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To gain positive visibility within the business, IT should approach upper management but never forget about the end users. This is an opportunity to wear a white hat and solve problems at the grassroots level. If end users rave about IT to their bosses, then your chances of having advocates at all levels increases.

Of course, in some workplaces it's particularly tricky to satisfy users. Williamson of Brigham Young relates his frustrations about providing services to professors. "You're dealing with some very educated people, and there is in any academia this belief that if you don't have a Ph.D., your opinion doesn't matter," he says. "Some professors have been bold enough to say it flat out--'Why am I bothering to talk to you?' There's a little attitude there."

Finally, some IT managers express the age-old maxim that nobody notices IT when things are running smoothly. "We get attention only when things go wrong," says Kosht, the Cole Tool and Die systems administrator. Again, this puts the onus on IT to solicit opinion through user feedback. You can combat that one irate user quite well if you have a documented track record of success.

Staying Special

It's important to keep up with your certifications and ensure that you acquire valued skills. Right now, for example, there's a lot of demand for IT pros certified on Cisco routers, while Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers are "relegated to the basement," Hill says. "There are millions of them." The same thing happened to Novell CNEs in the mid-to-late 1990s. The market got flooded, and skill levels declined.

And employers aren't forking over a lot of time and money for skills training. Asked how many weeks per year they receive job-related training or professional development, 17 percent said none and 28 percent said less than one week. Nineteen percent said one week, and another 19 percent said two weeks. Some 18 percent get three weeks or more.

Remember the things people said they disliked about their jobs? Inadequate training was cited by 31 percent of you. One way to shake loose some training funds is to make sure that any lessons learned get redistributed to the rest of the organization. For instance, if someone gets some specific security training, he or she should become a power-user/trainer for others in IT and even other parts of the business, if possible.

We've heard wistful memories of the days when your voicemail boxes were filled with headhunter calls. Not anymore. Now, many of the headhunters are out of business, and if you don't want to join them, you should start increasing your relevance to the business by listening to your peers and implementing some of the advice we've provided.

In any case, look on the bright side: At least you're not an accountant.

David Joachim is Network Computing's editor/business technology. James Hutchinson is Network Computing's director/editorial content. Write to them at djoachim@nwc.com or jhutchinson@nwc.com.