Managing your IT career helps maximize your happiness and success. Because you invest so much of your adult life by working, you want to make the most of your time. Having a plan helps you set milestones and accomplish your professional goals.

Use these tips to develop a plan for your IT career.

Start with Your Current Role

Think about where you are now. For instance, make a list of your skills, strengths, and experience. Also, include what you enjoy doing most, what gives you energy, and what keeps you motivated. Additionally, focus on whether you prefer leading, collaborating, or working independently. Plus, consider whether you have finished your education or would like additional certifications or degrees.

Include Your Destination

Figure out where you want your career to lead. For instance, think about what you want to be doing in 5 to 10 years. Then, focus on where you want to be in shorter increments. Also, decide whether you will be with the same employer in a more senior role, at another company, or in an entirely new career. Be sure your goals align with what motivates you the most.

Analyze Your Gaps

Use your career goals for the next 2 to 5 years to find postings for the type of job you want. See whether you have the education, skills, experience, and requirements for each role. Next, rate your list of education, skills, and experience against the job requirements. Use 1 to indicate no match between yourself and the requirement and 5 to indicate an excellent match. The lower the rating, the more time and energy you will need to invest in improvement. Then, group together the common skills and experiences you have a solid background in and those that require additional development. This shows the type of education, skills, and experience you should focus on.

Develop Your Career Plan

Use your list of the education, skills, and experience you need to develop to create your career goals for the next few years. Start by creating tasks related to each item and how you will achieve it. For instance, if you want to learn specific software, you could ask a colleague to show you or take a class. Then, organize a timeline for a logical direction in which to reach your goals. Begin with the short-term tasks you can quickly achieve, such as reading a book, before moving to the long-term goals, such as earning a master’s degree. Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Give yourself start and end dates with milestones in between.

Measure Your Progress

Hold yourself accountable for making progress toward your goals. For instance, keep track of how your results align with your deadlines. Also, find ways to get back on course when needed. Additionally, revise your deadlines accordingly. Plus, celebrate your successes along the way.

Advance Your IT Career

Move forward in your IT career with help from RightStone. Visit our job board today.

Automation has been a regular topic of discussion for well over a decade. Even still, the world has not yet felt its full effects.

While there’s no doubt that automation impacts jobs, automation also presents opportunities for IT professionals. Before you can harness automation to expand your career, you first need to look at the applications.

What’s Automation Doing in IT?

Automation is part of the software revolution, and it’s made the jobs of IT pros easier to bare. Automation makes monitoring simpler and allows you to skip the manual sifting through files. These realities align with the predictions that found automation would first take over repetitive, manual work that primarily requires following the same program.

Although it’s possible that tech support jobs, in particular, will be most subject to automation, it’s unlikely that these roles will evaporate. Instead, the tasks themselves will change, and there will be a smaller cohort of people doing them.

However, automation isn’t going to do everything for you. It won’t take over from non-routine or non-standardized tasks.

What Should You Do Next? It’s All About Skills

Automation itself isn’t here to take IT jobs. However, if you want to remain relevant, you do need to adjust your skills accordingly.

The IT field is already facing a huge skills shortage in general, but some of the automation skills that are increasingly in-demand include:

Network automation skills
Configuration management software experience
Troubleshooting
Scripting

Of course, if you know how to work with automation or contribute to it, then your skills will be particularly in demand.

Finally, there’s evidence that applied technology skills (ATS), or skills that focus on integrating new technologies, such as data analysis, will remain at the forefront or recruiter and hiring managers’ minds.

You Can Survive Automation

Automation reduces the need for highly repetitive tasks, which means jobs associate with repetitive and easily programmable tasks are at risk. However, automation isn’t AI. If there’s a deviation in your processes or they’re not standardized, then they require a human to run them.

You can survive automation by focusing on upskilling and reskilling to progress through your career. Because while you can’t control tech developments, you can learn how to use and protect them.

Are you looking for a place to practice your new skills? RightStone is placing candidates in IT roles right now. Get in touch or browse our list of available jobs.

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How to Create a Career Development Plan