Information Technology job titles can be confusing because a tech person generally performs multiple job roles. For example, you can be a IT Project Manager and also have responsibility as a Systems Developer, Software Developer, and Systems Analyst, just to name a few. When you are looking to advance your technology career, it is important to look at your interesting achievements that are not part of your primary job.
An ideal technical job search should focus on the exploration and discovery of opportunities both within and outside your domain. For technology jobs in particular, the industry changes so frequently that new opportunities continuously arise. Advance your career by looking beyond standard career paths, the results can be truly amazing.
Advance Your Career: Think about the possibilities
Do you want to transition from Software Engineer to Data Engineer?
Do you want to transition from Data Analyst to Data Wrangler?
Do you want to transition from IT Support Specialist to Analytics Developer?
Case Study – Finding Opportunities
Taking on these expanded responsibilities can create career opportunities beyond a traditional career path. This was the case for one of my clients who made such a discovery.
Bryan came to me after being laid off from a job he’d held for over 10 years. He wanted to find another position as a help desk support manager because it aligned the best with the primary work he’d been doing. From my perspective, it seemed like a very straightforward project.
Bryan used my storytelling approach to describe those projects where he was most proud of the results. He soon filled his questionnaire with great examples of the work he’d done. But as I read through his stories, a distinct theme emerged that had nothing to do with his IT support responsibilities.
Instead, the projects that he described were about the business products he’d created– simulations to develop and test management skills in an online learning environment. Over his career, he’d designed business simulations that blended standard business programming with game programming into products that became the primary revenue stream for the business.
Here is how I captured some of the work that he’d done. I first defined the business need and then wrote to that need.
How to Make Your Technology Resume More Interesting
Business Need: A new “family” of project management teaching simulations.
- Developed products that generated ~$10M over 3 years, with a low development cost. Created a common platform for 3 educational product lines.
- Coordinated with subject matter experts to define requirements and validate features including action learning, individual team exercises, and a mini simulation of a project for a hands-on experience.
- Designed and developed simulation, utilizing a blended team of in-house and outsourced resources.
- Wrote user and instructor’s guides, and specified hardware, peripherals, and supporting software for classroom use.
- Rolled out products for instructor and student use and created a feedback loop for capturing suggestions for continuous improvement.
Business Need: Major investment firm wanted to evaluate decision-making capabilities of branch managers.
- Developed a model to simulate sales situations with the ability to analyze their decisions in order to evaluate performance.
- Delivered on the challenge to have performance exactly model the client’s extensive data collected by mapping real sales performance to situations and the decisions made in those situations.
- Yielded years of continued business with the client and the development of similar products for additional investment firms.
Business Need: Major electronics firm wanted to evaluate sales assistant’s ability to influence customer decisions, prioritize customer value, and manage time well within a sales territory.
- Worked closely with client to select the appropriate available decisions to influence the customers, and to simulate the necessity to manage time.
- Created problem situations identified by actual sales reps and turned them into random events to challenge the participants. Used varying customer profiles and actual model numbers within current product lines for an authentic experience.
Find New Job Roles and Interesting Careers
Creating the simulations had not been Bryan’s primary job so he didn’t consider it as a strong skill for his job search. He actually thought that the simulations would only be valuable for an online learning company. What Bryan didn’t realize was that a new industry had emerged – Business Analytics and Predictive Analytics – that used many of the same skills that he possessed.
Bryan nearly missed an exceptional opportunity by focusing his job search on the familiar work of help desk management and IT support. Though proud of his work with simulations, he saw it as secondary to his core support responsibilities. Seeing simulation only in context of online learning limited his career vision. New opportunities opened up when he became aware that simulation is a central concept of business analytics and a high-demand skill set.
About the Author
Jennifer Hay is that rare technical resume writer who actually has IT experience. She applies her knowledge of data and information management, business analytics, data analytics, data science, infrastructures and architectures, software development, project and program management, among other areas to create truly compelling messages.
Jennifer is the author of data and information management courses to help IT professionals in fields of business intelligence, business analytics, and data analytics.