Master Technician, Darril Gibson, breaks down the essential soft skills for peak performance and upward mobility in IT help desk job roles.

Help desk technicians (and all IT professionals) need a full range of hard and soft skills to excel in their career. Hard skills are specific, measurable abilities, such as configuring Windows or troubleshooting a Cisco network, while soft skills refer to a person’s capacity to effectively interact with others. As demand for IT talent continues to rise and the workforce becomes more competitive, those who compliment their knowledge and training with superior soft skills will be in the best position for long-term success.

Here are five of the most advantageous soft skills for IT help desk technicians:

Scott Skinger, CEO and Founder of TrainSignal, answers the age-old question of aspiring IT professionals; “Which is most important to landing the job: IT certifications, real-world experience or a college degree?”

It’s that inevitable fork in the road for an IT professional. Determining the path that will lead you to the most success when sprucing up your resume to land that next job. What are employers looking for? Certifications? Experience? Degrees? Some combination of the three? It’s a dilemma faced by many looking to launch or advance their careers.

Ten years ago, I founded my company TrainSignal to develop training courses that help IT professionals learn new skills to grow their careers. Over the years, I've spoken to a lot of hiring managers to understand what grabs their attention when evaluating resumes. As it turns out, most are zoning in on those three factors: IT certifications, hands-on experience and education. So how do you determine the right blend to wow your future employer?

Here are some considerations when weighing the value of certifications, experience and degrees:

In the competitive world of Information Technology, especially with today’s digital job search & application methods, technology employers are bombarded with hundreds of IT resumes daily. If you have a resume, you’re off to a good start. But what sets you, a qualified IT professional, apart from the other candidates? They have an effective resume that’s optimized for the job they’re applying to. A properly formed resume will increase your chances of landing the IT job you want.

Here are five tips to help you write an effective IT resume:

In Part 1 of this post - Personal Branding Part 1: How to Define Yours - we told you why it’s important to have a personal brand, and how you can define your own. This week, we are going to talk about marketing your brand. There are a lot of ways to promote your personal brand, all of which fall into two categories: Online and Off.

Establishing a personal brand is now a crucial part of a successful job search. Since we think it’s such an important tool for job seekers to understand, and because the experts we spoke to had such good advice, we decided to divide our personal branding post into two parts. Read this then check out part 2 here - Personal Branding Part 2: Marketing Yourself.

Used strategically, LinkedIn is a powerful tool for online job search. It is however very common for job seekers to ignore the value of LinkedIn, and focus their efforts on the massive job search engines like CareerBuilder and Monster. The big boards should still be part of your online job search strategy, but at times like these you need to use every weapon at your disposal; LinkedIn is the strongest job search tool you never used - or at least never used to its full extent.

So you've spent the money, time and effort to become an expert on anything IT. Now where do you go? Using Redmond Report's 2010 Salary Survey for reference, factoring in lists from publications such as Forbes, Marketwatch and Kiplinger and then sticking all applicable data into some of the most sophisticated algorithms created specifically for this list, we've narrowed down the top U.S. cities to relocate to, for those both just starting their careers as well as those looking for a change. And we've also taken into account that, once your 9 to 5 is over, you'll still have to live there.