Designing an IT Career Path

Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.

  Career Development  

IT is in your blood. You love the industry, but you are having difficulty carving out your niche. Do you want to be a developer extraordinaire, an infrastructure wizard, a database master, a Web Wonder or Project Management Maven? And once you have picked a focus, will you stay in the trenches or do you aspire to management, maybe even the CIO spot? When you consider the following (partial) list of positions available to IT professionals today, it's clear that you can’t be all things IT anymore:

• CIO: Chief Information Officer
• Network Administrator
• Network Engineer
• Software Engineer
• Application Programmer
• Systems Administrator
• Systems Programmer
• Database Administrator
• Quality Assurance Administrator
• Security Administrator
• Operations Director
• Tester/Trainer
• Change Management Administrator
• Applications Manager
• Applications Analyst
• Requirements Analyst
• Web Developer Implementation Manager
• Project Manager
• Portfolio Manager
• Process Improvement Facilitator
• Help Desk Administrator
• Incident Management Analyst
• PC Support Supervisor

So many choices, each with its own set of benefits, requirements and tradeoffs. Where to begin? Whether you are just starting out or well into your career, there are some things you should consider when designing your IT career path. In addition, the job outlook for many IT jobs is not so bright …

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