Position yourself

Don’t sit next to the boss – “you’ll look like a sycophant”` advises Professor Cary Cooper, professor of behavioural psychology, Lancaster University. Instead head for the seat opposite the boss or the chair because here you can get good eye contact with the key people.

Make eye contact

It’s essential so make it early on. Check out everyone in the room, not just the speaker. In fact, strong eye contact with the speaker or your boss will give them visual cues and increase your influence in the meeting room.

Tone it down

Men get sucked into macho power politics played out in a meeting room all too easily and think the only powerful place to be is holding court. In fact, if you hog the airwaves, people will soon get used to the sound of your voice and not hear what you’re actually saying.

Think in bullet points

These are a very useful way of communicating your views whether they’re mental notes or scribbled down. Three is a good manageable number, not too many and not too few. You can even preface your comments with I’ve three things to say’. It provides a frame for your comments.

Remember to pause

A pause is powerful: “It works like a verbal highlighter.” says Tina Lamb, trainer with The Impact Factory. If you want to emphasise a point or give credit, pause before you move on. Avoid talking without pause because people will feel excluded.

Ducking out

Sometimes, though, a meeting can get too much, plus contractors can never forget they are measured on productivity as well as presence. Bear in mind these do's and don’ts when bailing out of a tedious meeting:

• Tailor your excuse. The key question to assess is ‘how will my absence be interpreted?’ and to tailor your excuse accordingly. The meeting will always be important to someone so work out whether you can afford to annoy them by your absence
• Use email. The best tactic is to bail out of a meeting before it’s even started and it’s easy to ping the organiser an email saying you can’t attend this one. Offer to contribute some thoughts on agenda items by email.
• Customers first. The fact that you could be spending the time with customers or clients is always a legitimate excuse for not attending a meeting.
• Join up the dots. Always give a rationale for and early departure and don’t let people fill in the gaps: it’s a human tendency to interpret negatively

The days of the IT specialist are numbered and ambitious contractors should strive to evolve into ‘versatilists’, individuals who handle multiple disciplines and assignments. Gartner Group, who coined the term, predicts that by 2010, the IT specialist job market will decline by 40 percent and be supplanted by demand for versatilists.

“IT professionals should decide now whether they want to direct themselves to new domains of expertise”, says Dianne Morello vp research at Gartner. “They’ll need to and develop new practical experience in industries market sectors and core business processes that would help them in that domain.”

Think outside technology silos

Contractors who make it as one of the new breed, will have to learn to think outside traditional technology silos. That means grasping new technologies quickly and applying them to business problems rather than technology solutions. Brushing up on soft skills goes without saying.

IT pros working on big integration projects are already getting a taste of things to come. At Unilever, for example, IT departments, previously focussed on technology products have been reorganised to deal with issues such as capacity and availability. In the past a team was responsible for maintaining either Wintel or Unix platforms but the new-look team will deal with the two.

New skills and behaviours sought

The broadness calls for new behaviours and skills from IT staff across the board. “Service delivery and problem management affects everyone – and this broadens your thinking beyond the traditional service silos... When the IT department builds a SAP system, it’s thinking beyond programming interfaces to disaster recovery”, according to Geoff Thirlwall VP Unilever Europe, IT Services.

Starwood Hotels is another company seeking and valuing the hybrid contractor more highly. A recent project required close integration of object and SQL databases. “Most modern applications do require knowledge of object and relational programming. These [hybrid] guys are not easy to find”, says Song Park, director of availability technologies at Starwood.

Communicate –and accept challenge

Part of the success factor in crossing technology boundaries, is good communication. Happily it iss possible to practise this in any job and improve too.  English Heritage reports that contractors who communicate with users about progress on problem solving get more brownie than more technically proficient peers who go it alone.