Today is my birthday, and one of my means of celebration is to shine birthday candle light on a selection of job vacancies posted on the official jobs board of the State of Wisconsin. I applied for several positions which matched my experience very well but saw many others which inspired me to find out more.

Regular visitors will notice a bunch of posts dated "August 31st" sequentially had appeared on September second and third. I made that stylistic choice because this group of job vacancy reviews is a birthday treat for myself; I had actually found them on August 29th and sporadically wrote the reviews in multiple sittings throughout Labor Day weekend.

These writing sessions occurred whenever I had the chance because I also made incremental data backups, several new tee shirt designs, and progress on editing the ever-evolving book which is shaping up to be over thirty pages longer with my transition sentences and clarifying comments. I have my hands in so many things, it makes the Illuminati Rothschild bankers look like rank amateurs!

Because I spend the majority of my waking hours editing an acquaintance’s forthcoming book, I knew that either I’d present these right away or they’d never be published except maybe posthumously. As you witness now, I chose the “boss rush” approach of plowing through this batch of positions because I might not have the time for another month or so depending on how much buzz the book creates. I will release more details about the book when it launches to ensure our marketing campaign is consistent among promotional channels.

Although the book will undoubtedly bring royalties, sales will be a trickle until word-of-mouth sharing snowballs into a marketing force in its own right. Therefore, I applied for several jobs relevant to my experience and came across a bunch of other positions which stirred my imagination by practically begging for some clarification.

I worked through the finer points of selected governmental and university job vacancies posted by the State of Wisconsin. I felt surprised to see how many government agencies are seeking “application development tool” coders -- undoubtedly a boon for commissioned IT recruiters -- and was amazed at how each department has its own HR contact. While less efficient than a centralized system, I imagine without that organizational structure the unemployment rate for human resources personnel would be higher if not for this built-in redundancy.

We should, however, remember that a policy of decentralized business units nearly killed IBM before Lou Gerstner reined in the duplicate effort and interdepartmental chargebacks which allowed losses of one department to be disguised as revenue into another department. The state should be equally vigilant in its accounting, considering how duplication of services increases opportunities for misrepresentative accounting practices or outright fraud.

While I wrote this piece to organize my thoughts about those opportunities, others may benefit such as when discussion commences over my proposed screening exam for the entry-level “business automation” project position. I’ve also explained from my perspective what certain nebulous terms mean with the goal of reducing presumptuous jargon.

I was going to consolidate these into an omnibus post but decided atomization would be better for the following reasons:
1) Greater granularity by which to track which positions attracted more views from search traffic; and
2) Less scrolling if a reader clicks on a heading to load only one job vacancy review at a time instead of the default continuous “scroll” format of all posts on the main page.