Well, I just finished my third year here as the CIO for the University and officially started my fourth. Not a lot to update, the job is... Well, a lot. The thing I am actually the most proud of is getting my people a decent raise in a time when the University is not giving raises. Helps a bit, but the salaries here are simply so low that it does present a risk to the University that we could well lose all of our qualified IT staff too quickly to replace. With IT salaries generally going up a LOT during and even after the pandemic as companies scrambled to hire and retain qualified IT staff, being in an industry where that is generally not happening does make it easy to look at other places.
I mean over the 20+ years I worked at the University of Illinois, I can count on one hand the number of real raises I got which did not involve changing jobs/Departments. Actually that number is essentially zero. 2 years of actual pay cuts where they did the "furlough" thing. After University leadership was forced to actually follow the Federal laws on furloughs the second time it did not happen again. Turns out when your business model relies on your IT personnel working 50-60 hours/week without complaint, having them restricted to 32 hours for 2 weeks (which could not be concurrent AND the employee went from "exempt" to "hourly" invoking overtime should they work past 32 hours) really threw a massive wrench into the workings of the place... I mean I DID get raises, but that was always me moving between jobs/Departments and being promoted. There was never really a concern about retaining IT folks because at the end of the day the digital janitors were easily replaceable as far as University leadership/the Faculty were concerned.
Not actively looking elsewhere, but getting more and more "We invite you to apply" mails from HR and Headhunters... I mean it's just them scraping my LinkedIn page which is essentially my resume and saying "close enough" as on paper at least I have all of the correct pre-requisites to make it past the first pass of the search. My concern is that the instability here accelerates and causes us to lose more folks... Or the firings expand. Hoping things stabilize, but fortune favors the prepared, so get ready for whatever comes up I suppose.
