This is conclusion of the 5 part keynote I co-created and delivered with Orin Thomas. It’s been sitting in my drafts for FAR TOO LONG and as I came here at the start of 2025 to clean things up and dust off the old blog – I realized it was never published!
As a review – Orin and I decided to collaborate on this keynote because we realized there was something missing. Most industry advice for careers in IT are focused on the first part of your career:
– How to get hired.
– How to move up from the support desk to managing the big workloads.
– How to build a portfolio of valuable career skills that allow you to solve the problems.
But what’s rarely discussed is how to manage and tend to your career beyond that first decade – how do you keep your career resilient and continue to have a rewarding and valuable career through middle age and on to retirement? If you’re intending to spend the bulk of your career working in IT, you need to have a strategy to capitalize on your valuable experience as well as how to make the right choices on what new skills to add to your portfolio.
This video is the final chapter. In this 5th and final part of “Navigating Your Career in IT,” we emphasize the importance of effective problem-solving and continuous skill-building throughout one’s career. Address systemic issues rather than just point-in-time fixes, and become a valuable mentor in the “Twilight phase” of your career by sharing knowledge and helping colleagues learn.
I hope you liked this series – here’s the full playlist with all the parts in one spot.
Part 1: Going Beyond how to get started in IT
Part 2: Keeping up with new Tech & Tools, but not getting distracted
Part 3: Embedding Knowledge and Effective Knowledge Retention
Part 4: Myth: Seniority = Management