Taking a Backup on Your Job--Data Career Management

Career management is one of my favorite topics to write and or talk about, because I can directly help people. Something I notice as a consultant going into many organizations is that many IT professionals aren’t thinking proactively about their careers, especially those that work in support roles (supporting an underlying business, not directly contributing to revenue like a consulting firm or software development organization). One key thing to think about is how your job role fits into your organization—this is a cold hard ugly fact that took me a while to figure out.

Let’s use myself as an example—I was a DBA at a $5B/yr medical device company—that didn’t have tremendous dependencies on data or databases. The company needed someone in my slot—but frankly it did not matter how good they were at there job beyond a point. Any competent admin would have sufficed. I knew there was a pretty low ceiling of how far my salary and personal success could go at that company. So I moved to a very large cable company—they weren’t a technology company per se, but they were large enough organization that high level technologists roles were available—I got onto a cross platform architectural team that was treated really well.

I see a lot of tweets from folks that often seem frustrated in their regular jobs—the unemployment rate in database roles is exceedingly low—especially for folks like you who actively reading and staying on top of technology—don’t be scared to explore the job market, you might be pleasantly surprised.