An IT manager is only as good as his or her team is. This means that one of the most critical skills that an IT manager has is the ability to build the perfect team. The better a team that you can build, the better your team is going to make you look!

What You'll Find Inside:

• IT leaders deal with the three d's: Death, divorce, and disease
• How to keep your team from leaving as the economy improves
• How do IT leaders write a good job description?
• How to hire IT people: What they never told you

Building a world-class IT team starts with the recruiting process. You are going to have to understand the challenges associated with hiring the right people and what it takes to ensure that you have a truly diverse team. Where to look for the best candidates can be confusing, but often they are located locally.

Getting good people for your team is not all that you have to do. Once you've gotten them, you now have the responsibility of managing their expectations - which in some cases can be quite high. When people agree to join your team, they have expectations that you'll have their back when life's challenges come along and you need to be aware of these expectations.

No team is fixed, there are always changes happening. As a successful IT manager you are going to have to make sure that your staff are not planning on leaving you. You need to prevent staffing disasters before they occur. When people do leave, it presents you with an open positon on your team that you need to fill correctly.

Filling jobs starts with the same steps - creating an accurate job description that lays out what you are looking for in your candidates. It's going to be up to you to select the right person for the open job, but the challenge is that most of us have never had any training in how to do this correctly.