Reaching your career goals requires not only dedication
but continuing education.
The Road to the Top
Reaching your career goals requires not only dedication
but continuing education.
- By Greg Neilson
- 01/01/2001
I’m a new IT professional. I’ve attended
many TechNet conferences and have taken some Windows 2000
training. I have a small enterprise network setup at home,
and I’ve been working at a Tier-1 help desk position in
a Fortune 500 company for nearly three months. What skills
would you recommend I work toward to achieve my 10-year
goal of being an enterprise architect?
— James M. Goodwin, MCP+I, MCSE, A+, Network+, i-Net+
Agency Technology Representative SAFECO Agent Help Desk,
Indianapolis
James,
congratulations on your hard work so far and your great
attitude in wanting to work your way to the top of the
profession. In preparing an answer for you, I checked
with Nick Andrews, a friend of mine who currently works
as an IT architect. This is what we came up with:
Is
Your IT Career Stalled? |
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In the technical arena, you should be continually looking
for ways you can demonstrate the value of your technical
skills to the business at hand — this is what’s going
to help move you up the corporate ladder. Volunteer to
work on different projects that’ll help broaden your skills
and experience, even if this means you’re performing grunt
work. Over time, you need to keep yourself technically
up-to-date and work to build a specialty. Once you really
have mastered this technology — and those around you acknowledge
that you have mastered it — then you probably need to
broaden your technical expertise to understand the complete
IT environment. For example, to be considered a Microsoft
expert today, you’d have to master the base operating
system (Win2K), plus be conversant in all of the BackOffice
suite components and an expert in regard to some of the
important BackOffice products such as Exchange or SQL
Server. On top of this, you’d need to have a detailed
understanding of the new .NET initiative and understand
its future and what this could mean for your enterprise.
As you’re working on a 10-year timetable, of course you
must understand that we’ll have several iterations of
technology refresh between now and then, so it’s impossible
to say exactly what products and technologies you’ll be
working with at that time. But if you keep yourself up
to date technically, you’ll follow the wave to whatever
it is that follows.
At the same time, simply having all of these great technical
skills will be worth nothing if you can’t share them with
your peers and clients — that is, you’ll need to have
exceptional written and spoken communication skills. This
is something you can be working on as you build your technical
skills. A presentation-skills class can get you started,
but — more important — you’ll need lots of practice, which
is where something like your local Toastmasters club can
be of great help. You need to be comfortable presenting
on your feet and, probably more important, thinking on
your feet when your audience starts asking questions.
Being able to present complex technical issues in business
terms that your managers and decision-makers can understand
is a real art that will require practice. It’ll be sign
of your maturity as an IT professional when you get less
excited about the technology for its own sake and more
excited about what this can do for your business. So look
for opportunities to get out of the IT ivory tower and
see and feel the real business so you can get an understanding
of the real issues you’re trying to address. I also mentioned
written communication skills — let’s not forget these.
Typically, these are in the form of email, white papers
and design documents; these need to be first-rate. There
are business-writing courses around, but all they do is
undo years of formal schooling that had us believe using
long sentences and big words made us sound smarter. In
contrast, it’s important that you can get your point across
using simple English. So you must enjoy producing these
kinds of documentation (and let’s face it, most techies
hate the thought of documentation). But you must be able
to do these quickly, since there’s so much that needs
to be done.
You’re also going to need a good grasp of accounting
concepts — assets, depreciation, income, expenditure,
and so on — so that you’re able to present the benefits
of your technical proposals in the way that those who
sign the checks can understand. These concepts include
ROI (return on investment), benefit/cost ratio, payback
period, IRR (internal rate of return) and NPV (net present
value). I recently completed a finance course for my MBA
that considered the NPV a much better decision tool than
the other common measures I mentioned, but — unfortunately
— the others are so prevalent that you need to be able
to understand and use them all.
About the Author
Greg Neilson is a manager at a large IT services firm in Australia and has been a frequent contributor to MCPmag.com and CertCities.com.