How Do I Become an IT/IS Manager? 371
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?"
Are you sure you WANT to ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Get a lobotomy! (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not necessarily permanent .. (Score:3, Interesting)
Run away! Run away! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:You serious? (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone mod that 5- funny, please!
I just spent the better part of my "day off" yesterday working on my $8M budget and all the personnel requests that accompany it. I spent most of the time in MS Word writing justifications, duty statements, allocation categories and whatnot.
I am an "IT Manager" over a division in a very large county. To answer the question of the OP, here's how I did it. I worked my a** off as an analyst and programmer at various companies until I got a good job running a team of programmers as a project manager. Being able to handle large scale ($1M+) projects and successfully implement them prepared me for taking on more responsibility. I then used my contacts from the '90s to land me a position in my current company as a supervisor where I was quickly promoted to DM based on my attitude, work ethic knowledges of the business and results.
My IT experiences come in a distant fourth in terms of requirements. It all comes down to being prepared.
I do get to delve into the "guts" of systems once in a while, but not as often as I like. However, the money isn't all that bad and having a 20' x 10' window office on the sixth floor with a secretary tends to compensate a bit. Oh, and I can still hack a few systems in my spare time. I'm currently implementing an inventory program written by me in PHP.
Why?
Because I can.
Speak up. (Score:2, Interesting)
Like others said, make sure you aren't too technical, which could hurt you. A interest in managing and other responsibilities such as budget planning, people management, etc. go a long way.
Mod parent up (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Before you get the MBA..... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Questions... (Score:4, Interesting)
How to stay an IT manager (Score:3, Interesting)
I have no insights to offer on how to become an IT manager. Frankly, it seems such a thankless and boring job that I would presume a severe shortage of candidates. But I freely offer the following advice on how to stay an IT manager and not get fired:
How to become one or become a GOOD one? (Score:2, Interesting)
* Show up on time
* Dress neatly
* Lay off the profanity
* Do your bladder-control exercises for the meetings
How to become a GOOD IT manager (IMAO of course):
* Come from the trenches in at least 1 respectable area
* Set reasonable expectations both above and below
* Define deliverables/milestones and hold people to them, allowing leeway once they're met
* Stand up for your people but don't be an enabler for misanthropy
* Don't ask anyone to do anything you wouldn't do
* Plan disruptive work well in advance
* Be transparent
Some combination of the two = success
Re: How do I become an IT/IS manager? (Score:3, Interesting)
By your definition, I'm not in that 80%-- but I'm willing to improve to reach it.
I started in the IT field in December of '92, and didn't get into management until about two years ago. I'd had one brief (6 months) experience leading a two-person team during all that time, and hated it. It turns out, years later, that the reason I hated it is that I wasn't given sufficient resources to lead my other team-member, let alone to drive toward anything new. I've learned since then.
In my current position, I'm the leader for a team of (currently seven people, but it'll grow to nine in the next two or three weeks). We serve a large group of a much larger division of one of the largest five corporations in the world, but we're contractors (although at least we get good benefits). As a result, we're flexible, we're forced to work well together as a team, and because our corporate management is solid, we have the ability to, as Nancy Reagan said, "just say no."
Here are the things I pay the most attention to:
I hope this helps someone out there. I've had to discover each piece of it myself through hard experience (especially the "dealing with assholes" part), and wish anyone just entering into management much luck in figuring out these bits of strategy.
When I first entered management ranks, I talked with my father about leadership roles and responsibilities, and my skittishness about the idea. As he'd been a USAF officer for over 20 years (and has been retired for just as long), I value his input on this subject. His only advice was not to worry, and that in his experience, nobody is a born leader. We all have to learn along the way. Personally I still believe that there are people who learn easier and earlier how to lead than others (and I'm a hard late-comer), but his words encouraged me, and today I'm (mostly) successful in my management endeavors.
Cost reduction (Score:3, Interesting)
Thats quite true. My girlfriend is a warehouse manager for a known clothing company, she started about one year ago and it seems she has been quite good at it. About a month ago they called the managers from several departments (it is a manufacturing facility) and toll them that they will start a "Cost Reduction" plan in the facility and that there was going to be a consulter who will help them in the "cost reduction" works. Of course, that immediately meant laying off several people, including some which were in my girlfriend's department. Fortunately it seems they decided to avoid the "cost reduction" plans for now.
As a manager *you* are the one that has to make the hard decisions, and of course you are the one who gets to blame when things go wrong (even if it is out of your control like some merchandise trailer missing because the driver did not know how to get to the factory and he did not have mobile to communicate). That is one of the reasons why as a simple work pawn you see you manager yelling agree at you and your coworkers. It is because of the pressure they are putting to him which, believe me you can not compare against the pressure the guy puts on you.
Two routes (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Questions... (Score:2, Interesting)
recommend my career course for anyone. I've been a UNIX systems administrator and systems engineer for about
15 years now in a very wide variety of industries.
My current position is at a vice president level and I manage a UNIX system administrator team and DBA team for my company's Asia Pacific region. I work in Japan and work for a banking institution, which is generally very conservative. My boss (the regional CIO) is a cowboy (almost literally he's from Texas) and prefers expereince over degrees.
So as far as not having a degree or not, well professional training is probably more important. I took a management training class, which my employer paid for, Most of my co-workers have advanced degrees in finance, physics, mathematics and computer science. Nobody has given me a hard time about my unfinished education.
An MBA for management? A lot of advice I heard was to get an MBA if your company wants you to have one or you plan on starting your own business.
That being said, I still hope to finish my degree some day, still probably computer science or engineering.
Re:Even more questions... (Score:2, Interesting)
I have never understood "unpaid overtime" - does this happen often in the US?
In over 8 years of working in IT outside of the US, I've been asked to do overtime once. I explained to the manager in question that as a salaried employee, I had no way of charging extra for overtime and that he would find someone else to do that overtime. The manager quickly apologised and never mentioned again.
Why would anyone agree to work for free? I thought work without pay wasn't called 'work', but something else...
Natural Progression (Score:3, Interesting)
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!!
One Soul Please (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:Two routes (Score:3, Interesting)
It backfired hard. Position opened up, I applied, when talking in the interviewing process I was told the standard BS, not enough experience, etc... I nailed him on that and said that was a straw man excuse.
He told me, "you got me. The real reason is that you are too valuable where you are now, you fix things and are our only expert on the Billing system"
I left 3 weeks later for a position at a different company, they were more than willing to give me what I wanted.
If you are incredibly effective, they wont promote you. in my exit interview I was offered the position I wanted and a raise, I declined stating, "I can not work for a company that will not reward me for my efforts when asked. You claimed I was too valuable yet did nothing to ensure I would stay." The reply was, "We did not think you would leave."
you can be too effective, and if upper management is inadequate they will not promote you because they think you don't have the balls to leave.
I left for other reasons as well, but their "excuse" was the last straw.
Are you sure you want to manage? (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, you have been moving around all over the place inside of the realm. Too much. It seems like you haven't found a subject area that you are actually comfortable with. Most people tend to find something that they "like the most" and do it really well, get better at it, and ultimately master it. You haven't done this, yet. That's a problem.
The first thing I would recommend you do is to choose an area of IT that you enjoy... and master it.
Then, once you have mastered a part of the landscape... you are ready to ask yourself if you want to _manage_ that landscape and the people within it. *That* is a very difficult question not to be taken lightly. I don't think you are anywhere near ready to answer that question. I manage software developers for a living... and let me tell you... its an extremely difficult fucking job. It can be *very* rewarding when done well, but it is HARD.
If you do make the jump early, you are going to fail. Make no mistake about it. Take your time.
Why do you need to wait? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why do you need to wait until you are 30 years old to be an IT manager? I am 25 years old and an IT manager at a company of about 170 employees and I have definitely have a love / hate relationship with the job but I never have come home wishing I didn't jump at the opportunity. I have a staff of 6 people and I got into this position because the CEO (we didn't have a CIO at the time) recognized that I had the ability to take the position and he gave me the opportunity so I always work my hardest to prove his decision a good one each day.
In terms of the technical details and hours, I definitely don't get my hands dirty as much as I used to and I do spend a whole heck of a lot of time in meetings each day. But I also get to see the business side of the organization which is a whole different animal than you will ever see as a sys admin. To me this is just as interesting as the technical details of how IT works and you can't experience this without giving management a shot. It's also easy for non-managers to say that as soon as you take the leap you lose your technical abilities, but I will let you know that I can still write C# code as well as anyone else in my department or setup a EMC SAN as needed. Do I do these things every day? No, but I do generally get to make the decision to buy all this cool new technology and am usually the first one to get to try it out when it comes in.
My hours actually have not changed since becoming a manager, I still work 10 or 11 hour days on average and have to come in on the weekends occasionally to make sure some critical updates happen correctly to our core systems. If you are used to working your butt off then management is not going to be much more of a stretch for you in terms of time commitment. You will have documents to write, procedures to come up with and performance reviews to conduct but that is all part of the game.
Overall the worst thing that can happen is that you decide it not for you and you move away from the management track and back down into the trenches which is a perfectly valid decision and one that any director or VP should respect. I would not go asking for a management position if you have not been at the company for a while though as I do think your work should speak for itself when a senior manager is ready to make the decision to promote someone from within the organization. However, if the the opportunity presents itself and you are interested in the business of IT then I would go for it and see what happens.
How? Or Why? (Score:1, Interesting)
From one who's been there:
Do you really want a job where
If I had it to do over, I'd probably have been a ski bum.
Re:Lie. (Score:3, Interesting)
> That's why every job posting I've seen for a managerial position says "must have X years of managerial experience to apply." They all have that requirement.
True, but most management postions are never advertised. Usually, a hirer up manager think's joe is a good guy, so joe gets the job.
Re:Emphasis on that last line. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Two routes (Score:3, Interesting)
This is how I got most of my opportunities--both for becoming a manager, and for getting other opportunities like a technical promotion. The only difference is which/whose problems you solve.
In addition to performing a useful service for your employer and providing them with a nice audition, it's also a bit of a trial run for yourself. As you find more opportunities to do the work at the next level, do you enjoy them and are you any good at them? Better to find out before you ask for the promotion whether you should be doing the work...
Here's an important one... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to be a manager, don't think that the parent is funny. TPS reports, or other productivity tracking methods, are one thing a manager will have to deal with a lot. Being a manager means dealing with more b'cracy. Most people on /. bitch about the BS managers make them do. This is because it is a small amount of the paperwork that can get shoved off onto them. The truth is, when you are an IT manager, and being compared to other (non-IT) managers, all your work will get turned into cost/benefit analysis. It will not matter how nifty the languages are that run the servers. It will not matter (directly) how clean the code is. It will not really matter (directly) how happy your employees are.
You will be expected to demonstrate that you are delivering a good ROI. This can mean the code is clean, but it is phrased in terms of capital investments to shorten future development. This can mean treating your employees like people, but it is phrased in terms of increasing productivity via low-cost non-monetary inducements.
But, above all, you have to understand that an IT manager deals with business people. He gets requests for capability, and delivers black-boxes. If you want to become an IT manager because you can create cool stuff, you're looking for the wrong reasons.