Consider carefully all your options before deciding management is your path to career happiness.
Make the Management Move
Consider carefully all your options before deciding management is your path to career happiness.
- By Greg Neilson
- January 01, 2000
I’m an MCSE who has lots of field experience. Unfortunately,
I don’t have a degree in business like many of my counterparts.
However, I’m well-spoken and aspire to be an information
technology executive some day. How can I best prepare
for IT management? I see as many openings for managers
as I do for engineers. I’d like to get some training on
presentation skills and strategies for dealing with the
complex business we’re in.
—George Ulerio
[email protected]
George, we’ll get to the specific advice soon, but, first,
I want to briefly discuss the decision to move into management.
As a starting point, you need to be clear in your own
mind why you want to be a manager and why you believe
you’ll make a good manager.
There used to be a common view that the only way to make
career progress was to move from a technical to managerial
role, but in many organizations, that’s no longer true.
Some companies now realize the importance of skilled technical
people and have developed good career paths within the
company to accommodate them. So don’t feel you have to
move into management just to progress.
In moving to a managerial role, you’ll move from being
responsible for completing technical tasks to being charged
with producing business results. Your current technical
skills will take a backseat to your ability to work with
people to get things done—and your technical people will
hate you if you don’t leave the technical decisions to
them! Don’t forget that you’ll be measured by your ability
to achieve as much as possible using as few resources
as necessary (for example, keeping staff salaries under
control and making tough decisions about new IT equipment).
In addition, you may often be forced to make decisions
without all of the information you’d like.
Your local Toastmasters club is a great way to practice
your public speaking. You can also learn how to run a
meeting there, along with how to think on your feet and
general leadership. This is a supportive environment for
mastering the basics of putting together an effective
presentation.
You should also consider some basic education on negotiating
skills. As a manager, you’ll need to constantly negotiate
with your peers, managers, staff, and clients in order
to get things done. There are books you can read on this;
Getting to Yes (by Roger Fisher et al, Penguin
USA, ISBN 0-14015-735-2, $12.95) is often quoted, although
you might want to look around for a two- or three-day
course where you can practice what you’ve learned.
You need some basic knowledge of finance and accounting
to be able to communicate with others within the organization,
since this is the language of business. There are plenty
of books on this area in your local bookstore; you just
need to find the one that’ll suit you best. To give an
example, in your management role you’ll probably be responsible
for developing a budget for your functional area, then
sticking to that budget throughout the following year.
You may deal with accounting staff who put together the
consolidated plan for the whole company, as well as the
regular reports that show variations of planned vs. actual
expenditure for each business unit.
On a day-to-day level, keep current by reading the business
section of your local newspaper and by subscribing to
business magazines such as BusinessWeek, as well
as ComputerWorld or InfoWorld, which cover
IT issues at the managerial level. As you find articles
of interest to your immediate management, photocopy and
pass them on, even if they might already have seen this
information. That informs them that you’re reading and
keeping yourself updated.
Developing and understanding business strategy is tougher,
since it’s not generally something you can pick up by
skimming a book over the weekend. You could get some basic
information from pocket MBA guides—the Fast Forward
MBA Pocket Reference (by Paul Argenti, John Wiley
& Sons, ISBN 0-47114-595-5, $12.95) and Portable
MBA (by Robert Bruner, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN
0-47118-093-9, $34.95) come to mind—but don’t kid yourself
that you can learn enough to be an expert in the area
that way. These cover just the basics, as do short courses
on business management available at your local college
or university.
As you probably found when taking your MCSE, there are
no real shortcuts in life. These tips may get you started,
but in the long term, to become an executive in IT, you’ll
probably need an MBA. I’d suggest considering that later,
once you’ve established yourself as a successful first-line
manager and are sure that this is the path for you. I
know of many successful managers who have used their management
experience as a development opportunity and later move
back into a senior technical role. In those cases, they
bring value with both their technical and business knowledge.
The best advice I can offer you for now is to make your
ambitions known. Talk to your manager about your aspirations
and tell him or her about your specific plans and the
schedule you had in mind to get yourself ready. Your manager
knows better than anyone what skills you need to improve
on or gain in order to be ready for a management position,
and most organizations prefer to promote from within when
they can. Look for opportunities to demonstrate your leadership
skills within the organization—volunteer for projects,
arrange team meetings, take control of things needing
action and make them happen (rather than waiting for your
manager to mandate it), and ask whether you can act as
a manager during vacation periods.
About the Author
Greg Neilson, MCSE+Internet, MCNE, PCLP, is a Contributing Editor for MCP Magazine and a Professional Development Manager for a large IT services firm in Australia. He’s the author of Lotus Domino Administration in a Nutshell (O’Reilly and Associates, ISBN 1565927176).