IT industry is a dynamic, fast pace, changing, and chaotic world. For IT professionals in all levels, it is so easy to get lost. If that happens to you, you will waste your time efforts, burn out all energy, and never succeed. To avoid such a failure, successful IT professionals build career roadmap and follow the path. People who use a career roadmap have a much better chance of reaching their goals.
Making a career roadmap can be beneficial at any stage of the game for IT professionals. No matter you’ve just broken into the IT world, re-entered workplace, or perhaps been hanging around in IT for decades, career roadmap can prove to be an powerful tool to success.
Career roadmap helps you stay on track and navigate through difficult situations such as changing jobs, switching fields, layoffs, outsource, re-organizations, mergers and acquisitions. It also helps you deal with the advent of new technology and its impact on your career.
To develop an effective IT career roadmap, you need to analyze your background, assess your intellectual assets, evaluate your experience with the industries and workplaces, identify your short term and long term goals, and document your plan and strategy to reach the goals. Your roadmap should contain the following aspects:
1. Set a Goal:
Decide want you want to accomplish in the future. One year, five years, whatever makes sense for you. Make a career goal in the aspect of financial objective, professional achievement, and self-satisfaction.
2. Select a Route:
Choose the best route to reach your goal. Find out if it is better for you to go through technical route, management route, or a kind of both. Consider both your ability and interest.
3. Find Your Spot:
Find a spot that you can fit in and focus on it. It is a special area, i.e., database, network, security, J2EE, ASP, web services, XML, where you could become a specialist. Choose the spot that is of your interest, meets your experience profile, and has growth potentials in IT industry.
4. Build Skill Inventory:
Check out what skills and experiences you have, what skills are required on your spot , and what you are missing. Identifying your strengths and weaknesses; Build skill inventory to maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses.
5. Clear the Path:
Remove any obstacle that blocks your way to success. If common issues such as time management and peer communication had negatively affected your career growth in the past, you need to improve yourself on them.
6. Identify Your Market:
Decide which industries you want to serve – banking, health care, manufacture, or no preference; Find out what type of companies you want to work with – small startup, Fortune 500, Non-profit, government agencies. Look for opportunities in your market.
7. Positioning and Selling:
Position yourself in the industry – Do you want to be a permanent employee, contractor, high-paid temp worker, or independent consultant? What kind of position is the most appealing for you? Market yourself accordingly and sell your strengths.
8. Make a Action Plan:
Do whatever necessary to reach the goal. Have a plan for actions – getting certified, self-training, studying tech books, learning from co-workers, enhancing skills, gaining experience from project, asking for more important role, switching spot, changing jobs, etc.
IT world is changing so rapidly that IT professionals who hope to do well are those who have an idea about where they are going and how they are going to get there. It is dangers for you to make career decisions without a real strategy behind them. Occasionally you’ll get lucky and hit the target. Most often you won’t. IT is a jungle where you get lost easily.
After you have developed your IT career roadmap, it is the most important to follow it and execute the plan. Along your career journey, you should often stop and take a look at where you are on your roadmap. You may need to re-adjust your plan according to changing conditions.
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