Stories of the month - January 2008

Inevitably the post-Christmas January blues prompts many people into looking for a new career or job and recruitment agencies predicted a healthy flow of new candidates and continued high demand for tech skills in this analysis of the 2008 IT job market.

For those looking to change job the first step is to dig out that old CV and give it an overhaul. Where better to start than this headhunter's top tips on how to write a killer CV, which includes advice on writing a punchy profile and what skills and experience to highlight. It also warns on things to leave out of a CV - especially hobbies such as tortoise husbandry and collecting beer mats!

Stories of the month - January 2008

Click on the links below to read the stories everyone is talking about...

How to write a killer CV

Photos: What should be crowned the king of Apple cool?

Five mobile trends to watch in 2008

Shell's outsourcing plans face legal threat

2008: Crunch time for IT jobs?

Brits suffering fat pipe rage

Whitehall staff banned from removing laptops

Business execs snub Facebook

Is online TV throttling broadband networks?

Taxpayer stung by £2.25m HMRC apology

Staffing issues also dominated one of the biggest stories of the month when plans by oil giant Shell to outsource its IT to AT&T, EDS and T-Systems were leaked, revealing up to 3,200 IT staff globally could be affected.

That sparked a furious response from the trade union Amicus, which is threatening legal action against Shell over the redundancy terms for IT staff affected by the outsourcing deal.

The annual CES consumer gadget extravaganza in Las Vegas was by all accounts something of a damp squib this year, despite it being the swansong for Microsoft's Bill Gates. Not for the first time Apple stole the CES thunder at its Macworld conference a week later, unveiling the super-thin Macbook Air to the masses.

This prompted silicon.com's own Apple fan boy Seb Janacek to look back over Apple's history and pick the 10 coolest products it has ever launched from the Macintosh 128k and the first PowerBook to the iPod and the iPhone. Check out all 10 here.

The ongoing data loss fiasco in government continued with a raft of new breaches being revealed across government departments and NHS Trusts. HM Revenue & Customs admitted it was forced to cough up £2.25m to send out letters of apology to the 25 million people whose records it lost on two CDs and the theft of a Ministry of Defence laptop containing 600,000 records prompted a ban on all Whitehall staff removing laptops containing unencrypted personal data from offices.

The BBC's online on-demand iPlayer for watching TV on the web had a good Christmas with 3.5 million hits but this sparked a debate about whether ISPs can cope with the increased bandwidth consumption, with speculation that content providers such as the BBC may in future be forced to pay for network upgrades.

The speed of the broadband connections also got Brits in a rage this month with a quarter citing sluggish speed as the most annoying thing about their fat pipe service, prompting many to take out their frustration on the hardware.

Next month sees the mobile industry's annual get together at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and silicon.com looked at the five mobile trends to watch in 2008, including femtocells, convergence and mobile social networking.

But one group not down with the social networking trend is CIOs - a poll of silicon.com's CIO Jury IT user panel found most snubbed Facebook because of the amount of "silly applications" and lack of business use. Most favoured more 'grown up' networks such as LinkedIn or Plaxo.

We rounded off January with a different look at London, courtesy of new 'super zoom' aerial photos from 192.com. See if you can spot the landmarks in this photo story here.