Posts Tagged ‘career’

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Only An IT Manager Could Screw Up A Job Change!

Thursday, May 5th, 2011
Image Credit It Can Be Easy To Take A Wrong Step When Changing Jobs

It Can Be Easy To Take A Wrong Step When Changing Jobs

The global economy is roaring back again and it sure seems like everyone is starting to take stock of their job and decide if they want to stay where they are or move on to greener pastures. IT managers are no exception. Perhaps you’ve grown as far as you can or perhaps you feel that you’ve done everything that you’re going to be allowed to do where you are at. If you are thinking about moving on, you had better be careful that you don’t screw up your job change…

Failing To Do Enough Research On Where You Are Going

Considering the fact that doing research, collecting data, and then making the best possible decision is such a key part of the job of being a IT manager, you’d think that we’d all do this well when it comes to looking for our next job. Well, guess again.

The folks who know such things, search consultants, say that IT managers are dropping the ball in several areas. The first is that they don’t do a good job of sizing up the market for their skills. What this means is that IT managers don’t have valid assumptions for how long it’s going to take to find their next job.

Next, IT managers somewhat surprisingly don’t do a good job of checking out the financial health of the company that they are thinking about jumping to. Sure they may check out the salary, but not the bottom line situation.

Additionally, the culture of the new company is rarely considered. If an IT manager is coming in from a free-wheeling Silicon Valley company and is considering going to work for a 100-year old insurance firm, culture becomes a big deal.

Finally, all too often IT managers assume that they are getting what’s being advertised – that the job title matches the job. Just because the new company calls the job “IT manager” does not mean that you’ll have the same level of control that you had in your old job.

Going When They Show You The Money

Hey, I like money, you like money. However, as hard as it is for both of us to understand, you can’t leave one job and go to another just because the new job pays more. This is a sure recipe for disaster.

When IT managers were asked to rank what they were looking for in a new job, pay came in at the fourth or fifth place on the list. However, all too often IT managers bump this factor up to first place when it comes time to make a decision — bad move.

Deciding To Go “From” Rather Than “To”

Just like everyone else out there, IT managers can become dissatisfied with their jobs. When this happens, they can start to make poor career decisions.

When a IT manager decides to switch jobs, it should be a carefully planned career move. However, if they are really upset with their current position, then all too often it becomes just a desperate jump to the nearest lifeboat. Since this often happens with little or no serious research into the firm that the IT manager is fleeing to, these new positions rarely last for long.

As a IT manager bounces from firm to firm, you can quickly develop a reputation as a job hopper and it will become that much harder to get your next job. No matter how bad your current job is, take the time to plan out what your next career step should be before you do anything.

What All Of This Means For You

IT managers are like everyone else: when the opportunity to move to a new job comes along, they can decide to make the jump for all of the wrong reasons. If you are aware of the most common mistakes that other IT managers have made, then you’ll have a chance to avoid them.

The mistakes that IT managers make are easily avoidable. The most common mistakes include not doing enough research on the company that they’ll be joining, being seduced by an offer of more money, and focusing on leaving the firm where they are and not taking a careful look at just exactly where they’ll be going.

Ultimately, being aware of the most common mistakes that IT managers make is the first step in avoiding them. You can switch jobs smoothly and end up in a better place, just make sure that you’re switching for all the right reasons! /p>

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that going to a company in trouble for a lot more money would be worth it?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Sure you did all of the research, you talked with all of the right people, shucks you even followed up on every Google link that you could find on the company that you were thinking about going to work for before making the jump. However, now that you’ve made the jump you are finding out that perhaps you’ve made a mistake. Now what do you do?

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Discover The Secret To IT Manager Career Success

Thursday, April 14th, 2011
Image Credit
Not All Career Ladders Go Up…

Not All Career Ladders Go Up…

IT managers are asked to do a lot of things during the average day: recruit new workers, keep the ones that they already have, resolve disputes, etc. The one thing that they also need to be doing every day is probably the thing that gets overlooked all too often: manage their careers.

Just What Is Career Development?

When we start to talk about career development, it brings up the question of just exactly what is a “career”? Maybe more importantly, what’s the difference between a career and a “job”?

I think that we can all agree that a job is a set of tasks that you work on for a given company. A sequence of jobs is what makes up your career. When we start to talk about career development, what we are really talking about is a process that you go though in which you take a look at where you are in your work life. You need to decide if you are where you want to be, and if not then you need to decide what changes you need to make and then you need to make them.

Every job that you have makes you more valuable to both your current employer as well as the next company that you’ll work for. As time passes, your career will either drift along under its own accord or you’ll manage where it goes. Which path do you want to take?

Not All Career Ladders Go Up

All too often IT managers believe that there is only one possible path for their careers – up. In the past, this may have been true. However, this is no longer the case.

Over the past few years, companies have changed the way that they are organized. Most companies have become “flatter” – they have reduced the number of layers of management that they use to run the business. What this has meant for IT managers is that there are now fewer opportunities for promotion up the traditional career ladder.

What’s needed is a different career track. The responsibility for managing your career rests firmly on your shoulders. What you need to be doing is looking at your current job and identifying the parts that you enjoy the most.

This can come down to either the different types of work that you are doing or perhaps the it has to do with the different groups within (or outside of) the company that you are interacting with.

Once you identify what you like about your current job, you then need to find another job that contains more of what you like (and less of what you don’t like) to do. The move to this new job may be more of a parallel move instead of a traditional move up the ladder.

Managing your career and ensuring that you are doing work that you enjoy is your responsibility. Career development is just one more thing that you should be doing every day.

What All Of This Means For You

On top of all of the other responsibilities that an IT manager has, you also have to manage your career. Ultimately it’s up to you to take charge of your future and make sure that you have a career and not just a job.

All too often we IT managers believe that a career can only travel in one direction: up. In the world in which we live in, flattened organizations often make this difficult, if not impossible, to do. IT managers need to start to realize that they can move sideways in their careers as they seek new jobs that better match what their interests and passions are.

The one thing that nobody ever takes the time to teach IT managers is how best to manage their own careers. That means that we end up picking it up along the way. The most important point is that we need to always be working on it so that we’ll eventually arrive at the destination that we want to get to.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. It’s your career, make the most of it. Subscribe now: Click Here!

Question For You: How many jobs do you think are going to make up your IT manager career?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Once you become an IT manager, you’d think that you’d pretty much made it – what more could you want? However, it’s really just the start of another journey, not the end. What makes this part of your career potentially different from the parts that came before is that you are the one who is in charge of it. How do you want things to turn out?

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Are You Cut Out To Be An IT Leader?

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

There Are 5 Skills That You Need To Be A Product Manager

There Are 5 Skills That You Need To Be An IT Leader

Jeff Vance over at Sandstorm Media talked with me to get some inputs for an article that he was writing for the Project Manager Planet site. Yeah, yeah – I know that we’re IT Leaders not Project Managers. However, Jeff did a very good job of capturing a lot of what makes our job so hard to do.

Check out his article which is called 5 Signs You’re Not Cut Out to be a Project Manager. Give it a read and every time you see “Project Manager” just mentally replace it with “IT Leader” and it’ll work out for you.

Jeff has included the classic story of Charles Pellerin, NASA’s director of Astrophysics for the Hubble space telescope program which should serve as a good reminder for all IT Leaders that you should never give up trying to make something better…

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So what do IT Leaders actually do? Generally I’d agree with you if you answered something like “create IT solutions“; however, I’ve been giving this some thought and I think that we’re missing the mark if that’s our answer…

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Staffing Diversity Challenges IT Leaders

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

IT Leaders Need To Manage Diversity In Their Teams<br><div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/clevercupcakes/2980544017/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href=They say that the world is becoming a smaller place – I think that they just might be right. IT Leaders are starting to realize that coming up with ways to staff their teams so that they are diverse is quickly moving from being a political nicety to now becoming a business necessity. Does anyone have any suggestions on how best to go about doing this?

The Problem

Most IT departments are no longer single site operations. In fact, with the growth of outsourcing a single IT department may now have offices in multiple countries: China, India, Russia, etc. This type of distributed operation is a great way to ensure that more work gets done at a lower price; however, it also poses a significant staffing challenge for IT Leaders.

It’s all too easy to think that we can take a few high-performing IT Leaders from the U.S., plunk them down in one of our remote offices and have them be a an effective leader. The reality is that all too often, this doesn’t work. If you haven’t groomed someone on your team to step in and run / interface with a remote office, then they aren’t going to be able to do it.

In the U.S., IT managers are encouraged to use frank talk and direct confrontation in order to deal with team issues. However, especially when dealing with teams in Asis, this can come across as being rude and offensive.

What’s An IT Leader To Do?

The trick to solving IT staffing challenges for remote offices or just to deal with remote offices is to create what the experts call a “talent plan“. Doing this will allow you to provide unique levels of value to your remote IT offices.

The first part of a talent plan is to identify what positions on your team you are going to have to fill and what types of cultural skills those  positions are going to require. It’s important to note that it’s not always necessary to hire a person of a given nationality in order to deal smoothly with a remote office that has other staff members of that nationality. Finding someone who is sensitive to that nationality and who has dealt with them before can fill this need.

Filling a position to manage a remote office should not be a sudden effort. IT Leaders realize that every position will eventually need to be filled because the person in that spot now will be promoted, let go, or will move on. A key part of any talent plan is to early on identify who the potential replacements are. This allows an IT Leader to take the time to make sure that the potentials get an opportunity to get trained in both the skills and the corporate values that they will need if they fill the position.

Final Thoughts

Staffing mistakes can be very expensive and picking the wrong person to lead a remote IT office or to interface with such an office can flat out be disastrous. IT Leaders realize that if they wait until the last minute when an position suddenly has to be filled, then it will be too late to do it correctly.

Instead, if they take the time to create a talent plan then their investment of upfront time and effort into grooming the right replacements will ensure that the correct staffing decisions are made. Learning to add diversity management to your IT team will mean that you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Even in tough economic times, IT Leaders are still concerned about losing talent. Studies are showing that we are losing our IT Leaders at a much faster rate than new ones are being produced. On top of this, up to 30 million managers and leaders are going to become eligible to retire in the next five years. How can an IT Leader help to replace these leaders?

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Recruiting Is Something That IT Leaders Need To Start Thinking About Again

Thursday, August 13th, 2009
IT Leaders Need To Think Differently About How They Will Do Recruiting In The Future

IT Leaders Need To Think Differently About How They Will Do Recruiting In The Future

It’s starting to look like the economic winter just might be getting ready to thaw. Once this happens, IT Leaders realize that they’re going to have a massive task added to their already overloaded plate – recruitment.

During the economic downturn IT workers were staying put because they didn’t know what was going to happen next. Additionally, firms stopped hiring except for the most critical functions. When things start to pick up again, this will all change. Are you going to be ready IT Leader?

The Problem With The Way That IT Recruits

We all need to remember that recruitment is really a game that we are playing with our competition – we want to get all of the good talent in order to boost our firm and our competition wants to do the same. On top of all of this, who among us has ever been trained on how to properly do recruitment?

The good folks over at Forrester Research realize that we need some help and so they’ve done some research for us. Their conclusions just might surprise you a bit. They believe that there is something that we need to start doing if we want to be successful in attracting the right kind of talent: we need to diversify our talent pool.

The Way That IT Recruiting SHOULD Be Done

Right now all of us pretty much do the same thing when we want to fill a position in our IT department: we start looking at other firms who do what we do in hopes of finding an IT professional who is willing to leave and come work for us. This has worked for a long time because there have been so many people working in IT. However, with outsourcing and the Baby Boomers starting to retire, this isn’t going to keep working much longer.

Instead, Forrester tells us that what we need to do is to expand the pool of talent that we recruit from when we go looking to fill a position. This means that we need to start looking at college students and non-IT business professionals as potential sources of new recruits.

College students have always been an underused resource. The reasons are many, but more often than not it boils down to the simple fact that it takes time to guide them when you give them a task – you can’t just “fire and forget”. Sometimes poor management of college students results in poor performance and this can leave a lingering sense of frustration that causes IT Leaders to shy away from working with college students.

Non-IT business professionals, sometimes called “super users“, are a fantastic under-tapped resource. This resource has both the technical and business knowledge that can prove invaluable to any IT department. Providing existing employees with an opportunity to rotate into the IT department can be a win-win situation: you get the talent that you need and the employee gets a brand new career track.

Final Thoughts

What are we really looking for when we go to fill an IT position? We’d really like to find candidates that have three things: technical skills, business knowledge, and interpersonal skills. The ponds that we’ve been fishing from for these types of workers has just about dried up. In order to meet the staffing challenges of the future, we’re going to have to start fishing in other ponds.

Rethinking about how we attract, develop, and then retain college recruits can pay huge dividends. Who wouldn’t want to hire someone that they already knew and who they had groomed for a specific role in the organization? Likewise inviting non-IT business professionals to join the IT department solves staffing problems and breaks down internal walls.

Learning to do a better job of fishing for new talent will mean that you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

Questions For You

Where do your new hires come from – other IT companies? Have you used college students before? How did that work out? Could you list 5 “super users” who work in your company right now? How many of those would be interested in working in IT? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

They say that the world is becoming a smaller place – I think that they just might be right. IT Leaders are starting to realize that coming up with ways to staff their teams so that they are diverse is quickly moving from being a political nicety to now becoming a business necessity. Does anyone have any suggestions on how best to go about doing this?

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Posted in recruiting | No Comments »

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