The new economy puts you in the driver’s seat of your
career. Can you handle it? We’ll show you how.
The days of building a lifelong IT career at a single
company are long gone. And now, the days of building a lifelong IT career just
within the IT department are dwindling, too.
Technology professionals today are just as often advancing
their careers through a marketing group or supply chain organizations as they
are through an application development team or software quality group. Tech
staffers are migrating into new roles frequently with non-T job titles throughout
the enterprise, working on an array of projects that require tech savvy in
addition to business and process knowledge, management skills and more.
You can’t think
too far out. It’s more important to be flexible enough in the three to five
year time frame. Don’t say, ’20 years from now, I want to be a CIO,’ because
then, that’s all you’re looking for.
To move ahead in 2013, you’ll first to drop any lingering
notions of vertical ladder-climbing. After that, it’s all about exiting your
comfort zone and actively seeking out new and different opportunities, rather
than relying on traditional organizational charts, human resources or even your
own immediate manager. Your very best career strategy, experts say, it to take
over the navigation controls yourself. Your very career and livelihood depend
on the out-of-the-box thinking that goes into formulating and then executing
such a strategy.
There’s no doubt the process of career strategizing can be
daunting, but it can also be empowering because your strategy will be based on
your individual passions and skills as well as your career goals.
We asked veteran IT professionals to share their best advice
for mapping and continually updating a personalized guide too your career
future. You can start by deleting your old plans, because 2013 marks the start
of a radically different IT career landscape.
Do Your Research
Not all career strategies must be drawn entirely from scratch.
Check first to see what kind of career tools or development programs your
potential or current employer may have on the books. “Find out if they’re going
to vest in your career and ask about movement of IT people into different
roles,” advises Andrew Macaulay, senior vice president of IT at Bellevue, Wash-based
Clearwire, which builds and operates mobile broadband networks. While most IT
professional are indeed on their own, an increasing number or companies have or
are developing detailed plans for rotating and advancing employees through
different roles.
“We have specific job descriptions that help employees see
what they need to do go get to where they want to go,” Macaulay says. “People
are laying out their careers three years at time and creating their individual
development goals to get there.”
At BNSF Railway in Fort Worth, Texas, recent college
graduates are recruited in to a management training program, which includes
rotating through various assignments across the freight transportation company.
“We spend time educating people in what BNSF is about and how learn overnight.
We’re trying to accelerate the learning curve.”
Olsovsky says teaching participants about BNSF’s culture is
one of the key goals. “While going through all of their assignments, people
learn that BNSF is an operations-oriented company. That’s the culture. We move
freight,” she says. “In an operations culture, what gets rewarded are those
things that deal with operations, like dealing with a crisis,” she says. As an
IT professional, “you have to figure out a company’s culture and decide if it’s
for you,” she adds. “It’s a way to shortcut your way to rewards. One area where
I see people miss steps is not under-standing the culture of the company
they’re in.”
Time Your Moves
Jim Clementson, director of technology at Providence Health,
likens the points on a career plan to steppingstones across a stream. Their
ultimate purpose is to help you get to the other side, but it’s best to take
them one at a time.
“You can’t think too far out. It’s more important to be
flexible enough in the three-to-five-year time frame,” he advises. “Don’t say,
’20 years from now, I want to be a CIO,’ because then, that’s all you’re
looking for.” It’s more important to be open to a wide range of roles that could
broaden your knowledge and help you acquire experience that will serve you well
over the long term, he says.
In his own career, Clementson moved from a software
developer role at Arco Alaska to the company’s service center, which in turn
“opened doors into the infrastructure realm,” he says. He ended up leading a
Mac-to-PC migration project. After that, he went back to software development
for a while, and then moved in to the healthcare industry. There, his
experience with the Arco migration project helped him land a leadership role on
an electronic medical record project, and that led to his current role as
director of delivery for infrastructure.
“It’s all about looking at what’s available and adjusting
things and stretching yourself,” he says. “You have to be comfortable and
willing to move into the opportunities that are out there.”
Olsovsky says 18 months to two years is a good benchmark. By
then, you understand the role and it’s time to make the next move, she says.
“But you have to be thoughtful about your progression,” she
warns. “If you’re an applications developer in marketing systems and you know
marketing systems, that’s great. But if the boss has an opening in operations
systems, that’s better choice because [you’ll] get an operations back-ground
for the next progression. You have to keep your eyes open for side-to-side
moves that move you ahead.”
Rotation, Rotation, Rotation
The most effective career strategy is more directional than
specific. That is, it may point to an ultimate dream position, such as a
directorship or executive management role, but it should also take into account
the fact that, inevitably, there are multiple routes to the same destination.
“Statistically, if you look at CIOs, very few of them grow
up in just the infra-structure area alone,” says Cora Carmody, CIO at Jacobs
Engineering Group, a $15 billion global construction and engineering services
company. “We try to keep that in mind for people who are coming up in
infrastructure. We want to get them cross-functional experience so they have
more capability to take my job.”
I tell people that
it doesn’t matter how technical you are; you deal with people so your people
skills will always need maintenance. And you’re supporting a business, so you
[must continually] learn about the business.
Early on in your career, it’s all about acquiring multiple
experiences, according to successful IT veterans.
“The first thing you have to do in your career is touch a
lot of things. Check out a bunch of areas and see which ones spark your
passion,” says Jamie Hamilton, vice president of software engineering at
Quicken Loans in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Quicken is a major online lender, and “the underlying things
that makes our whole business possible is technology,” Hamilton notes. “We have
a team of 200 software engineers who develop internal applications and other
systems for the mortgage process, marking and mobile apps. The tech team takes
a lot of responsibility to move the company forward. IT drives the business.”
That means a lot of opportunities to move around and gain experience across
multiple areas, says Hamilton, adding that “you should remain broad in
experience at the beginning and don’t jump into a specialization.”
“Early in their careers, most people do not have an exact
idea of what they want to do, mainly because they don’t know what the
possibilities are,” says Macaulay. “You don’t know what you don’t know, but
meanwhile, there are a number of paths.”
At Clearwire, for example, IT pros can pursue a
super-technical individual contributor role, go down a more traditional
management track or gain experience in people management and/or project
management. Macaulay says he advises employees to volunteer for assignments in
all of those areas to get an idea of what they like. His message is, “Identify
your passions.”
Jacobs Engineering sets up an individual development plan
with each IT employee to learn what skills staffers want to acquire and what
their project interests and career goals are. The plan is used as a guide for
career rotation roles and cross-functional assignments. “This is something we
do, not just for college graduates, but for everybody,” says Carmody.
