IT pros: Where will you be in five years?

Standard daily activities can often prevent you from stepping back, thinking and planning your own professional future, agrees James Burnett, IT manager at Fidelity Life.

Burnett suggests that it's important to keep up-to-date with technology and what it can do. "Take time to attend the seminars, conferences [and] training courses," he said. "Select the courses one goes to with the future in mind when one may have to job hunt."

Likewise, Burnett believes it's also a good idea to establish and keep up with your contacts in the industry, with the vendor community and also specialist interest groups. Keeping an eye on job ads to get an idea of what experience is being sought by employers and keeping a history of what you've done are also tips he suggests.

He also believes that CIOs and IT managers have to make sure that they keep relevant. "Many CIOs and IT managers get so involved in the people management--the paper production, plans, processes and HR--that they neglect their technical skills," Burnett said. "I have met a number of people who don't have any technical skills to fall back on, and they have found it very hard to find a new job. Many jobs require some technical skill, and one must work at this so that a second option is always available."

"There is a lot of luck in [a professional's] career. Most people seem to be in their jobs because they were in the right place at the right time, rather than planning a career beforehand, and I suspect that this is true for 80 percent of CIOs."

Tony Phelps, IT manager at Yarra Plenty Regional Library Service, also talks about the issues IT professionals face when evaluating where to go in their careers, when they assess factors such as interesting projects, personal development, salaries and different work environments.

Phelps also questions the changing face of the CIO and IT manager role. "As IT becomes both increasingly commoditised and increasingly specialised, I wonder if we can expect managers in general, and CEOs/CFOs in particular, to be sufficiently IT-aware that they can make their own decisions about what services to use and how they want to use them," he asked.

"Looking ahead 10 years, it seems to me it is wise to start planning now to become more of an IT-savvy business manager, with important skills/abilities being more at the management end--project, supplier, contractor and outsourcing management," Phelps said. "We all know how difficult it is to keep up-to-date technically, especially as you step up the ladder."

Thinking ahead to where you want to be is also something that recruitment consultants suggest IT professionals need to be doing more of.

Grant Montgomery, managing director and search firm EL Consult, believes the technology sector seems to be more opportunistic in terms of moving from job to job, rather than planning each step out. "Probably the main thing [for CIOs and IT managers] would have to be to start educating themselves in areas outside IT--for example, business management courses, MBAs and the like," Montgomery said. "Maybe requiring or asking an organisation to give them opportunities in other sectors of the business."

Andrew Hennell, president of the Systems Administrators Guild of Australia (SAGE-AU), sees several career paths for junior sysadmins working their way up within a company.

"Going from that technical level into areas such as an IT manager/CIO is to me a jump from the purely technical work into having some business knowledge--areas to consider would include business processes, conflict resolution, negotiation skills, and to some level HR and personnel management skills," Hennell said.

But Hennell warns that moving into a management role isn't necessarily something which would appeal to all sysadmins. "There are some people who love administrating systems and the challenge and complexities that presents them...and the idea of being just in management and not having that hands-on work is something they wouldn't naturally gravitate towards."

As an alternative, Hennell said that some sysadmins might also look at moving into areas such as software development or working as a self-employed consultant or contractor. "But, again, they need the same skillsets as those management streams because these are things they're going to need day-to-day to run their own business."