Strategies For Securing Your IT Career
April 26, 2007 By Rob England
As technology skills become more of a commodity, your IT career depends on providing added value. Here are some ways to stay ahead of the pack.
In a previous article we looked at the position IT technical people find themselves in as technology skills become more of a commodity, and the organization expects broader skills and greater ROI from their higher-value IT employees. If you are an IT technical person of increasing seniority (and cost), here are options for staying ahead of the layoffs.
As you get older, you get slower, uglier and more expensive. As your work rate goes down and your cost goes up, you must compensate by expanding your skills and adding more value to the organization. If you depend on product and technology expertise alone, you will compare less and less favorably to eager cheap young pups wanting a crack at your job on their way up. When the 5% layoff tranche comes through, your colleagues are your competitors. Make sure you are doing more to add value back to the business (and to be seen to add value back to the business) than most of them are.
Where to from here?
More of the same. You can stay a technologist. Get deeper and wider. Stay ahead of the kids. In fact, guide, train and mentor them so you are adding value back. Just accept you won’t be the centre of the universe any more.
Management.
That is a fine and challenging option if you are good at it. Typically, technical people aren’t. But by all means have a go: While finding out whether you are suited or not, it will be an enlightening experience. If you really try to embrace the thinking, it will give entirely new perspectives.
Sales.
See “management” above.
Software Engineer.
You can grow your engineering skills. Engineers understand how the world works: how systems behave, how problems get solved. They put things together, select components and materials to meet a spec, figure out new ways to use things and to do things. They develop gut instincts for what works, how things scale, how much is needed.
Software Architect.
Architecting isn’t about selecting which products, or how many servers to put them on. Architecting is about understanding the business requirement in the client’s terms, translating that into terms we understand, then working with engineers to determining the best technologies and designs to use to meet that requirement, and to understand how to deliver that.
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