Tips to Evaluate Your Career and Move to IT
When do you re-evaluate your career?
My husband and I are long-term veterans of working in IT. We have both morphed and reinvented our careers multiple times to keep up with changing technologies. I am now a career coach who assists IT folks in pivoting to new opportunities.
The need to ‘reinvent your career’ is determined by: 1) where you are in your career life and 2) your needs for work/life balance and career happiness. Workers in their early to mid-career phase have a more urgent need to manage their relevancy. A person late in their work journey may need to assess their time remaining in the workforce before considering a career reinvention. For example, I focused on gaining experience in SAAS implementations and Agile methodology when I was 5 years from retirement. Alternatively, my husband chose not to learn automated storage provisioning as he was only 1 year from retirement.
If you are an early to mid-career worker in IT, your best bet is to consider career reinvention as a regular annual exercise.
Here are a few ways to educate yourself on trends
Follow career-thinkers and influencers (a great place to start is LinkedIn)
Read read read all the best publications (New York Times, Business Insider, Reuters)
Stay active in your professional associations and NETWORK
Know the 10-year projections for employment and salaries from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (www.bls.gov)
Work with a mentor that has the career and IT vision to assist you
Once you get an idea of technical trends, create your plan
Stay in your current company and move to a tangent job that has the skillsets you want to target.
Work with your manager to gain the specific experience needed for your career change.
Create a plan to leave your current company and perform a career pivot. You will need a learning plan for specific skills.
Volunteer for projects or experiences outside or inside your company to gain targeted experience.
Leave your current company and opt for a short but focused learning plan through a boot camp or specific education.
A few promising areas for IT career reinvention:
Any jobs related to AI (Artificial Intelligence)
Data science or data analytics – 36% projected growth 2021-2031
Cybersecurity/Information Security Analysts – 35% projected job growth 2021-2031
Computer and Info Research Scientists/Machine Learning – 21% projected job growth 2021-2031
Many people are already flocking to these areas and may oversaturate the job market in a year or two. These roles also have higher educational and experiential requirements. Therefore, it may take additional time and patience to pivot completely into these technical roles. I would suggest pursuing RELATED jobs that have the skillsets that keep you relevant into the future.
A storage architect can volunteer to learn automated scripting.
A project manager can work on AI-based projects.
A business analyst can work with chatbots.
A network analyst can work with cybersecurity folks to elevate and improve security protocols against attack.
The opportunities are endless if you focus on trending needs and create a doable plan.
Good luck!
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