Tips for carrier management in IT in a large corporate firm

In those tough times, it is important to keep in mind the basics of carrier management and how-tos for progressing (or staying) in the ladder of large corporations IT departments.

Among the necessary soft skills: learn to never report bad news. You are paid to make your boss feel good, not to give people additional work! At the same time, someone needs to get the work done, make sure you don’t do too much so that you have time left, for instance to plan for your future carrier. There are some more soft skills you do need to master if you want to move up the ladder, remind me of them.

Some ideas to progress in the ladder: do not belittle! What is the use to simplify the IS of your firm? You will end up with less staff and less issues! Think long term: propose to add layers of IT so that you add sexy (sexy not useful) functionality…and more staff (yes, you can be a big boss too), so that later you might have more production problems (yes, you are important) requiring additional expert staff and raising architecture questions (yes you are an expert). We all have numerous stories about making boss the one who created the mess…
One of the best ways to achieve this is by building data-warehouses…All managers love them: performance indicators, clients or production statistics (gorgeous figures should not lead to too significant action). This represents great opportunity for an ambitious IT wanna-be-manager: convince a big business boss he needs figures & indicators (to make him/her shine of course) ; ask for a small budget to get started…and along the way, more needs will pile up, so that you’ll be able to ask for more resource…and before you know it, you are ahead of a big team, congratulations! Of course, once the original boss moves to another job, the data-warehouse stays…and even if no one looks at its reports, who will have the courage to cut it?