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How Do I Become an IT/IS Manager?
link915 writes "For the last seven years I have moved around from job to job climbing the rungs of the IT ladder. I've worked in tech support, network operations, sys admin, and as a programmer. Two years ago I took a job with a company that has a small IT department. We are now hiring on more people and doubling the department, and along with this growth comes an IT manager. Now, I could stay and wait things out with the goal of taking over the IT manager's position someday; or I could look for a new job as a manager elsewhere. What are others' experiences with moving up the ranks in IT? Is it best to move on to another company or to stay where you are and try to get ahead there?"
Do you understand the company and the business? Not just IT.
An IT manager is NOT just someone who manages IT. You have to be able to explain to the other business people how you plan to help them achieve the business goals.
Make sure that you are documenting not only what you do, but how you do it. If you are the only person who knows how to do a set of tasks, then you will be the IT technician who does those tasks. If you ensure that others can do those tasks, then you have a better chance of convincing others to have IT technicians work for you (thus making you the manager or team leader). Remember, if they can't replace you, they can't promote you.
A lot of guys I know got into IT management through two ways.
One.... work your way up... from helpdesk, there is usually a supervisor role that is not a manager, especially at large organizations. You prove to the manager that you're the most skilled or most "together" on the team, you will get that spot when it opens up. If it does not exist and there are a dozen or more people, write a proposal to create it, pitch it to the manager as taking some burden off his/her shoulders. If he likes you, he'll approve the job.
Two... work your way out... go work for a small, fast growing company. Usually the job of "I run the whole damn business" is called "IT Manager". Regardless of whether or not you are leading people, the independent decision making and self-reliance justify the title of Manager. Perhaps as the business grows you can hire someone to help you out. Perhaps you end up finding another job in a "supervisor" or "lead" role because of your former experience.
Regardless, getting "Manager" is not an exercise in duping people or some forumla... but it's a process of impressing the upper management and getting them to think that you are skilled, level headed and capable of being "in charge" of a mission-critical department.
SI
I've worked in tech support, network operations, sys admin, and as a programmer.
It sounds like you haven't really enjoyed much of anything you're doing. Why else would you change positions so often? Seven years is a pretty short time to have 4 different jobs in vastly different areas. Why do you want to be a manager, and why do you think you'd be any good at it? If your answer is "to make more money/be more accomplished", you've chosen the wrong path.
I'd say the first step in getting a management job is to show that you can do a job for more than 2 years without more "ladder" climbing.
AccountKiller
Being a lone gunman or independent worker gets you noticed as the guy who fixes things. And as such, you will always be pigeon-holed into being that guy.
When you start managing the people who fix things, you become that guy who knows people who know how to get things fixed. You begin to be asked for more advice as a strategic advisor and not the tactical fix-it in depth analysis. You move up the ladder many times dependent upon your group of people and how well they get things done as well as managing these same people. (do they do things without gripping or leaving? do they support you? do they keep quiet about asking for more money?)
Once you start managing the meat effectively, you begin that slow steady climb to higher positions. And once you arrive at a certain level, networking not only saves your ass , but it also helps you to climb higher.
Being that tech who does great things only keeps you forever in that position.
Actually, this was one of my first thoughts, too. Jumping around doesn't get one noticed.
It sounds like you've moved around a lot in the past few years. If you (the OP) were applying to my company, I'd wonder if you were in a hurry to get somewhere. True, you might tell me you're in a rush to get to the position I'm hiring for, but how would I know that's true?
From what I read and the way it sounded, my first thought was that this is a person who is in a hurry to get somewhere. He's not patient and seems to think he can move up the ladder quickly. In my experience such people are always trying to get up another rung and always thinking they'll be happy at the next level, yet never doing but so well at the current job because of such an anxiety over getting the next job.
A history of jumping around, to me, indicates a person has trouble following through and lets me know that if I hire him, I'll be replacing him fairly soon. He may say he wants an IT management job, but if that seven years started right after college, then this is not someone who knows what it's like to stay in a job long enough to be frustrated -- or how to manage someone in such a situation.
becoming a consultant in a management capacity is a good way to go. it's less of a risk for the party hiring you, because they can easily replace you. it's less of a risk for you, and easier to learn to boot, because you can focus on how to run a good team/department without being overly distracted by company politics. then you can turn around and point to your successes as a consultant in those capacities when looking to landing a full-time job.
those sorts of consulting gigs are most often found in companies or industries that are trying to get into new I.T. areas where they have no internal expertise. an example of that sort of thing would be, say, a pharmaceutical company that wants to build a social networking site for physicians. they know physicians, pharmaceuticals, and probably even have an I.T. dept. that runs around ghosting machines and helping people with their email, but they don't know how to build a successful social network and would therefore look to someone like you.
consulting is a better bet than trying to make the leap to management in the place where you are. there are several reasons.
first, if you're good at what you do they'll want you to stay there instead of promoting you, because having to bring in a good I.T. manager is one thing they have to worry about, but promoting you gives them two things to worry about, whether you'll be a good manager and also where are they going to find someone to replace you.
second, being promoted over your peers creates instant personnel/political problems for you, your peers, and the company. that is, will your peers accept you in your new role, and also will you be able to crack the whip when you need to with people you've come to consider colleagues and friends? again, this multiplies the worries for upper management.
and nobody in upper management wants to multiply their worries. so internal promotion to management is a tough sell.
becoming management elsewhere is also a tough sell if you don't have a track record as a manager. and when you do pull it off, it either only happens at the greenest of startups or at established places where you have a serious old-boy network connection pulling strings for you.
so if you don't fill that bill, consulting is the best way to make that transition.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I asked the owner of my company for the job, provided him with documentation (hierarchy chart, a detailed description of the position), and discussed him with how I felt my taking over the department would make a difference. We agreed that this would be a trial position for 3 months, to see if I could implement constructive changes. It is several months past the end of my trial and things are going.
I found my foothold because the company is growing and there was no direct management of the IT staff, just a hodge podge of upper level managers making, often contradictory, decisions that had a negative impact on those beneath them. Since I had spent time in the trenches, I knew what it was like to be there and some things that could be done about it. I also had several supervisory roles on past jobs, so had an inkling how to do it.
For those of you saying that it is a horrible and thankless job, generally I agree. Why did I ask for this position? Because I am interested in leaving IT in a couple of years and having manager in my title and the experience to go with it helps my long term career.
Do I want to stay here forever? No. Is the money great? No. But it opens up a large number of doors for the future.
-- You don't shoot to kill, you shoot to stay alive.
Sorry Tom, you are 25 years old. Most people don't get to be IT managers until their mid-30s. Try working for a couple more years until you get more experience on the IT side of it before worrying about managing other people. Especially with your jumping around from position to position, it would take a large leap for a company to trust you with managing their IT staff. My advice: Continue doing good work in what you're doing now and take some extra outside courses in management to see if you even have the aptitude to become a manager, or it would even interest you.
It seems the younger generation doesn't want to put in the time doing the work before they become the boss, and I say this as a 27 year old...
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
Maybe your friend is still rich, doesn't need to work, and that's what makes him happy? Rich people can retire and work for fun, you know!
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Let's face it, corporate culture is generally abusive toward IT workers, although most IT workers I've known have at least genuinely tried to do a good job in as much as they knew how to. My experience has been that 100% of the time, the #1 hurdle to getting important things done has been upper management interfering to demand priority service to the IT tasks they perceive as being most important (fix the VP's printer so he can stop sharing a printer with his secretary right now or you're fired!) rather than the tasks that the IT professionals think are important (installing a backup system, removing the 12 viruses from the database server that has the only un-backed-up copy of the vital corporate data). When I have, as a manager, been able to get upper management to (at least temporarily) stop interfering with my staff's work, those were the times when things actually got done.
I agree. I have filled positions at the Director level and CTO level and have no degree. I have 12 years of IT experience having managed multi-million dollar IT projects. No one asks for a degree anymore lol. In all seriousness, the ability to function without being managed is paramount to the ability to manage others. The other critical requirement is that you understand the business, how to relate and convey information between IT and the business.
Basically, you need to be able to solve business problems with IT solutions, explain the issues and solutions to other management, maintain a solid budget, manage internal projects and work with IT people. I'm sure that in tech support you learned the business, but that was another company. Learn the business of your current company or the one where you want the management job. Talk to non-technical people and learn to appreciate the fact that IT exists to support business. The business is your customer to learn to talk to them and treat them as such. Project Management experience is a perfect stepping stone from the technical role to the management role. I used it 5 years ago to make my transition and it worked like magic. Find a good consulting job and over time you will learn the variety of personal and management skills needed to make the transition too.
A word of caution. If you are on this site, you probably keep up with new technology. Business hates new technology as the answer to everything, although it is often applicable. Being inventive and finding ways to leverage technology that you already own to solve a business problem is the #1 way to demonstrate your ability to be a good IT manager.
Dissenter
"There is no knowledge that is not power."
As much as geeks and techies might slag off their PHB, management does actually serve a function and is a non-technical skillset. Stop asking questions about Mbits and Tbytes, start asking questions about costs, market share, critical business success factors... Or, but another way: where does the company want to be in 5 years time and what other managers want to achieve; not how much bandwidth they need in 5 years time.
The managers provide a service to the organisation and help it function. An IT manager is one step back from that: he provides service to those other managers by providing the IT tools they need to meet their goals.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
At my previous job I was talking with a director level person (in a different area of the company) about how I would ever be able to move up in the company the way it was setup. Our department had no supervisors and it looked like they were going to get rid of the manager position and have a director in charge instead. (they did that after I left)
She asked me what my motivations were as far as management. She realized that I was much more valuable to the company in a staff level position down in the trenches. I told her that I wanted to make more money and she said something to me that I later found to be true.
Just because someone is in a position of management, does not mean that they make more than the people that work for them. Any manager can manage employees, projects, and other managers, but it took a high level of competence to run their intricate network. There were a couple of people who were in Staff level positions making more than their manager. The IT managers responsibility had very little to do with IT (it probably could have been done with someone that just had a business background). It was a project management position.
The main goal beyond project management was to shield individual IT personnel from other managers and from end users. (mostly from upper management) The philosophy was we succeed as a team and fail as a team. When a server crashed that did not have a backup, upper management did not find out specifically who was responsible for that mistake, it was the mistake of the department.
I know this will sound overly simplistic. All the points above are important but the absolute most important one is: Ask for it. Poeple don't realize that their little slice of life is not the center of the universe and therefore not as high up on other people's conciousness as in their own. I'm not saying this as a flame but instead as a blunt explanation of how something as simple as walking in to the desicion makers office and stating you want the job is often overlooked. Don't worry about being "management material". Get the job and unless you are a fool you will learn. I have often take projects on for systems/languages I had zero knowledge of and just studied and leveraged my fundamentals only to end up with a very happy customer oblivious that they were my first in that arena. Listen to Nike and .....
"This message was sent from an Apple
He had soft skills.
No really. Most IT guys seem to think that technical excellence is what you need to become a manager. It is not. You need these soft skills that aren't taught in tech programs. If you are a really good system administrator then they keep you a system administrator because they need really good system administrators. If you are a pretty good system administrator and you can coach others then you are someone that they can afford to lose as a system administrator transition to a manager.
Personally, I have no desire to go into management.
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