lives!
In my spare time I am a gigantic sports fan. Sadly, this means I have to put up with an enormous amount of disappointment being here in MN, but I am still optimistic that one day we’ll be able to see a local team win a World Championship again. I am a fierce competitor when it comes to Fantasy Football and am always happy to share advice on players and such. I was unable to win a championship this year but had won at least one title the previous 6 years.
I’m a big fan of music and movies as well – and have a pretty diverse taste in both. Really, if it involves pop culture, fun gadgets, the Internet, etc… I am probably going to be real interested in it.
Recently I’ve been a big fan of social networking online. I am an extremely avid user of LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/kirkwalton) and Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/people/Kirk-Walton/679991124) and have started to use Twitter a bit as well (https://twitter.com/RecruitingGuy). These are all sites I would HIGHLY recommend – I think that in this day and age, using tools such as the above sites are going to be much, MUCH more effective when it comes to finding new opportunities than simply relying on the job boards (which are still effective, of course, but utilizing multiple sites and online tools is the way to go).
I don’t want this to be too much longer but in general I’d love to be thought of as an extremely friendly, helpful individual who is easy to work with and dedicated to finding the right opportunity for the people I work with and vice versa! Please do feel free to drop me a line at any time – kwalton@tech-pro.com.
I am a lifelong Minnesotan, born here in 1976 and have lived here my whole life. I believe the longest I’ve ever been out of the state, consecutively, is about three weeks or so. Needless to say, Minnesota is really all I know and (even despite the weather we have seen lately) I don’t ever see myself being anywhere else!I grew up in Chanhassen and eventually moved to Chaska -- which meant I was always part of the Chaska school district. I think growing up both towns had a population of less than 10,000, which was really cool – I felt I grew up in both “a small town” and “the Big City” since we weren’t THAT far from Minneapolis. I graduated from Chaska High School in 1995 and stayed busy with a ton of sports and activities in high school (one thing you will learn about me is that I really, really can’t sit still for too long).
I moved on to the University of St. Thomas and spent a fantastic 4 years there. I was fortunate to have been involved in both athletics (varsity swimming for four years) and student government (class president a couple years) all while getting out with a double-major in Computer Science and Business Administration / Marketing. After graduating I was extremely fortunate to have jumped right into the IT Consulting Services world. While in college I was an intern at 3M where I picked up Lotus Notes development. For whatever reason it really clicked with me and I was able to earn a few certifications, then leveraged that skill set my first couple years out with BORN, which at the time was probably the largest consulting firm in the Twin Cities.
In 2001, of course the market turned a little soft in our industry and after going through a real tough layoff, I found that development was something I enjoyed but it wasn’t necessarily the thing I was going to excel at the most. I always had more of a knack of working directly with people and my competitive side made it easy for me to get into sales. After spending some time as an account executive with a couple IT training companies (with a short detour into the medical device world) I was extremely blessed to have gotten the chance to get into the recruiting field. I have been in recruiting since January of 2004 and at this point I can’t imagine doing anything else. I love what I do! At some point in the near future, I’ll blog a little more about why I love recruiting so much.
As far as my personal life, I have been married to Kate since July of 2005, about the same time we bought our first home down in Savage. We welcomed our first child, Brady, into the world on October 2nd 2007 (his birthday is one day before mine!) So we’re still getting the hang of the parenthood thing but Brady is absolutely the joy of our lives!
In my spare time I am a gigantic sports fan. Sadly, this means I have to put up with an enormous amount of disappointment being here in MN, but I am still optimistic that one day we’ll be able to see a local team win a World Championship again. I am a fierce competitor when it comes to Fantasy Football and am always happy to share advice on players and such. I was unable to win a championship this year but had won at least one title the previous 6 years.
I’m a big fan of music and movies as well – and have a pretty diverse taste in both. Really, if it involves pop culture, fun gadgets, the Internet, etc… I am probably going to be real interested in it.
Recently I’ve been a big fan of social networking online. I am an extremely avid user of LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/kirkwalton) and Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/people/Kirk-Walton/679991124) and have started to use Twitter a bit as well (https://twitter.com/RecruitingGuy). These are all sites I would HIGHLY recommend – I think that in this day and age, using tools such as the above sites are going to be much, MUCH more effective when it comes to finding new opportunities than simply relying on the job boards (which are still effective, of course, but utilizing multiple sites and online tools is the way to go).
I don’t want this to be too much longer but in general I’d love to be thought of as an extremely friendly, helpful individual who is easy to work with and dedicated to finding the right opportunity for the people I work with and vice versa! Please do feel free to drop me a line at any time – kwalton@tech-pro.com.
Happy Holidays! (and an introduction to "the blogletter"
As we head into 2009, I wanted to find a way to keep connected with the consultants I’ve met with – hopefully something that will help to build our relationship, keep you informed of things going on in the market and with Tech-Pro in particular, and really help us to get to know one another much better. My hope is that, whether it’s next week or next year, we’ll be able to work with one another one day, and of course it’s always easiest to work with someone you feel you know and trust!
With that in mind, I am rolling out my “blogletter.” It’s something that I’ll be posting online at www.RecruitingGuy.com (or http://kirkwalton.blogspot.com/) but also something I plan on sending out over email each time I update it. If you feel that the emails are not providing any value to you at all, please kindly send me an email and I can certainly remove you from the mailing list. You can always find the updates online if you choose to follow it that way. In either case, you can also subscribe to the RSS feed online as well. So it’s a blog and a newsletter. It’s a blogletter!
There won’t necessarily be any “rules” for when I will post (hopefully fairly regularly), or what content will be in the blogletter, but typically you can expect a few of the same things. I’m an extreme optimist by nature, so it would be extremely rare that I’ll post anything negative; I’d rather focus on good news in the market and what’s going on here at Tech-Pro. I’d love to write about interesting websites and online resources, fun gadgets, best practices and things I hear from other consultants and groups such as IIBA and PMI, and really anything else on my mind as well. I’d love to get feedback on any of my posts. Maybe you’ll read about something you’d like to chat more about -- If that’s the case, please drop me a line! Ideally that is what I am trying to do – I figure it well help us to build rapport with one another!
So without further adieu, on to the blogletter!
With that in mind, I am rolling out my “blogletter.” It’s something that I’ll be posting online at www.RecruitingGuy.com (or http://kirkwalton.blogspot.com/) but also something I plan on sending out over email each time I update it. If you feel that the emails are not providing any value to you at all, please kindly send me an email and I can certainly remove you from the mailing list. You can always find the updates online if you choose to follow it that way. In either case, you can also subscribe to the RSS feed online as well. So it’s a blog and a newsletter. It’s a blogletter!
There won’t necessarily be any “rules” for when I will post (hopefully fairly regularly), or what content will be in the blogletter, but typically you can expect a few of the same things. I’m an extreme optimist by nature, so it would be extremely rare that I’ll post anything negative; I’d rather focus on good news in the market and what’s going on here at Tech-Pro. I’d love to write about interesting websites and online resources, fun gadgets, best practices and things I hear from other consultants and groups such as IIBA and PMI, and really anything else on my mind as well. I’d love to get feedback on any of my posts. Maybe you’ll read about something you’d like to chat more about -- If that’s the case, please drop me a line! Ideally that is what I am trying to do – I figure it well help us to build rapport with one another!
So without further adieu, on to the blogletter!
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