Skilled financial IT pros can take their careers to the bank

There's a lot more to IT than software development. Financial end users like insurance companies and banks offer good jobs and complex assignments in IT

The sector's evolving employment picture includes a surprising range of challenging technology work

By Jon Boroshok
Contributing Editor

Over the past two years the financial services industry has pulled down more than its share of negative media coverage. But the sector's employment picture is considerably brighter now, particularly for IT professionals with the right skills.

"Recessions and economic downturns create conditions for the next boom," says Jeff Altman, a longtime search professional known to some of his clients as "the big game hunter." Altman supplies financial services IT pros, and works for professional services firms looking for them. There's IT job growth on Wall Street right now, he believes, and it's creating demand and raising salaries.

Altman predicts there will be more news about downturns in other areas of the economy, but it's unlikely to affect financial IT hiring. "Wall Street and the overall labor market have already started to diverge," he says.

Wall Street, of course, is not just banks, but also trading firms, hedge funds and more. These companies are poised for growth, looking to restructure and improve their IT to make it faster and cheaper. In any trading environment the speed of transactions can greatly affect the ability to make money, so investment firms are willing to pay for expertise, either through direct hires or with outsourced consulting projects. IT pros often work with traders, helping them build models.

Brilliant people are in demand
Financial companies look for top-class IT pros. A diploma from a top-tier school is certainly a plus but by no means essential, because firms are focused on the right mix of expertise and cultural fit.

Skills in particular demand include Java, J2EE, C#, C++ for Linux, and business knowledge, especially knowledge of high-frequency trading, Altman says. "Wall Street wants to know how to create a model that will let firms trade even faster."

The IT picture in mid-America
Away from the enticements of Wall Street and closer to mid-America, Chris Knapp is executive director of the Capital Area IT Council, a Lansing, MI-based regional skills alliance. He says demand for IT pros is growing at financial sector companies in his area, too.

"Lansing is home to a half-dozen national insurance company HQs and has a strong insurance and financial services sector," says Knapp. He works with many of the companies' IT departments as they recruit and train the IT pros they need to sustain and grow their local presence.

Of some 9,000 local residents currently working in IT, only about half are at "pure IT" companies like software developers, data centers and managed-service providers. The rest are spread out in end-user firms. These companies are continuing to grow despite the economy, reflecting similar trends nationwide, Knapp says.

Financial IT companies are looking for programmer analysts, business analysts, DBAs and data security specialists for compliance issues. Knapp points out that the larger the organization, the more "traditional" IT needs it's likely to have. And of course a lot of the demand comes from "non-marquee" companies.

Knapp notes that mid-American companies face the challenge of attracting IT students, who apply to software companies in and outside the region but don't always think of financial IT end users like insurance companies and banks. The Capital Area IT Council tries to build more awareness by scheduling "tech tours," which give local college students opportunities to explore the IT user community through a series of "live, work and play" experiences.

Jacob Waah: IT comes naturally at Mass Mutual Life
Jacob Waah grew up in Cameroon, and came to the U.S. in 1994 with the equivalent of a community college degree in computer systems. With some additional community-based training in Oracle, he landed a job at an IT consulting company in Maryland. He became a U.S. citizen soon afterward.

In 2000 he went to work for the Clopay Corp, a multi-billion dollar manufacturing company. "Clopay sent me to Oracle University, where I did all five tracks in six months," he remembers. He's now an Oracle-certified professional and has a foundation certificate in IT service management.

His Oracle University courses were taught in Cincinnati, and when the program ended he went on to get a BSIT from the University of Phoenix, partly at the Cincinnati campus and partly on line. "I was heading for management, and the company advised me that I really needed to get a degree," he explains. At Clopay he moved from senior database architect and project manager to director of IT, responsible for global IT strategic planning and application support. The job was exciting, but involved a lot of domestic and overseas travel.

"By that time my wife and I had a child, and I didn't want to travel so much," he says. In 2008 he went to work for the State of Ohio government as deputy director of enterprise applications architecture and infrastructure. He designed, developed and managed the implementation of the state's first Oracle/PeopleSoft ERP application. "We always intended to outsource the program to a managed services company," he explains, so once the implementation was complete he was in the job market again.

In 2009 he found his present job at Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co (Springfield, MA). He moved there because he liked its promise of growth and financial stability as a policyholder-owned company.

Today Waah is based at Mass Mutual HQ, working in the enterprise technology organization as manager of enterprise release management for the company. He provides leadership in defining and managing enterprise processes for scheduling and releasing software and hardware: establishing the strategic approach to the function and what will be required to make it operational. He also evaluates industry best practices and recommends strategies to address IT service management. He likes the task of aligning change and innovation with business needs.

And he's proud of his past mentoring and training success with customer support service reps. "You always want to hire the best talent," he says, "but you can help people reach even greater heights through effective mentoring and coaching."

Waah speaks English, French and five African dialects; he has used his French on the job while working on European opportunities and traveling overseas. In the future he's hoping for more community involvement and mentoring work as he continues to contribute at MassMutual.

Waah is a member of the grants review panel on IT projects at the National Science Foundation. He's also a member of the Information Technology Senior Management Forum (ITSMF), a national organization that fosters upper-level executive talent among African American IT pros.

Benedict Peter is a developer at SWIFT
Benedict Princy Peter comes from the southern part of India. She earned her BS in CS and engineering at Thiagarajar College of Engineering in India, and joined WIPRO Technologies, a top IT company in India.

After a year there as a project engineer she came to the U.S. in 2003 to pursue an MSCS at George Mason University (Fairfax, VA). "It had always been my dream, and it truly was an amazing experience," says Peter.

In 2005 she was recruited by SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecom, which has its world HQ in Belgium and U.S. offices in New York, NY and San Francisco, CA. She joined the secure financial messaging service company as an associate developer, and today she's a developer working in both Java and Oracle.

Peter designs, develops, packages and maintains critical customer-facing apps. She's also responsible for upgrade and migration of legacy SWIFT apps, and for ensuring timely delivery of software releases. Coding in Java has also given her the opportunity to try J2E, and she's enjoyed the chance, she says.

She appreciates SWIFT's openness to innovation, which gives her every opportunity to try new tools and ideas.

For example, she leads the company's secure channel application server project, a customer-facing financial app used worldwide by bank security officers.

Keeping up with security concerns is a fascinating challenge for Peter. She hopes to move up to senior developer status, and perhaps go for an MBA with SWIFT's tuition benefits.

Michael Shepelak, who heads up SWIFT HR in the Americas, is pleased with Peter's progress. "We work very hard to attract diverse talent," he says. "Diversity is part of our DNA and we are very proud of SWIFT's diverse international workforce, made up of more than sixty nationalities globally."

Gary Kensey supports end user tools at Capital One
Capital One Financial Corp (McLean, VA) is a financial services institution with close to a thousand bank branches in NY, NJ, TX, LA, MD, VA and DC. As part of its enterprise technology organization, Gary Kensey supports a variety of end user collaboration tools including videoconferencing, BlackBerry services, collaboration software and mobility tools.

He manages a team that provides IT end user support for the institution's senior executive team, including the office of the CEO, and plays a key role in communicating with end users across the business, getting the word out on new and existing IT services, resources and tools.

Kensey completed his BS from Millersville University (Millersville, PA) in 1996. Although he always liked computers and had some classes in IT, his BS is in biology, hardly the traditional path to an IT career.

"Back then CS involved mostly you and the terminal and a bunch of code, and not much in the way of collaborating with other humans," Kensey explains. "I switched to a biology degree with the aspiration to pursue a medical profession that involved working with other people."

After graduation he started working in respiratory therapy at Children's National Medical Center (Washington, DC). Then the tech boom hit and reinvigorated IT with a whole new collaborative feel, and Kensey decided to go back into IT, leveraging his knowledge and experience working with hospital systems.

"I was able to transition from doing IT projects for hospitals to working for Capital One," Kensey says. "I've been able to apply the analytical, communication and process management skills I learned in my undergraduate program throughout my IT career."

Kensey has been with Capital One for ten years. He's been promoted several times and selected to participate in an executive MBA program; he received his MBA from the University of Maryland in 2008.

Today, as part of a broad IT initiative to integrate recently acquired banking infrastructure, Kensey's team is working on a project to unify the desktop environment, including connectivity, apps and configurations.

Kensey enjoys the challenges of his job and the opportunity to work with complex tools and leverage technology to meet business requirements for end users. He also enjoys the teamwork and environment. "Everyone is committed to working toward the same goal, and that is really motivating. All my colleagues are as driven as I am and focused on what needs to be accomplished," says Kensey.

At Capital One Kensey has had both official and unofficial mentors. He's a member of the African American network, which provided him with an executive coach at one point. He's also received support on an ongoing basis from his peers, managers and senior leaders.

"That kind of support is very common in our culture," he explains.

Kensey plans to stay in technology while continuing to leverage his business background. He's active in the Society for Information Management, the National Black MBA Association, and some local community organizations.

Vicki Mirandah, senior director of HR at Capital One, notes that the institution "strives to attract the best people and give them the opportunity to be great! Having a diverse range of talents, perspectives, backgrounds and experiences is an invaluable asset for our business and lets us better serve our customers and communities."

Patricio Cobar focuses on the NY Fed's public-facing website
Honduras native Patricio Cobar came to the U.S. at the age of twenty. He earned his BSCS and MSCS at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York. "I was inspired by the 90's Internet boom," says Cobar. "It looked exciting."

His first job out of school was in network support for the Church Avenue Merchants Block Association, a nonprofit in Brooklyn, New York. Today Cobar works for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, one of twelve regional banks which, together with the Board of Governors in Washington, DC, make up the Federal Reserve System. The regional banks work within the Federal Reserve System and with other public- and private-sector institutions to ensure the safety, soundness and vitality of U.S. economic and financial systems.

Cobar has been with the New York Fed since 2001, and he's now a senior member of the IT support staff. He does website support and software development and comes up with technical solutions; as part of the bank's Web communications group he focuses on the Fed's public-facing website.

The best part of the job for him is its technical challenges. He manages his own work and helps make policy. He takes pride in a mobile version of the New York Fed's website that he delivered, developing not only the specs but the business rationale as well.

Another source of pride was automating the publishing of financial data to make it available online. This, he explains, lets the newswires capture data and create headlines on the fly.

Being Hispanic has never been an issue for Cobar at the New York Fed: the bank is committed to diversity and inclusion, and has a diversity council and many diversity affinity groups, he says. He has represented the bank at SHPE career fairs.

"I'm at the point in life and career where I'm thinking about project management," he concludes.

Diane T. Ashley, VP and chief diversity officer, adds that "A commitment to diversity and a spirit of openness and inclusion are important components of the New York Fed's broader business strategy. Diversity is critical in building a truly inclusive workplace."

Ulysses Stanley, Jr: infrastructure tech services at the Hartford
Ulysses Stanley, Jr is a senior specialist voice and data analyst for Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc (Hartford, CT). He works in the enterprise-wide infrastructure technology services area. His role, he says, is to help the management team optimize operational efficiencies. This is done "through continuous service improvement reporting, best practices support and various service methodologies," he explains.

Right now, Stanley is working on the Hartford's Bus-iness Application Mix 2010 project. The idea is to cut the time needed to build new or refreshed desktop and laptop resources for deployment to the company's workforce. A cost reduction component will let the project team condense and simplify Hartford's business software portfolio while recouping costs on unused software licenses.

Stanley has been with the company for eight years. He's a techie without a formal degree, although he has taken courses in business admin and communications at local colleges and universities.

As an IT manager, Stanley championed the successful implementation of software-based sniffer technology enterprise-wide. "The technology produced a more robust troubleshooting solution that can be managed centrally for more efficiency," he says.

He found his way to IT after participating in Engineering for Disadvantaged Youth, a summer program offered by the University of Bridgeport (Bridgeport, CT). "I decided that a career in IT would be stimulating and worthwhile. From then on I looked for work that aligned with my interest in business technology," he says.

The financial services industry ramped up its dependence on office automation technologies in the mid-1980s, Stanley explains. "I followed the trend and focused on working with companies that had high investments in office technology solutions."

In his career Stanley has worked as a bank teller with Lafayette Bank & Trust, and been in a leadership training program at Connecticut Bank and Trust where he worked as an NCR operator.

Today he's a member of the Hartford's diversity network leadership council, and president of the Black Insurance Professional Network, a business resource group at the company.

His advice to today's IT hopefuls: "Step out of your comfort zone and leverage professional and social networking. Partner with HR or a business segment in your organization and serve as a career mentor or service volunteer. It's a great way to expand your technical and communication skills."

Candice Dunlap: beyond IT at SWIFT
IT people are not only in demand in the financial arena; in some cases IT can be a steppingstone to a whole other career. That's how it was for Candice Dunlap, who has gone beyond IT to a new career in human resources. She's currently an associate HR generalist, involved with recruiting, training coordination, and running background checks on job candidates.

Dunlap was always a fairly "nontraditional" IT pro, she says, starting with a BA in music from Coastal Carolina University (Conway, SC). But when her father, a career SWIFT employee, recommended her for a job there, she found she enjoyed the challenge of working in IT. SWIFT brought her in as a systems and network controller in the operations center in 2005 and she worked there for four years, monitoring computers and systems in a constantly changing environment.

As systems became more stable, Dunlap looked for more career options. Last year she went through a six-week training period with a mentor, began on a professional HR management certification course, and launched into the expansive world of HR at SWIFT.

D/C

Jon Boroshok is a freelance writer in Westford, MA.

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