Getting unstuck

Dear Bob …

I’ve come to ask for some career advice, I’ve been a windows network admin at a small university for nearly 7 years. At the place I’m currently employed I could stay forever and work until I could retire at 65, I’m 27 now. They haven’t laid off but 4 people in 90 years and those were people ready to retire anyhow. I know that I really shouldn’t be complaining about having a secure IT job but here’s the issue.

As I have grown in this position over the last 7 years I have come to realize that while I’m a good network admin my heart isn’t in it anymore and don’t really share a whole lot of values with the place or people that I work with, I’m progressive they are mostly conservative. Also I am bored out of my mind by the day to day implementation and maintenance details of running a network.

I’m much more a process, big picture, and above all people person. The more I do in my current job the more I realize how much me and it don’t go together and I get that sinking feeling whenever I look at other IT job ads because I can see in reading them that it would be more of the same. But the thing about working as a network admin for 7 years is that I feel trapped by my credentials and experience. There doesn’t seem to be a way to stop being one and to start being something else.

I have managed to pick up a Masters degree in Educational Psychology and Counselor education along the way which be done this coming May, my Bachelors is in Management Information Systems. So I’m not completely pigeon holed, I don’t think.

I for one would love to be out in the IT field helping people communicate better, helping them have better processes, and motiviating them to do their best at what they do. How can I turn that into a career that I can change over into so I can leave the dreary world of network administration. I know that no field or career is without its bad days but running a network is just one long bad day for me.

– One stuck and looking for change network admin

Dear Stuck …

That’s always the difficult question, isn’t it? Figuring out a path from what you’re doing from what you’d like to do, that is. There always is one; the question is whether you have the persistence, patience, and luck to make it work (there’s always luck involved; people who take credit for their personal success generally filter out the random events that contributed a large share of their success).

You’ve taken the first step by recognizing the difference between having a job and having the career you want, and the second by broadening your background educationally. What comes next?

My first thought is that you should re-frame how you think about your situation, putting it into more general terms. I’d say you’re stuck in IT operations when you’d like to make the move to applications and projects, and in particular business analysis and design. That’s where you help people develop better IT-enabled ways of getting business done. My next thought is that you’re in the same situation as a business whose strategy has run out of steam. Faced with that eventuality, good business strategists look for “logical extensions to the business” – strategies that take maximum advantage of what the business is already good at and require relatively little major change.

Translated to your situation, I’d say you know IT operations but have insufficient credentials in process design and implementation, and in project management – the critical skills for succeeding in the applications side of IT. One way to get there might be ITIL – the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, which provides a process model for the operations side of IT. It’s still in operations, giving you credibility, but it would give you the opportunity to design and implement strong process in an organization, and possibly to manage projects.

Another possibility might be to move from network administration to network engineering; from there to infrastructure architecture, and from there to technical architecture – a path that moves you out of the day-to-day grind in manageable steps.

Here’s a third alternative: Find a small company that needs IT generalists and use that to get yourself the kind of experience and credentials that can move your career to the next phase.

I’m sure there are plenty of other alternatives as well. The key to all of them is to find a path where each step builds on what you’re already good at instead of trying to make the entire jump all at once.

Which is why this all does require patience and persistence. Or at least the ability to pretend that you’re patient and persistent, which is almost as good.

– Bob

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