I have a friend. (no, really ;)). She recently got laid off from my workplace, from a job that was basically as a very junior db analyst. This was the first job she’d had for quite a while, so naturally this is a pretty hard blow, which she seems to be dealing with by pretty much focusing every second of her day so far into getting a new job.
So far so good. Trouble is, seeing how the job panned out for her, I’m convinced she should not be working as a programmer or an analyst or anything of a similar nature. Some people have programmers brains - others not so much. What she does have, though, is a great desire to work in a computer sort of area, people skills, organisational ability, boundless energy, and motivation.
So - what is there out there for someone with that sort of skillset and not very much recent work experience? I’m really trying to get her to slow down and consider what she’s best suited for, and this is hard since she’s the sort of person who, after sitting down and having a good cry, was off at 9 the next morning updating her CV, hitting the job sites and applying for anything she could see - but she’s in this mentality that she should be applying for stuff just like what she’s been doing. I need some practical suggestions to try to refocus her.
She won’t get an IT manager role directly, but she could possibly work as a project manager on IT projects. Again, it’s one of those tough to do things without experience. I’d suggest she look into that topic. If it interests her, she can study and look for work as an assistant on a large project.
I agree it sounds like Project manager is the way to go.
Unfortunatly it is becoming a vague job title these days. Some places, because of Title Inflation(or the fact the boss isn’t budgeted a secretary anymore) Project managers are basically doing secretarial work for the boss, rather than PM work. That is especially true of Junior PM roles.
I am a Systems Analyst and that doesn’t seem like it would be a good fit for her. It is a hybrid of strong technical skills, technical writing, training, and meeting with people at all levels to discuss technical issues. I agree that a junior project management role may be a good fit for her. Many of them have minimal technical skills but they can run meetings and keep track of long lists of tasks, timeframes, and deal with all kinds of people to keep projects on track. I would hate it myself but some people love it.
What about telephone tech support or inside sales? It’s not anyone’s dream job, but then a lot of people who go into it have tech skills and not people skills. A lot of those jobs are organized in tiers, so that she could learn the technical aspects at her own speed.
Another area she might consider is training people on computer-related stuff.
My best project managers were good with people and had enough tech savvy to understand what us techies said, but also the brains to understand that they weren’t experts nor expected to be - their job was to manage the people-and-organization end of the work.
So another vote for trying to get some sort of junior project manager job.
If I understand the project manager role correctly, it’s basically herding the cats (ummm…programmers ;)) so that the project gets completed well and according to the customer’s satisfaction?
That’s interesting, because in my company that role tends to be taken by the guru programmers - at least on the lower levels. On the higher management levels - the managers of managers, they’re not necessarily (and yes, those sort of people are sometimes teh best managers) - but I’ve never been quite sure what their career path was to get there.
The other sort of thing we were looking at is Business Analysts … again, in my company these sort of positions tend to be taken up by programmers (well, ex-programmers) but I’m sure there must be some other sort of career path … I just don’t know what it is!
Trainer is an excellent idea. I’ll definitely suggest that. Actually, recruiter would be good too. I wonder if any recruitment firms are hiring…
IT help desk. If she really wants to work in IT but doesn’t have a lot of experience she should start at the bottom doing helpdesk. Possibilities are endless from there after a few years doing it.
Well, That part of it, but not all. A good PM takes personal responsability for a project.(They often have more than one going on at once). Most of the other involved parties usually have many activities going on at once, and can easily forget one or two of them. A good PM will sit down with the Architects, Programmers, and get feedback. They are kind of the mediators between the main forces in IT development.
1, The Users(gimme gimme gimme, we want a program that will do eveything, with no bugs immediately, and we ain’t gonna learn anything new)
2. the architects(…And the database tier will be served by 4 Unobtainia Corp. PetaFlop supercomputers, with 5 levels of redundant failover backup…)
3. The programmers(We dont have enough time to do all this on schedule, and that feature would be very little payoff in utility for the time invested, we ain’t gonna do it, and Oh yeah, we need $1.6 trillion in seat licences for the nifty new toys)
4. The Boss/accountants(Well maybe we can have a part time intern spend next week on rewriting the entire legacy code-base, will 26 approved man hours cover it?)
Amazingly enough when you get all of these people in one room you have a metric buttload of words expressed, and you achieve negative progress.
The good PM spends a lot of time sitting with each group, going over their concerns, and knows enough about technology, business, and the other aspects to pass those concerns along to the other groups in their language, and must understand which battles to fight, and which to fold. They then create thick documentation, and beat every stakeholder over the head with spiky instruments until everybody signs off. Then they start herding cats to make sure every thing agreed to is happening on schedule.