How To Become An IT Standout?
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.
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