Nine Career Mistakes for IT Pros To Avoid

By Linda Leung

New career mistakes such as messing around with personal Facebook accounts during work time join some old-time favorites as gaffes to avoid. Here are some of the mistakes as observed by career experts and IT executives that IT professionals should avoid.

1. Failure to appreciate your network of contacts. The success of LinkedIn shows just how powerful connections are for getting your foot in the right doors. Independent career coach Patricia Furlong recalls an example where an executive client referred a contact to a job at her (the client's) company. The contact got the job but didn't bother telling his referee the good news, least of all thank her for her referral. The new hire's bad manners led the exec to vow to never to make referrals again. This may seem like a dramatic decision but is not unusual if one feels taken for granted when referring a job candidate.

2. Follow the money only. As a tech geek, it's easy to get starry eyed when your employer lavishes you with the latest tech toys and high salary, but does the company's culture fit yours? "Does the company espouse the technology, practices, or processes that you believe in? If you don't believe in what they're doing, or their goals for technology, would you be happy?" asks Michael Morris, a communications engineering manager at a high-tech company. You could find out about a company's culture by searching for existing employees using social networking tools, Morris suggests.

3. Lousy soft skills. This mistake is an oldie, but some IT pros still think tech skills is all that is needed to get ahead in IT. Matt Colarusso, branch manager, national recruiting team at IT staffing company Sapphire Technologies says he knew of one consultant who was continually being passed over for promotion. "Socially, it was very difficult to get information out of him. I told him to pay attention to the people who were getting promoted and see what they're doing that he wasn't." Colarusso says companies are more likely to promote techies who are good at interacting with end users - after all, end users are the customers. And if techies ultimately want to become CIOs, people skills are a very important attribute. Colarusso advises techies to get involved in social activities, such as charity work, in which they can present themselves in a new and different light.

4. Being too supportive. As a supervisor you could sabotage your career by being too supportive of an underperforming worker. Furlong recounts a tale of one senior executive who went above and beyond to try and help an underperforming team member. Despite the one-on-one time the manager spent with the individual, and the professional coaching offered to address behavioral issues, the individual could not or would not recognize the problems he was causing and failed to improve his performance. "As a result of the individual's continuing poor performance, the manager was perceived to be ineffective, which also had a negative impact on his own performance review," Furlong says.

5. Not understanding your capabilities. You want a promotion in recognition for your hard work. But is a management role suited to your personality? Managers manage people and that includes the not-so-fun stuff of disciplining, firing, and so on. Colarusso says IT execs could try hybrid technologist/manager roles, such as team lead, which exposes them to some of the people-management aspects to see if it suits their personality.

6. Resume mistakes. Colarusso says resumes are living documents and IT execs should update their CVs every three months. Even if the end result runs over multiple pages, you'll at least have a good basis from which to edit down when you need to send out resumes quickly. Again, don't just rely on your technical skills to sell yourself; you should also describe the scope of projects that you've worked on and quantify their successes. But of course that doesn't give IT pros free rein to do a little resume- or title-inflating because hiring managers will want to dig deep into that part of a pro's resume.

7. Don't burn bridges when you leave your employer. After a layoff, it's often tempting to tell managers and coworkers exactly what you think of them - either directly or as a comment in your social networks or blog. But even in this globalized economy, the IT world is pretty small. Your coworkers may end up working in your dream company one day and would put in a good word for you - if they had any to say that is. Morris says: "Not burning bridges was always a rule, but it's mushroomed now because of all the tools available today to find out about people quickly." Colarusso says some of his clients keep databases with names of former contractors and whether they should be rehired when openings occur.

8. Be careful what you put in writing. Email and instant messaging notes are such easy forms of communication but as IT execs, you'll know that they're just as permanent as indelible ink. Even if you think a comment in an email is between you and the recipient, you'll never know if the email is later forwarded to others, or if someone decides to comment using the "Reply-All" button. Also, organizations have legal and regulatory obligations to retain email and other forms of business communications. Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, for example, all email correspondence could be used as evidence in legal proceedings.

9. Letting your tech skills get outdated and not learning about important new technologies. As the tech industry moves in Internet speed, it is easy for skills to become outdated (see the previous newsletter "10 Dying IT skills"). Colarusso advises IT pros to use online skills assessment tools from companies such as Brainbench and Kenexa to check how their skills measure up. Michael Morris singles out virtualization as a technology that all IT pros should learn about, whether they specialize in hardware, software, or networks. "Organizations are moving to virtualization very quickly because of the cost savings," and IT pros need to understand how virtualization affects their particular niche as well as how it affects the broader IT infrastructure, says Morris.

Linda Leung is an independent technology writer/editor in California. Reach Linda at linda.leung@gloabalknowledge.com.