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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?"
1. Have you asked? If you have asked management when the company is growing if you could be an IT Manager explain why you would be a good one.
2. Show management incentives. Do you help out the new guys by being a mentor to them? When you go to meetings bring up your own ideas. Talk to management outside of meetings about your ideas?
3. Do you need a lot of management yourself? Make sure you do not need to be managed a lot, prove that you are self-reliant.
4. Do you have efficient education? 4 year degree, graduate degree, PHD. Having or working on an MBA is a big plus.
5. Do you show interest outside of IT? If not they you may want to.
As a manager of IT your jobs is looking out for the company first then IT second and make sure they work together.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
And why?
Buy a tie, set impossible time scales and grow a fringe/bangs; they will cover the lobotomy scars.
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.
Generally, a company will look for someone who has experience working for that company so they'll understand what sort of management style is required for the department/position. Jumping around between companies is NOT the way to get someone to notice you. Your best bet is to stay where you are and try to get a promotion. Have you already asked and been turned down for the new job managing your current IT department? If not, then that's an excellent place to start--let them know that you're interested.
After 16 years in IT I finally accepted a management position in a large company. Yes it is more money and more responsibility but what it isn't is hands on. If you like the techy stuff then stay away from management. In just a few months I already feel like the guys I use to make fun of. If your goal is more money pick up some more certification and then start tossing your resume at the large IT consulting firms. I worked for six years traveling the country as an security consultant. Tough, difficult stuff but I was never bored.
More meetings, more stress, having to deal with morons all day long. I haven't yet known anyone who went into management who's happy about it- in fact I know several who dropped out of management they were so miserable. If its about money, you can probably make more by switching companies than you can getting promoted locally.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Why would you want to be a manager?
Spend all your time in meetings and nagging lazy workers to do their job? Asking for money to develop improvements and being told you can't have the budget?
The only rewarding thing to come out of IT is getting into the guts of a computer and making it work, which is not something managers do. I've turned down several opportunities since this became my profession, and I'm glad I did because everyone I've ever seen who got moved into management became bitter, unhappy husks of what they used to be.
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.
Utterly fail to understand the development process. It's just like quality control in a jam factory, right? You want the code now, dammit! Make sure the coders look like they're coding - none of that thinking, discussing, planning, prototyping. Fail to support the development/UAT/release cycle. Look impressive amongst your suit wearing goons by dictating technologies, rather than by using the right one for the job. Ensure you lose your subordinates respect by spouting buzzwords - badly - at every opportunity. Be an email warrior, and make sure you have a far more powerful pc than those who'll be developing enterprise apps.
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
Why not give management a go in your current employment? If you don't like it, chances are that they won't fire your ass, but they will give you a chance to slip back into a technical role. I was a manager for five years, and decided after that it wasn't for me, so I 'dropped' (some would say rose) into a Solutions Architect role. The company knew my capabilities, and were willing to cut me a little slack. If I'd taken a management role with another company, I may have been paid more, but they might have let me go rather than try me in a technical role. YMMV
Absolutely! This one can never go wrong.
This guy's the limit!
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.
IT management is the most thankless, horrible job/career path on the planet. I know this from much experience and many friends.
I know it's very hard when you are a seasoned experienced IT person to know where to take your career, but IT management is NOT it. May I suggest some other options.
Sales Engineer: My favorite. Great pay, good hours, lots of good lunches, some very technical and challenging problems. It's just like being in IT, but you are paid well and everyone appreciates you.
Consultant: Takes a special personality, but hours and pay can be very good.
Field Engineer: Better pay, hours can be rough, but if you don't like dealing with the business side it's better than the previous two options.
Technical Marketing: Little harder to break into, but good pay (not as good as sales), great hours and you really get to make an impact.
Whatever you do, just say NO to management.
Start reading Dilbert. The manager in that strip is an oracle of insight, and his methodology has been perfectly replicated in companies throughout the world.
If you decide you would prefer consulting to management, a certain Dogbert would be an excellent example to study.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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.
- Becoming a Technical Leader by Gerry Weinberg. Gerry talks specifically about making the transition between being in the trenches and being a manager-type and just what you have to give up in the process.
- Journey of the Software Professional: The Sociology of Computer Programming by Luke Hohmann. This book is not nearly as well known (and read) as it should be; it's also a great source of references for hard research on IT development teams.
- The Mythical Man-Month (20th Anniversary Edition) by Fred Brooks. Just because anyone in IT management should read, understand, and believe this book. I deal with failing or failed IT projects for a living, and most of those failures occur for the same relatively small set of reasons.
Once you've read these three books, then decide whether you still want to be an IT manager.Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
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.
BINGO! That's the answer. In the role of IT manager, the staff needs to respect you. If they don't WANT to follow your lead, it's a lost cause. Mentoring the new people is one way to achieve respect. No matter how good you might be at achieving your OWN goals, the manager is expected to help others achieve THEIRS. The rest of the management team wants a person who distributes accurate information about how IT really works, offers solutions in lieu of excuses, and has the respect of the rest of the department. At the very least, volunteer and offer a solution for every problem you think you can solve.
Aside from mentoring, the next key is communication -- verbal and written. Public speaking and presenting is often overlooked. Either take a course, or at least learn from the examples you see. If nothing else, watch politicians face a tough question from a reporter.
Joining the world of IT management is not something that happens when you fill the checklist with credentials. I have essentially no credentials but I have been in IT management for 14 years. You get admitted to the club when other members ASK you to join.
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)
My opinion is only get an MBA if:
The company will pay for it.
You can do your homework on the job.
and you get it from Harvard, Yale, Wharton, Stanford ...in that order and only from those schools (The business magazine ratings are full of shit). Otherwise, MBA degrees are completely worthless. I know, I have one and it was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
1. Do you want to be a manager or a technical lead? If you are in true management you won't be able to put as much time into the nitty gritty, some geeks will find this distressing. A technical lead position has a leadership component but you would still have to get your hands dirty. If you play it right, you can take your pick of the most challenging or interesting work as a way to lead by example.
2. Can you handle stress well? If you can't, don't bother because management is not for you.
3. How are your political skills? As a manager you are doing many things: directing a group of people, exchanging resources with other departments, little turf wars, big turf wars, etc.
4. Are you able to look a person in the eye and order him/her to do something you know he/she won't like? What about asking the person to work unpaid overtime when you know that your employee would rather be at his precious snowflake's thanksgiving play? Managers get to make these decisions, many times knowing well that there is an obvious disruption of the employee's personal life.
5. Are you able to work a 9:00 AM - 5:30 PM work day with a 1.5 hour (working) lunch, knowing half your team is pulling 15 hours day for its third week in a row, weekends included?
6. What would you do if you get pulled into your division VP's office and asked to reduce your workforce by one warm body every 90 days over a 9-month period? Laying off employees, many of which used to be your own coworkers, is extremely hard.
7. Would you be able to draw the line and move on with firing an employee that doesn't measure up to your standards? Laying off people is really hard, but nowhere as hard as firing a person for cause.
8. Are you a problem solver? If you are a real problem solver, you will be sucked into "fire fighting" drills (at a previous job each of us managers actually had a toy fireman's helmet). This is an easy way to get fast tracked even higher, but it also means you lose time you should have spent taking care of your own people and dealing with your own deliverables.
9. Are you a territorial person? Each manager has his own little turf to share with friends and defend from intruders. Some managers are easier to deal in regards to this than others.
10. Are you willing to act as a shit shield for your team? One of the most important jobs of a manager is to protect his/her team so they can get their jobs done with as little external disruption as possible. Think of your past bosses and try to remember which ones were more respected, the ones that protected their people (within reason) or the ones that fed them to the wolves at the first chance?
11. Can you play golf? Regardless of sex, golf is a great way to get together with your team or other managers at your level. If the weather is nice you can schedule your meeting late in the afternoon and run it while playing 9 holes. There's bound to be a cheap course at a reasonable distance. We used to sneak out of Bethesda to play at River Road, a municipal course in Potomac. It was very nice and dirt cheap.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
The hard way: apply for a management job, in a firm that doesn't know you, and with no management experience on your resume.
The easy way: tell your boss he needs you in management, using the credibility you've built up with him. If you don't have any credibility, then this is the hard way.
Generally, if you are person that makes things happen, and if people on the management team like working with you, and you have a good argument for why putting you in that position would make save money or make everyone's life easier, it isn't hard.
The third way is probably even easier, but it backloads some drama. You simply start managing things. You find something that needs to be managed and you do it. You remove burdens from weary managerial shoulders. You fix things everybody knows are broken but nobody has the energy to do anything about. In short you become a manager. Now comes the drama: you point out that you are managing, and you want the title and a better salary. If you get both, great. If not, settle for the title, wait a decent period, then apply for a job elsewhere.
Come to think of it, that's how I got into IT management.
I was hired to maintain a custom software system that was written in C and an obscure database system I happened to know. The department had a backlog that nobody had ever bothered to characterize, so I did, just to figure out how much work I had. The backlog was over three years. So I went to the various people who had various things on the list which I didn't quite understand. I talked with them and heard countless stories of frustration and anxiety over various business functions. While I began to whittle down the list, a pattern began to emerge of people asking for things because they needed the answer to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. So I diagrammed out the worst processes, what they were supposed to do, who participated in them, and who used the things the process produced. Then I convened meetings of people who had things on the list.
There was a lot of stuff like this: "Betsy wants a status projection on such and so. Look here. Bob, did you know when you don't get this stuff done by a certain point in the month, this other thing doesn't make it to Betsy in time, and her whole department ends up working late to make deadline? No? Well, why are you in charge of this at all? Betsy could do this, it would take a task off your plate and a load off of her mind." Then people would scratch their heads, and wonder why it hadn't been set up that way all along. There were dozens of meetings like this, where we found critical pieces of information that were never available on time because it was on somebody's desk who had no idea of its significance to somebody else. Several critical information flows that could be cut from three weeks to less than a day; several instances where incoming checks got filed in somebody's drawer because they happened to be attached to a particular form instead of going to finance to be cashed right away.
To make a long story short, the three year backlog became a three month backlog, practically without a lick of programming. little programming and the backlog went under the 1 month benchmark. After a couple of years of taking the bull by the horns, I had streamlined most of the critical business processes, identified numerous serious problems with financial control and reporting, which I addressed by finding a tech saavy CPA and suggesting he be hired to fix them. As a result, over the course of a year a new finance department was in place, headed by a Sloane school MBA with a CPA as comptroller, and professionals with years of experience heading up AP and AR.
Now to me, this wasn't management. It was engineering. To solve a problem, you identify what really needs to be accomplished and document the environment it has to be done in. You discover metrics by which a system's performance can be measured and improved. You persuade people to agree with your d
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I've worked for my current company for 6 and a half years, the last 3 years and 10 months as IT Manager, and IT Assistant before that. On day 1 in the job, I was "Monkey Boy" to the one and only other IT staff... The IT Manager..., basically doing all the crappy jobs, and redeveloping the company website.
Over time, our parent company demanded more time of the other guy for their needs, meaning I had more responsibility to the "child" company that actually employed us. At one point, I ended up writing his reports while he (or sometimes both of us) presented them to senior management. He then got "promoted" (the p-word is an in joke between the two of us!!) to IT Manager for the parent company full time, and so I got promoted to his old job. I took on a new assistant under me, and over time recruited another.
I'm blowing my own trumpet by saying I'm well trusted by the senior management to do a good job and to ensure my team do a good job, and sometimes I don't feel I deserve the position because I never specifically worked towards it. But I guess that at least some of them saw that I could take charge of running a large company's IT infrastructure, managing change, and trying to make the best technical decisions even in times of crisis (like today when a server almost died).
If you're up to the challenge of those last three points, go for it - You obviously feel you can do the job, and if this makes you stop job-hopping so much, it'll make you happier (and a happy employee is a hard-working, long-lasting employee!) It just sounds like you'll have to force the natural progression a bit more than I did!!
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.
As an acomplished IT manager http://www.linkedin.com/in/zachmiller I can tell you that you may want to pause before entering.
There are parts to management that are really great. Growing people and building projects and budgets is fun.
But you have to be willing to relinquish the technology and trust your fate to others.
You have to be willing to work wiht the business and understand them and leave the technology.
Can you do that?