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Path Finder
Bob Weinstein is a journalist who covers technology, project management, the workplace and career development.
It’s mind-boggling how much stuff has been written about career paths. The experts tell us that everyone ought to have one. It doesn’t matter where you are on the career ladder. For power jobs, they’re a must. In concept, the pundits are right. Read on and find out why.
What is a career path, exactly? Simply, it’s the way in which you develop and plan your career. And it rests upon a bunch of factors, such as your education, your skills, the job market, the economy and, ideally, your preferences--what turns you on and fires your imagination.
Is it possible to have a long-term career path in a world where change is taking place at a staggering speed? It depends. In virtually all technical careers, rapid-fire change has ascended to a given, elevating career-path mapping to an imprecise process.
The more specialized the technical field, the harder career-planning becomes. IT job paths, for example, are changing every year. In 2002, more than 540,000 IT jobs were lost because the economy was in the midst of a recession. During that scary period, techies weren’t thinking much about career paths. All they cared about was securing a job that paid a living wage. Everything else was secondary.
A decade ago, there were few career paths in IT help-desk support. Today there are many. Help-desk and end-user support rank as…
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