It’s been a while since we launched any new content but there’s been a lot going on behind the scenes and we’re pleased to announce the launch of a career development tool. This isn’t aimed at any particular role and is intended to be applicable across any IT profession; it may also be applicable to non-IT professions but will probably need a bit of tweaking.
The intention behind the tool is to act as a checklist of skills and experiences that (in my opinion) are necessary to progress to the highest levels in an IT organisation, and can therefore be used as a tool to shape personal development, either for yourself or in a mentor/mentee releationship. This was developed by me from a real-life mentoring relationship and has proved useful for a number of people in helping to identify both gaps and useful, transferable skills and experiences. For example, if you want to make it as a CIO or other senior leader in IT, it’s unlikely you’ll get there without some experience with Project Management.
This has proved useful in having discussions with people who are doing a role that they don’t really enjoy to help them recognise that it may be a necessary stepping stone and to focus their minds on how they fill in the rest of the boxes on the checklist. As ever, your mileage may vary.
This is being released (like all our work here on pragnalysis) under a Creative Commons license, which means that if you don’t agree with some of the content, think something’s missing or just plain don’t like the format, you can change and improve it to your heart’s content to make it more relevant. All that’s required is that you credit the original source and you can’t use it or any derivative works commercially.
You can find the links here:
OpenDocument format (ODS)
MS Office format (XLSX)
The way it works is as follows: the top left quadrant is a linear view (from left to right) of the experience you’ve had in 5 key areas; in my experience and opinion, you need to have ticked as many of these as possible to get to the top. The top right quadrant is also linear, however, this one is from bottom to top. This relates to specific experiences that again (my opinion) are needed to progress to the highest levels. This one is intended to be more of a hierarchy, in that each level typically (not always) needs to be completed before moving to the next level – you have to get a full line (incidentally, this tool was originally called Career Bingo…).
The bottom left and bottom right quadrants are non-linear, that is there is no hierarchy or order to the boxes. The bottom left represents IT-industry specific skills and knowledge and the bottom right represents general business knowledge/experience. The intention here is that if you tick one of these boxes it means that you have some practical experience of the subject in question, not just a level of conceptual knowledge. So fill it in (a random example is on the second page) and use it to identify areas that you may need to develop in order to progress.
Obviously this is a very opinion-based tool and not everyone will want to progress to the top levels of management in IT. Plenty of people have done that without filling in a lot of these boxes – I have certainly worked with a few. However, the people I have shared this with so far seem to have found it useful so feel free to use it, build on it, tailor it or just ignore it. Any and all comments and feedback greatly appreciated.
pragnalysis Career Checklist by Joseph da Silva is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
