Guest Author - J. Lynn

In the world of IT, no job is truly secure unless you work for yourself. Even then, you still rely on pleasing clients to keep a flow of income. For both, you have to take charge of your position to ensure job security. You do this by making yourself into the indispensable IT employee.

There are many reasons for lay-offs. Whether business is slow or your entire department is on the downsizing platter, you can use a few key tools to lock yourself into your job and make it nearly impossible for your supervisor to fire you.

The first thing you need to do is become the point person for your team. If you don’t have a team, you should become the point person for your department or specialty. When people have questions and concerns, they should know that you are the most knowledgeable person on the subject, that you will tackle their issue quickly and completely and that you are dependable to see it through to the end. If you really want to earn points, you can schedule lunches and meetings with other people in your company and find out their expertise and create an ‘Expert’ list.

Everyone in the company will thank you for that. Whether it is a formal document detailing the Unix and Firewall experts or something as basic as “Excel Formulas Expert” or “Mail Merge Expert in Microsoft Word”, it will benefit everyone to know who to contact when they have an issue that needs quick resolution.

When I was in my first IT position with a large discount retailer in the Midwest, I created an org chart of my area and a phone list of contacts in each department and their specialty. Many times an Administrator, either receptionist or Administrative Assistant will typically handle this, but in doing it yourself, you can customize so that it highlights your particular strong points in responsibilities. Be sure to distribute it through your internal communications means and make sure that everyone knows you created it by adding your name or initials to the footer of the document.

Another way to become indispensable is to get additional training for your job so that you know the ins and outs of your position. It’s also a good idea to know the same for the next position you would like to enter into. If you work with a particular software program, contact that company and find out if there is Certifications that you can obtain being an intermediate or expert user. Certifications add credibility to your work. It also says that you go the extra mile to do a good job.

Create a “Bus” book for your job. The “Bus” book is the Encyclopedia of your job. It’s a book that anyone can pick up and perfom your job if you should say get hit by a bus on the way to work. As a team player, you don’t want to call in sick one day and have to spend two hours on the phone teaching a co-worker how to log into your computer and send out a saved mass email for a completed project. You can provide detailed instructions in your Bus Book.

The Bus book should include:

• Your job description
• Daily To-Do list
• Weekly To-Do list and responsibility
• Detailed instructions to carry out each job responsibility ( including print screens)
• Contact list with telephone, fax and email information for the people you have daily communications with.
• Important Documents list ( and list of where to find them in your files or on your computer)

The most important thing you can do to become indispensable is to always meet your supervisor’s expectations of you. In order to do this, the first thing you need to do is find out what those expectations are. Schedule an informal meeting with your supervisor and together come up with objectives for your position. Arrive to the meeting with several goals already written.

After that first meeting with your supervisor, discuss scheduling weekly or monthly meetings or status updates so that you can track your progress and make sure your supervisor knows how well you are progressing in position. At each status meeting, bring along two typed copies of the last meeting - one for your boss and one for you-, the results in the form of dates you completed each project and their outcomes, along with the next week’s ( month’s) objectives. Once the meeting is over, use that form to plan out your work week and file the form away in a special folder for that purpose.

At the end of each year or when it is time for Review season, you can quickly go to your ‘Status’ folder and be able to see everything that you worked on for the year. Working from the Status updates, you can pull together a review in record time and detail examples of how well you performed over time. It’s also great to use in situations where your supervisor might have missed some of your accomplishments.

There are many ways to make your job indispensable. Use this article to think about what things you can do in your company to go the extra mile and shine. Remember, they never fire the Superstar.