Should i stay technical

It may be as a software developer, help desk technician, social media guru, data communication specialist, website designer, or in other technical area.

Hi your name goes here , you have done great work over the past couple of years and have shown some great leadership qualities. I would like to promote you to a new job that:. All that said, being an IT Manager is a great job for the right person. I personally loved being in IT management roles.

I found it to be creative, interesting, challenging, and rewarding. IT Management, however, is not for everyone. Does becoming a manager interest you or are you considering the job just for the potential increase in pay? Do you feel you are personally ready and have the level of maturity needed to take on the responsibility of managing other professionals? Do you have the professional experience to move into management or would it be best to gain more experience as an individual contributor first?

Do you love doing technical work to the degree that you will eventually be sorry you moved in a different professional direction? Does becoming a manager excite you as a new career opportunity? If so, why? You have the opportunity to move into management because you have proven that you have impressive technical abilities. When you make that move, you will have to deal with a whole new set of responsibilities. Managers have to take care of hiring, firing, and sometimes petty inter-office conflicts.

They also have to spend a lot more time in meetings, planning budgets, and thinking about big picture goals rather than minute technical challenges. If you can adapt to this new set of responsibilities, you may thrive as a manager. But if you would rather think about coding than human resources, the step up may be a mistake.

It is expected that if you have a skilled technical mind, you will eventually be promoted into management. Instead of going into the work directly, creating a document explaining what you want to do and having people give you feedback on it. Remember, whenever we're reviewing, we need to model curiosity. So we focus on making questions and not assumptions.

We need to respect that people had the time to work on what they're submitting to review and to study it, and we didn't, and our experience may be outdated. A great way to extract the most out of a review is to set a personal goal to understand and articulate every impactful decision the person made and its implications. We don't need to review every piece of work. Instead, we can focus on going deep on what's more impactful or riskier.

For most managers, having deep knowledge of a subject will not pay off as much as having a broad understanding of several areas. Therefore, instead of focusing on mastering all topics, we should master only those we have to. We should dedicate most of our technical studying time to learning the basics of many different ones.

Having technical people around us and discussing experiences broadens our knowledge and gets live feedback on what we do. Creating a network is all about helping people. I promise you. You will get way more than you give if you dedicate yourself to supporting others, not expecting them to help you back—especially when you connect two people who can help each other.

Participating in communities is a great way to foster this network. Sharing your experience, learning from other people's experiences, and discussing ideas are rewarding and help build connections. So, whenever you can, ask for the authentic experiences behind blog posts and tech talks.

Listen and learn from people who have done similar things. Ask for feedback on tools, frameworks, or processes you want to use. But remember to filter out and understand that each context is different.

We need to stay technical without having our hands all over what people are building. Our work is still the team, and the reason we stay technical is the same we should be doing any other thing with our time: To Make The Team Awesome. That's where our focus should be.