Suggest best career path

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• Mario

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  04 February 19

  Hi Anonymous,

  When you say "change my career", did you mean you want to get out of IT and into an entirely different line and type of work? If that's the case, I would suggest you get in touch with a more general career counselor who can help identify alternate careers in other disciplines that might suit you. At MyTechlogy we specialise in IT only.

  If, however, you meant that you are looking for a different role, and you do not have enough time to learn and gain practice in new technology areas, I would suggest considering the following roles.

  1. Business Analyst. You have not mentioned whether you have strong business domain skills, but assuming you do have good analytical skills in general, and reasonably good communication skills one option that may suit you is the business analyst role. If you have strong business domain knowledge you could apply for a role as a fairly senior business domain specialist in that area.

  2. Test Manager or Test Lead. Again, I don't have enough information about the depth of your knowledge and experience in formal testing methods, but I assume that over the course of your career so far you have gained a lot of experience in this part of the software development life cycle, so it is another area to consider. There are usually many qualified candidates for these roles, so it would help a lot if you could get introduced to a hiring manager through a referral.

  3. Project Manager. You already have experience in this role, so the most natural progression would be to find a new job as a project manager, but for larger or more complex projects or support operations, either in mainframes or in any other technology or product implementation. I am assuming that you may not be working in a DevOps environment, nor are your projects following an Agile methodology, and there are still plenty of organizations that do not use either of these.

  4. Trainer. If you have the aptitude, temperatment and experience to train and groom other professionals, you could also look at becoming a trainer or a coach in area such as business analysis, testing or project management methodologies. Demand for trainers in mainframe-based technology skills is currently less than it used to be earlier, so depending on where you are based it may take more time than you have to find a training position for a technology skill area. Certain training roles are increasingly gig-based, which means they may not offer a full-time job, but (if you are so inclined) an understanding gained of the training sector can eventually lead you to starting and growing your own training business.

  Being multidiscplinary leads me to guess that you have the ability to work with a wide range of project types and business domains, and while that generalist analytical ability may suit several types of organizations, the ones that are focused on one type of product within a narrow business domain may expect a strong degree of specialisation in one area. Therefore you may be better off targeting organizations that either work in the areas you are strongest in, or those that require adaptability and the ability to work across technologies and domains as a generalist manager.

  Whichever path or opportunities you choose to pursue I would recommend that you tailor a version of your CV for each one, so that you present the most relevant aspects of your profile for the job that you are applying to. (I would also recommend keeping track of which version you send for which job).

  Finally, finding a new role also involves an element of good fortune that is gained by always trying to be in the right place at the right time, so I would strongly recommend leveraging your entire professional network so that you come to know of new or unadvertised vacancies fast, and also by writing a clear headline and profile summary in the professional profiles that you maintain on social media or job sites.