Career Opportunities

The High-Tech Career Handbook

End Game

April 13, 2001

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Regardless of what type of high-tech job you may have, you will eventually have to deal with an important career question – your final career goal. High-tech workers start in all different areas, programming, support, networking, but as your career progresses you will be moved closer and closer to some eventual decision. Do you follow a management track? Do you want to continue in a hands-on technical role? You might even decide to move outside the typical corporate environment and work for yourself. Regardless of the choice, you will either make these decisions for yourself or someone will make them for you. This is why it is so important to look towards the "end game" of your career, even if you are years, if not decades, away.

My own experience

As I developed my own high-tech career over the last 15 years there were several points where I made decisions about the work I wanted to do. I had to face important decisions from the very start. I spent 3 months searching for my first job when my wife and I moved to Los Angeles in mid-1986. I had been offered a job in sales at Egghead Software, but I was really waiting to hear from a small, online services company that I had interviewed with at the same time. Due to several concurrent problems the interviewer could not give me an answer when they had planned, but the Egghead people where pressing me for an answer that day.

After a few hours of heavy thought, I turned down the Egghead position and hoped that the other company would eventually make me an offer. As you can imagine, it can be very stressful to turn down one job offer in hopes for a better one, but I knew that I really didn't want to work in sales. My career decisions had begun before I even had my first high-tech job in California.

Much later in my career, while working for Walt Disney Imagineering, I faced another decision, one that many of you will face, to manage or not to manage. I have always enjoyed being a hands-on computer technician, trainer, support guru, you name it, but after nearly 5 years with Imagineering I was asked, flat out, if I wanted to chose a management track or continue in some sort of technical track. Despite the fact that I knew the technical track would be less secure and less profitable, I chose to remain in that position. I couldn't see myself managing other workers and distancing myself further and further from hands-on skills.

Looking back, I think I knew intuitively that I wouldn't be at Disney forever and already saw a different track for myself. I had been writing for several years and I was finding that more enjoyable than my full-time work. I knew that I would eventually be working for myself, either as a writer or computer consultant/trainer or some combination. In fact, this is basically what happened.

Take a look

So, to quote the Microsoft marketing department, "where do you want to go today?" As a high-tech worker you have a wide variety of career "end-games" open to you. If you want to follow the management track you should start today, regardless of your job-level. Find goods managers, in your own company or outside, and learn from them. Take each and every opportunity to supervise and manage that is offered to you. If your department needs someone to coordinate and installation or upgrade, volunteer. Be very clear where you preferences lie. Eventually, you will be seen as someone who is eager to take responsibility and manage others.

If you want to remain in the technical arena you may need to develop your own position in your company. Your challenge will be to create a job that moves you above the usual support calls and system management issues into the realm of computer guru. Something that I always championed was the concept of a tech worker hierarchy.

As people grew from entry-level tech support and hardware installation jobs they would perform less hands-on technical work and become more of a resource for the other members of the department. They could still get their hands dirty when necessary, but they would also be responsible for shepherding the younger technical people through their careers.

I had often noticed that when technical workers moved into management you often lost their extremely valuable technical knowledge. They spent their days shuffling paper instead of applying the knowledge that they had worked so hard to acquire. By developing tech workers in their own career track, I believe that that knowledge can be maintained and passed down to the rest of the staff. Sure, there is some management involved in a position like this, but the focus is less on management and more on keeping the company's technology as productive as possible.

These are only three possible "end games" for your high-tech career. Whether you follow on of these scenarios or, more likely, create one of your own, it is most important to look up and check where you are headed. You always want to make sure that where you end up is truly where you want to go, today, tomorrow and always.

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