IT careers: Should you leave?
Ask yourself a couple of key questions before quitting the job you have.
Ask yourself a couple of key questions before quitting the job you have.
Your happiness can be affected by how closely you identify with what you do for a living.
The New Year is always a good time to reflect on your career: where you've been, where you're heading, and where you'd like to go. It's also the traditional time for people like me -- industry analysts, pundits and consultants -- to tell you what hot skills you'll need to develop to advance your career in the next year. Of course, if developing your career were really that simple, every reader would be the CEO of a company by now.
The question you need to consider concerns the great workforce changes that have shaken up the work environment over the past three decades.
Business people don't trust us, and we don't trust them. It sounds kind of hopeless, but it doesn't have to be.
Too often we make self-limiting assumptions about position, status and the need to rigidly follow a career path.
To get your projects done, you'll need to motivate your people to perform, no matter where their loyalties lie.
When two parties are in conflict, they don't have to agree in order to respect and learn from each other's perspective.
This year's Computerworld reader survey on careers topics indicates that we in IT have turned a corner. And, overall, the new direction is good. With nearly two-thirds of the respondents reporting that they paid for training out of their own pockets, we see that IT has accepted, at least to some degree, the new nature of employment relationships.
Many IT leaders seem to have difficulty separating the concepts of power and influence, thinking of the latter as a softer form of power.
There's a silent killer attacking the careers of technical people. It runs rampant through organizations, destroying the future job prospects of even the most talented geeks. They end up sidelined, passed over for promotions or laid off. Sadly, this killer can lead us to engage in some self-destructive, dysfunctional behaviors.
While you oftentimes just have to live with whatever it is you don't like, some situations call for a more forceful reaction.
Providing a quick-win deliverable is of value only if what was asked for is what's really required.
The most elegant thing you can do to motivate geeks is to define a problem that your team will want to solve.
As long as a problem seems present, gnarly and intractable, we enjoy following the process that solves it. But once the problem has been solved, it's not so interesting to us anymore.