Maximizing Your IT Career Needed Skills and Next Steps

Maximizing Your IT Career 2
Introduction
IT, as an aspect of business, is rapidly evolving. It’s moving from being seen as a behind-
the-scenes cost center to a business-critical aspect of every successful enterprise. And as
IT becomes more tightly integrated into the business, the seasoned IT professional is
expected to be able to understand the business, communicate with businesspeople,
negotiate, and even lead.
The increasing expectations of IT leaders is well enough understood that some university IT
programs are including communications, group dynamics, collaborative and interpersonal
communications, and leadership classes in their curricula. This, of course, does not help
current IT practitioners like you.
In April 2014, Wisegate surveyed hundreds of seasoned IT professionals (90% of whom
have been in IT for more than ten years) across a balanced mix of roles, as shown in Figure
1.

Needed Skills and Next Steps 3
Figure 1. "Which of the below most closely matches your current role in IT?"
Source: Wisegate, April 2014
An analysis of this data leads to several meaningful insights about skills current IT
practitioners should be working toward, as well as what steps you need to take in order to
maintain relevance within your field.
Get Balanced with Business Experience
As noted in the introduction to this report (and shown in Figure 2), 90% of the respondents
to this survey have been in IT for more than ten years, making this a very senior group.
Figure 2. “How many years have you worked in IT?” vs. “How many years of
business-related experience do you have?”

However, as the second chart in Figure 2 shows, this very senior (50% of those surveyed
have been in IT for more than twenty years) group of IT professionals is likely to have
relatively little business experience: 28% have less than five years-worth; another 23% have
6 – 10 years of business-related experience.
This is, of course, understandable; if you have been in IT for ten or more years, you likely
weren’t expected to have business experience for a large portion of your career.
This is changing now, as Figure 3 shows. An overwhelming 87% of those surveyed see
business knowledge is now more important for them to move forward in their career.
Figure 3. “If you had to choose, which would you say is more important, business
knowledge, or technical know-how for you to move forward in your career?”
It’s one thing to recognize the need for business knowledge and recognize the gap
between current technical and business experience among IT professionals; it’s another to
do something about it—to start bolstering one’s business acumen and experience. The rest
of this report calls out types of business skills you should be actively pursuing, along with
guidance on where and how to get help.
Get Help…Now
When asked to “choose the three skills and attributes you think would be most worthwhile
for you to focus on to move your career forward,” IT professionals in the Wisegate survey
most often chose “Being business savvy,” “Influencing others,” and “Building relationships”
(see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Wisegate Survey Question: "Choose the three skills and attributes you think
would be most worthwhile for you to focus on to move your career forward."
The top three responses to the question shown in Figure 4—all close to or even above 50%
of the respondents—are telling. Clearly, those taking the survey understood they need to
develop expertise that will help them add value to the business, but they tended to select
general options like “being business savvy” (chosen by 57%) or “building relationships”
(chosen by 49%) over specific skills such as “negotiating” (19%), “verbal communication”
(18%), or writing (a very meager 4%).
This is in stark contrast to how respondents replied when asked what kind of skills their staff
needed to develop, for which negotiating and communication (both written and verbal)
easily topped the list.
The disconnect here is interesting: respondents strongly note a need for specific business-
related skills to be developed by their staff, while they think in relatively vague, general
terms of business skill development for themselves. It’s very likely that in order to accurately
assess and address your own skills gaps, you’ll need to ask for help from a trusted,
objective source: someone to help you develop your career.

But who?
Who Depends on Where
When asked the survey question, “Who is currently helping you develop your career?”
“manager” was the most frequently chosen option (38%), while “mentor” was second
(31%), and “nobody” unfortunately came in third (29%).
This, however, tells only part of the story.
Who is available to help you develop your career likely depends on the structure of your
company, as is demonstrated in Figure 5.
Figure 5. Wisegate Survey Question: "Who is currently helping you develop your career?"
broken down by how hierarchical the respondent's company is.
Here, you can see that in flat organizations, a mentor, an executive coach, or a peer from
outside your company—all three likely to be from outside one’s company—are the most

likely options for getting help in developing your career. This makes sense; flat
organizations are less likely to have processes and personnel in place with the objective of
progressing employees “up” a ladder.
On the flip side of that coin, Figure 5 shows that IT professionals in hierarchical companies
are more likely to have their manager helping them develop their career—but less likely to
have anyone else helping. A probable reason behind this is the sense that your manager is
sufficient help in developing your career. This might in fact be the case if you are satisfied
with your current career trajectory. If, however, you expect to excel in business—not just
IT—skills, you’ll very likely need to look outside your traditional organizational structure.
To further validate this point, you need look no further than at this same question, through
the perspective of C-level and director-level IT professionals, as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6. Wisegate Survey Question: "Who is currently helping you develop your career?"
broken down by role.

C-level / VP-level and directors are more likely than those at manager or individual
contributor level to have a mentor helping them develop their careers. Likewise, C-level
respondents are the least likely to rely on a manager for career development. These are
good examples to follow; in order to integrate well into the business, it makes sense to get
the same kind of help others who successfully work with the business have gotten.
Focus on Specific Skills
If you were to ask a successful businessperson how you should develop the skill of being
“business savvy,” you would likely be met by a blank look. And yet, as shown in Figure 4,
being “business savvy” was chosen more often than any other option as a top-three
needed skill / attribute for you to focus on to move your career forward.
The point is, while being business savvy is an admirable aspiration, it will be by developing
specific business-relevant skills that you will become valuable not just within the IT
organization, but throughout the company. Note, for example, some of the lower-rated skills
in Figure 4: negotiating, verbal communication, presenting, and writing. And yet, these are
all skills that are critical components of being business savvy.
A reason these skills are seen as less important to strive for is the “if I have to” mindset.
Most senior IT professionals can write an email, make a presentation, and conduct
negotiations…when and if they have to. This is, of course, much different than actually
being skilled at these critical business tasks.
Meanwhile, people in the business side of an organization often have a difficult time
following those presentations, or understanding the question or point being made in an
email due to the technical focus and detail, at the expense of the business message being
presented.
Don’t think that just because, in a pinch, you can get one of these “soft skill” tasks done,
that you actually are doing it at the level businesspeople expect from one another. In order
to understand which skills you need to really focus on, take the time to find a mentor, a
career coach, or a successful peer to help you honestly assess your strengths and
weaknesses. Identify specifically what kind of business tasks you’re good at, what you’re
competent at, and where you need work.
Then prioritize your weaknesses and put together a plan to begin working on specific
objectives in these areas.

Make Career Choices That Help You Learn
A look at Figure 7 from the Wisegate survey shows that more than 60% of IT professionals
rank “more opportunities to learn” as one of the top-three most-important things they would
value in positively affecting their job and life.
Figure 7. Wisegate Survey Question: "Rank these items in order of importance they
would have in positively affecting your job and life."
“More positive feedback from the business side of the organization” was chosen second-
most often, and “more challenging work opportunities” was the third-most frequent result.
Very interestingly, “more money” was ranked toward the bottom. And yet, when making a
career move, compensation is frequently one of the points most-frequently negotiated,
while learning opportunities are either touched upon briefly, or not discussed at all.
The market for highly-experienced IT professionals is—and will almost certainly remain for
the foreseeable future—a seller’s market. It can almost be seen as a given that you are
going to be fine, in terms of compensation. With this in mind, it makes excellent sense to
focus on negotiating—whether when discussing benefits within your current job or when
pursuing another—on learning opportunities and business integration.

Specifically, ask for help with the following:
• Finding a mentor within the company: Someone who has a history within the IT
organization, but is currently working in the business side. Be certain to also ask for
time both on your schedule and your mentor’s for you to work together.
• Locating and subsidizing the cost of a career / executive coach: In order for
you to get a sense of what you need to learn to be valuable to the company in an
expanded, more comprehensive role, you need to develop beyond traditional IT-
specific tasks and begin working on business-relevant skills. To do this, you will
benefit from the help of someone whose business is assessing and instructing
those who, like yourself, have high competence in one area and want to now do
more.
• Opportunity to develop business-relevant skills: Most IT professionals agree
that the best way to learn is by doing. Ask for changes to your role—or to the scope
of your role—that will put you in the position of interacting with the business:
presenting, communicating, building relationships, negotiating, and participating in
strategy.
The great thing about making these kind of asks in negotiating is that each of them has a
strong benefit to the business itself. As you develop your business skillset, the enterprise
derives direct, meaningful benefits as well. First, you become an incredibly useful person in
the business: an IT professional with business savvy. Perhaps even more importantly, you
challenge yourself—and like most IT professionals, you likely find that you’re most fulfilled
when challenged in meaningful ways.
The Bottom Line
A strong and persistent need for senior IT professionals, combined with increasing
relevance of IT to every business, puts you in the driver’s seat for your career. Most IT
practitioners recognize this and an overwhelming percentage agree that business
knowledge is the most important thing they need to move forward in their careers.
However, while most IT professionals understand they need to be more business savvy,
they falter somewhat in understanding what skills they need to acquire in order to be more
relevant to the business.
Getting help in this regard—by working with a mentor, a career coach, or even with your
manager—to assess and develop specific “soft skills” like communicating, presenting,
negotiating, and so forth—is a critical step in making the transition from being a useful
employee in IT to being an essential person to the business.

There is a growing body of evidence that the
emerging successful leader is the self-
aware leader1. The self-aware leader is
strong in empathy and compassion as well
as integrity.
One key trait of self-awareness is the ability
to own your whole self—strengths and
weaknesses included. In this research we
noticed that when asked about themselves,
practitioners’ answers were general (e.g., I
need to be business savvy.) Yet when asked
about others, such as their direct staff, the
answers

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