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What It's Like To Work at ...
Interviewee: Phil DeKok, manager of IT training and sourcing
Company: Lands' End Inc.
Main location: Dodgeville, Wis.
Number of IT employees:
About 250, plus about 60 contractors, mainly for legacy systems support
Number of employees (end users): 5,200
What's your biggest recruiting challenge?
"Where we experience difficulty, like everyone else, is in the hard-to-find skills areas: Web development, Unix, Java. [Location] is a challenge because it's difficult to describe the feeling you get working in a rural setting to people who may be working in Silicon Valley or on the East Coast. But we have success recruiting in the Midwest."
IT training initiatives: "We're on a very deliberate course to move our mainframe programmers into hard-to-fill areas where there aren't as many external...