Tag Career Advancement

Entries 2 Total

Predicting Future Employee Trajectory

Feb 15, ’11 4:32 PM

One of the more interesting challenges for IT leaders is to be directionally correct in their assessment of ‘employee trajectory’ during the annual review process.

It is human nature to label/classify/categorize, and many of us have spent a significant amount of time placing staff into neat HR-derived boxes: “she’s a rising star”, “he’s a trusted professional”, etc.

I’ve often wondered how accurate the typical manager is in assigning these labels, and whether that categorization process really benefits an organization.  Like any label, an assignment into an HR box can take on a life of it’s own, and may be hard to shake off.

Of the dozens of trajectories that could be placed on a grid, here are two, which form an interesting comparison (and I suspect affects many organizations):

Future Trajectory

Here we have two individuals.  One is getting stellar reviews for two years, and as a result of that is likely the talk of the management team.  He may be getting additional face-time with the executive staff, hard-to-find dollars for training and development thrown his way, or other investments made on his behalf.

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Becoming a CIO – Current Thinking for IT Leaders

Aug 18, ’10 2:54 PM

Following is a curated list of resources that reflect current thinking on a topic of interest to IT leaders. You can assist this effort by contributing insight from your own real-world experiences, and are invited to suggest changes or additions here.

Current Thinking Includes:

A review of resources making referencing to the CIO position reveals a very long list of suggested traits for the role.  Rather than providing an aggregation of all those items here, we might focus on what appear to be the macro-level differences for this specific role versus the positions that come before it in the IT career ladder. While promotions within the IT domain will usually carry greater scope (more people, portfolio, budget responsibility), the consensus view is that movement to CIO is qualitatively different in several ways.

While continuing to be responsible for the successful performance of the IT organization, the CIO’s focus necessarily expands to the health and success of the entire business, with an expectation that a substantial positive impact will be made to the organization.  The dozens of skills learned and practiced over the course of the CIO’s career are leveraged not just toward a larger IT staff, but also to the organization and its needs.  A deep understanding of the business, market dynamics, financial drivers and opportunities are likely to be new skills over the demands of the past, and are a challenge for many CIOs (see Business Alignment).

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