You can really boost your IT career by adhering to these core principles: having an ongoing commitment for acquiring knowledge, a deep desire to improve your interpersonal and entrepreneur skills, and making an effort to establish your authority as a leader.

Never stop learning

IT is such a dynamic field that one can never afford to stop learning. Continuously educating oneself is absolutely vital if you want your skills to be forever in demand. Those who don’t do this are at a risk of confining themselves to narrowly defined careers and becoming redundant after a few years. The net is a great way of peeping into the future of not just IT but technology as a whole. So keep track of blogs and Web sites, participate in online forums, and do this with a critical eye on your future. Always keep a sharp lookout on the technologies that are most likely to shape the industry. This will allow you to keep up with the changes in technology, which, in turn, will provide you with the insight to steer your career toward growing specialties (wireless security, to use a current example) and away from less marketable ones.

Soft skills set you apart

Keeping your technical skills and knowledge up to date is important, but if you want to help bring about a change rather than just respond to it, you'll also need to take a look at how you work with others. It would be a good idea to periodically assess your soft skills to determine where improvements should be made. Ask your colleagues and department heads — whom you trust — for feedback on your strengths and weaknesses. When you are able to identify a shortcoming, make a plan of action to address it.

Establish your leadership potential

For an exceptionally good IT professional, his job specialization is actually just the starting point. So when you take an initiative to expand your role in your organization, people will automatically start to think of you as a leader. Serving your organization as a leader also means demonstrating integrity and selflessness. For example, the willingness to own up to a project that failed does more to establish your credibility than the effort you may make in making sure you get your share of the credit when a project succeeds.

The best-laid plans

Even though IT professionals believe in planning their career meticulously– very few people, who have been successful in IT, end up where they expected to be. In fact, many technology standouts owe their success to their ability to change course, based on developments in their companies and fields. By being willing to explore unexpected paths, you may run the risk of reaching a dead end or two, but you also open yourself up to a much broader range of professional possibilities.