I’ve been sitting back for a bit scheming on how to make money since being unemployed. Currently, I’ve got a business plan going for a website, but it’ll be a few months before it’s even Alpha. But, within the last few weeks, several things have happened to slow down progress on that project: ECM projects that actually pay real money…
There are several ways to get noticed, but the easiest way I’ve seen is Monster. If you have an ECM background with SharePoint etc, it’s very easy to get noticed by recruiters around the globe and even Microsoft. I’ve personally gotten emails from Microsoft asking me to apply to their SharePoint team. (In that situation, I actually got an email from the Internal MSFT PM, not to mention nearly every recruiter in WA.) I’ve noticed that if you update your resume every 2-3 weeks, you will get noticed much quicker than anything else. Even if you log in, change a few sentences around, you will get noticed much quicker than leaving your resume sitting for months. I’ve found that after a few months, with the right keywords in my resume, I’ve gotten requests for positions all over the US and other countries. I’ve found that NJ, FL, WA and NY are the biggest places for ECM jobs from unscientific logging from my Inbox. If you’re into the exotic locations, there are loads of jobs outside the US, but those who get to apply are normally approached specifically due to their skill set.
If you’re willing to travel, there are even more jobs out there for you. There are companies that want nothing more than a SharePoint admin to deploy and teach their team, then leave (this person usually gets support requests later as well). There are also companies that specifically want someone on site to work on WebParts and WorkFlows for them. Most of these jobs are anywhere from 1 to 6 months, but there are a few odds and ends of 1+ years. If you work it right, you get a nice salary in an area you can spend a decent amount of time in, with lodging paid for.
Some people may not realize it, but companies do use Joomla, Mambo and even WordPress for their ECM needs. Ford currently uses WordPress as an ECM platform. Though small, it looks good and gets the job done and the customers/users love the ability to comment on it. Locally, I’ve been helping a government entity with Joomla and WordPress deployments for their Content Management needs. Now, I’ve also been involved in meetings where some people want to deploy WordPress and Joomla/Mambo inside a LAN for ECM needs. While I initially loved the idea, I quickly figured out that those products wouldn’t help the situation. Fortunately, we where able to talk them out of it. The reasoning was that SharePoint 2003 didn’t provide the required features (Mainly blogging and Wiki’s) - with MOSS (SharePoint 2007), that need was in-place by default. So, all in all, don’t just focus on one ECM solution like SharePoint since some companies use OSS projects. MindSpring and Earthlink actually used a custom made CMS for their internal network (it was nicknamed the “Purple Monster” internally). In their situation, I would have recommended Joomla since SharePoint would have been met with major disappointment, skepticism and more, due to the hardcore OSS push internally.
On top of your ECM “skiillz”, extra bonuses come around. I get many, many, recruiters requesting resumes for general Web Dev positions. Most of which, pay around $60k+ to start. Many of these positions are companies seeking to jump into SharePoint or other ECM products like Documentum. There are other positions where you are the external web guru and a secondary SharePoint admin. So many companies make the mistake of hiring one person for SharePoint and other ECM products, but what happens when things break or need updated when that person goes on vacation?
During downtime, however, there is still a lot of money to be made with your ECM skill set. I do a little small-time web work for small business owners. Generally, they’ve gone to some company and asked about a web package and found that it may cost upwards of $1500 for a simple website. Using WordPress as a simplified Content Management Platform (go ahead, argue if you will, but WordPress is MUCH better for anyone that can barely figure out MySpace, especially compared to Mambo & Joomla.), I can quickly deploy a website for a client in hours and have them trained in less than a day. I’ve done this enough to where I’m about to start recording training sessions with Camtasia Studio to train people on how to edit posts, change certain things around, what happens when Plugins go bad, etc. When working on these projects, they go so quickly, that my hourly rate is what I would get as a contract working for some company doing SharePoint work, and the client is tickled pink that they can work on their own site for a fraction of the cost of what a custom designed site would be.
ECM work is out there, just stay on top of the latest news and blog info, keep playing around with the products and keep your resume fresh.
