Many Pies

Many Pies

Tuesday, July 11, 2023

How should you develop yourself as an IT professional?



Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

One of my colleagues was picking my brains recently as they were creating career development materials for a variety of jobs across our organisation. They specifically wanted to point to organisations that had good guides. For professions like accountancy and HR there were some very specific Chartered Institutes that had CPD materials. For IT though, I think it's very different.

I've been with Wycliffe for nearly 25 years, so I don't have a lot of wide experience. However we have recruited three people (developer, IT manager and a tech support role) in the past few months, so I've seen several CVs and what people are saying on them.

As far as Chartered Institutes go, I'm aware of the BCS and the IEEE in the UK. However, none of the CVs that I looked at mentioned either of them. From my perspective, when it comes to recruiting people experience counts for more than anything else (though specific qualifications in, e.g. Azure AD are of some use). 

Through the BCS and their SFIAplus I came across the SFIA skills framework. It does seem quite comprehensive. I'm open to debate, but I think IT is a much wider field than Finance or HR. 

I think SFIA will answer the question "in my particular area, where should I be putting my effort to gain skills" or progress in my career, or other ways of describing getting on. However, is there anything more generic. In fact my colleague had already come across the Research Development Framework. Although it is aimed at the research profession in fact I think the topics in the inner circle and the quadrants, with a bit of tweaking, could apply to IT - creativity, self-management, professional conduct - all good things.

So in the end we pointed people at that framework and the IEEE CPD materials. I hope you find them useful.

It would be interesting to get the perspective from both of my blog readers - does experience count for everything in IT? Is there any field in which being a Chartered Engineer is a distinct advantage?