We all know the nerd as the cliché figure of American high school films: the boys are highly talented but unsportsmanlike guys who were the counterpart to the “jocks”, the athletic but blunt football players at the top of the school hierarchy. The nerd, on the other hand, pretty much depicts the bottom link in the social chain – a lonely superbrain that grinds its teeth and sometimes jealous in front of the computer and proves itself unsuitable for small talk every day. A little cellar child, cold pizza, a high affinity for computer games and the nerd is finished as a stereotype of the 80s information society.
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The picture in society has changed with the increasing penetration of everyday digital worlds: Fortunately, IT people in large parts of the population are no longer regarded as freaks, but rather as tech-savvy people who carry a lot of knowledge, drive technologies and thus also our questions Time to answer our society. Besides, they also earn quite well.
Employers cannot find their best employees through job boards or at recruiting fairs. Suitable NGNs find YOU and choose their employers themselves. In this process, fair cooperation in the existing circle of colleagues, flat hierarchies and a management team that maintains contact with the base and the projects play the main roles.
Promoting young people, such as the provision of internships with a real desire to integrate interns and students into the company, is also part of the HR success cocktail for me. This applies to all five IT types, which I describe below and which, we are sure agree, rarely stand before us in their pure form.
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… impresses with an extremely high level of comprehension. He often realizes, often used at the interface between hardware and software projects, connections and dependencies of different disciplines and analyzes them precisely. Self-taught people like to work alone, often unobserved, and, formerly laughed at as Kellerkind developers, have now matured into sought-after experts for their companies.
Self-motivated IT self-educators continuously train themselves, are extremely creative and look for solutions instead of reasons why something doesn’t work. They are also happy to show off their skills as tinkerers, tinkerers and solderers. They like a stable, professional environment in that they do not always have to prove their skills to new people and are allowed to use the freedom to experiment independently.
When the last screw is soldered and the last code nut is cracked, he likes to look at Dr. Who.
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… likes to pitch his tent with a permanent employer in order to travel from project to project from there. He is flexible, mostly family-independent and curious about other people, teams and companies. Accordingly, with Verve, he also goes into his external projects and integrates quickly into existing internal structures. A life as a freelancer is too tiring for him because it goes hand in hand with activities that take him away from his actual IT route: tax returns, health insurance costs and this unspeakable necessity called acquisition.
Semi-nomads feel a temporary urge for freedom and often find the best of two worlds in IT consulting firms that hire experts and send talented people. As a positive effect, digital semi-nomads with their communicative nature often form the basis for long-term customer relationships.
In the evening, in the hotel room of a foreign city, crime scene cleaner runs for him.
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… likes to see himself as a kind of IT superhero who saves IT projects in need. Or in terms of business formulated as an interim manager who creates the turnaround for sluggish developments. Because of the talent mix of empathy (no one involved in the project stepping on their feet …) and ability to abstraction, they are few and far between. The troubleshooter works calmly, goal-oriented, with an overview and with psychological sensitivity for team blockades. For consulting firms, which are often consulted when others have already dropped the IT child into the well, it forms the heart of many a task force.
After successful project rescue, he relaxes with Better call Saul.
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… is a relatively young, but rapidly growing young talent in the IT job universe. The specialized nestling, so to speak, but from my point of view, in future, it will have to find a place in every consulting company. The cybercriminal has a knack for vulnerabilities in IT structures, knows GDPR, IT-SiG and KRITIS inside out and feels a passion for ethical hacking. The more extensive cyberattacks and data protection issues penetrate medium-sized companies, the more mature this IT type becomes, and the more indispensable it is.
He quenched his cyber curiosity with Mr. Robot.
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… is traditionally a career changer wit
h many years of professional experience. Today’s professional and study fields, for example from the MINT areas, leave young IT professionals plenty of room for subsequent activities. This creates patchwork resumes, in which the business information scientist may also work as a teacher after graduation before heading back to the IT world. Each occupied secondary location of a jack-of-all-trades has important knowledge and experience that later turns out to be valuable in the consulting and project environment.
This species has dealt with very different people in professional life and knows that IT terms and their interrelationships are not self-explanatory. Ergo, he can explain complex issues in an understandable manner and takes time for this. He is the most distant from the original nerd of all the NGNs mentioned, mostly has family and hobbies that get by without electricity!
Broadly themed, he shows an increased love of TV for Big Bang theory.