It may seem a little weird to be talking career paths your first term in college, however, there is a lot of reasons to.
If you think back upon your high school graduation, a lot of people feel like, “How can I be here already? I just started high school yesterday.”
This is a common feeling. Four years seems like a long time, until you look back on them. And if you come to school with another degree because you are changing jobs, or you changed majors, or you have a 2 year degree, your graduation will come even sooner.
We often talk about starting with the end in mind when developing software or IT solutions. This allows us to know what our end goal is, and we can then work backward to make sure we’re always meeting that goal.
Therefore, we know if your main interest is in finding a job in the IT field, we can look to taking on internships which allow you to gain additional experience while earning college credit. If you want to work as a software developer, we work on creating larger projects for you to showcase to future potential employers. And, if you want to go to grad school, you work on finding research opportunities to showcase your research skills – which is something grad schools look for.
There are three major career paths you can look forward to. And while I don’t intend to bias you toward anyone of of them, you want to know what is involved in each of them.
However, remember, you can change your mind at any time. I know I did, even late in the game. This made it more challenging for me, but its not impossible – clearly, as I was able to do it. And if I can do it, then you can too.
Practitioner
The practitioner is a person who works in their field of study. They will day in, and day out, be working on either administration or software development. As you move up in the career, you may take on a team doing the same time of work you do. This could be a small team, i.e. just a couple of people, to dozens of people. However, it will be in the area you focus on.
Also, as you gain experience, you will do less low level things, and more higher thinking jobs.
So if you work in network engineering for example, you might start with running cables, trouble shooting connections, and adding new ports. However, as you move up, you get into network management and load testing and balancing, and then into (re)designing new networks.
If you’re a software engineer, you will go from having people checking your code, and handing you small sections to correct/add to, to you designing and developing the high level goals of the application, and writing less and less code – as you will have people to give that job to.
Management
If you want to move into management, prepare to be good at communicating. You will also need to know not only what your job area encompasses, but how it affects other business units which interact with you. So if you manage the website, does does that effect the customer support team. Are there things you can do to help them improve their KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
Having some business knowledge is helpful as well, as you might be responsible for a team budget, (financial) forecasting, hiring and firing of staff, and more. Many people go on to get an MBA if they think they are going to be working on a management track, but check with your work to see if that’s what they want to see.
As a person with a tech background, you might work as a manager of a larger department, overseeing various teams, or even become a CIO (Chief Information Office) or CTO (Chief Technology Officer). Note: Some places use these terms interchangeably. Some have set definitions for them. In cases like that, I’ve actually seen companies that have both.
Grad School / Research
Another option is going on to Grad School to either get your Masters or PhD immediately. Think about what you want to do career wise. Most industry jobs don’t require a PhD, some might even frown on it. Some companies want a Masters, especially if you are in a highly sought field (High Performance Computing, AI, Cyber Security, etc) as it can help you get a head start on others. Other companies don’t care. They just look for results and who can get them there the fastest.
A Masters or PhD is required if you want to teach at a post secondary school, like Tusculum. Typically a Masters takes between 18 and 24 months extra, and a PhD will take another two to five years.
Expect to do lots of individual guided and team research if you go this route. Most students do the research that their sponsor wants/needs done. So pick a school which has the topic/specialty in faculty that you are looking for.
Potential Career Paths was originally found on Access 2 Learn
