How to become an IT manager: Career advice, tips, and tricks

Are you thinking about taking the next step in your IT career and moving from an individual contributor to management? This article shares how you can also make this career transition, based on my own career experience.

A bit about my story: How I got into IT Management

From an early age, I knew I wanted to work in technology. I was always fascinated with it, whether it was scrambling to fix the family PC before my dad got home from work, or figuring out how to set up a LAN game so my friends and I could play competitively. Because of this, it was a natural fit when I joined the field during the dotcom boom at the end of the 20th century. 

I started out in a small technology training company. After a year, the dotcom bubble burst, and after surviving two rounds of layoffs, I knew I was on borrowed time. To solve this, I seized on an opportunity to work on a corporate internal help desk. Once there, I established myself as a trainer, mentor, and informal team lead. Fortunately, I had a great manager that helped me gain experience in leadership and management, despite not having the word “manager” in my title.

These skills were invaluable, because I was then able to go on and secure a management position at a non-profit organization. For the last twelve years I’ve moved around, often helping IT teams get out of difficult situations and get things running smoothly again. 

What responsibilities does an IT manager typically have?

Your main responsibilities will be to support your company and the people you lead, so people will be looking at you from two directions. From above, your manager will be leaning on you to ensure the services your IT team provides are meeting business needs. From below, those you’re leading will be looking for direction on how to do that, as well as how to develop their skills and careers.

The technology services you’re offering will vary depending on the company. You may also be tasked with leading an internal help desk or managing a group of software developers building the next great product for your organization.

What technical and soft skills should an IT manager have?

For an IT manager, your soft skills are vital. I always tell my teams that I value communication and people skills over technical skills—it’s far easier to teach the latter (For more on the importance of soft skills in tech, read this blog article by Bob Petrocelli). 

That said, having technical understanding at a high level is important. As an IT manager, you won’t necessarily need to be able to complete every task your engineers do, but you should be able to understand what your staff are doing and why it’s important to the business.

Being a translator is a key skill every IT manager should have. It’s not enough to know how to use certain technology, but to teach others and be able to translate engineer-speak to business-speak. An IT manager should be a bridge between functions, a clear and concise communicator, and a caring leader. 

In the past, I was asked by my manager to interview for a job to lead a team that was struggling (Career tip: When your manager asks you to interview for a position, always say yes). I told the interviewers if they were after someone who understood the tech stack in depth, I wasn’t the right fit for the job. However, if they needed someone who knew the organization, could help the team members grow and learn, and get things back on track, I was their guy. 

The outcome? I was hired, and after a couple of years, the team was running as a well-oiled machine. Many of those engineers have gone on to bigger and better things. It’s more than five years later, and we still get together regularly for lunch. 

How can I transition from developer to manager?

The phrase “not in my job description” should never enter your mind. If you have a chance to take on other tasks or a special project, do it! Engineers who take more on and can communicate clearly with those who are not technical are natural fits as IT managers. Your boss has a job to do. If you’re making them look good, they’ll recognize that.   

If you can, find yourself a great manager who allows you to take a role in leading your team, despite not having a manager title. See if they’ll allow you to be involved in interviews, training new team members, prioritizing workloads, and meeting with customers. 

Pluralsight has a great resource for shifting from a technical individual contributor role to a manager role you should check out here. 

Can you be an IT manager with no leadership experience?

It’s the old catch-22: “How do you get a job as an IT manager if all the job descriptions require prior experience as an IT manager?” However, it is possible to get this experience without having the job. Here’s how I did it. 

Put your hand up for everything

I know I’ve said this a few times in this article, but it’s just so important to do. Show a willingness to help with anything, and complete it reliably and on time. And as stated earlier, find a manager who allows you to take on manager-like responsibilities in your current role.

Bring that willingness into your next job

You can move from success to success just through word of mouth, which can open up leadership opportunities. My leader saw how well I delivered, and how others looked to me to help with tasks. Because of this, I became a team lead, and when my manager left, I had an advocate who could speak to my performance and informal management experience as relevant experience for other jobs. 

How many years of experience should I have, if any?

When it comes to years of experience, more is always better.  But you have to start somewhere. As mentioned, take on whatever your manager needs and become the person that everyone on the team goes to for help because you know how to get things done. This will naturally cause your leadership to delegate more and more tasks to you. 

How can you succeed at being an IT manager?

First and foremost, you must meet the needs of the business. Your team provides a service, whether it's a help desk or supporting the systems that your sales teams use for managing customers. If your customers can use your service to succeed in their role, you’re succeeding. 

It's also key to support your manager in their role. If they have something they need from you and your team, don’t make them ask twice. When there is bad news, make sure they hear it from you first. If something breaks, don’t hide it and hope to get it fixed without your manager noticing. Better to give them a heads up and assure them that you and your team are on it. They will then be able to respond when their boss or a customer comes to them asking about an outage.  

Is it better to be an individual contributor or a manager?

When a newcomer joins my team, I often tell them there will come a time when you’ll face a choice: Do I want to continue being the engineer trying to get a system restored at 3 AM, or do I want to be the manager explaining to the executives why an outage occurred? And there is no wrong answer to this question.

It all comes down to your personal preferences. As a manager, I still like to dip my toe in the things my team does, because I still very much enjoy the technology and want to keep my skills sharp.

Managing and leading is not for everyone. Building relationships, interviewing, and managing the work of a large team can be daunting. There are inevitably times when you must deal with someone who is not performing. I was in a role where some of the people I was managing had been reassigned to that team before I came along. Their old roles had been eliminated, and their skill set was not well aligned with what they were being asked to do on the team. 

When I came in to lead this team, they were struggling to complete their day-to-day work. I had to have hard conversations with them about their performance. We talked a lot about why they were struggling and worked with Human Resources to put together a formal performance improvement plan with clear and specific targets that they needed to achieve. We met weekly to review their performance. Over the course of a couple of months, they were able to complete their performance improvement plans and meet the requirements of the job. 

If the thought of having one-on-one conversations with someone who is not performing makes you feel extremely anxious, then being a manager may not be right for you. 

What certifications or qualifications can I get to become an IT manager?

There is a plethora of options when it comes to certifications and learning in general in both IT and IT management. 

• Certifications in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) will teach you the industry standard framework for how IT is delivered across the business world today. 

• The Project Management Professional (PMP) certification is the number-one certification on organizing and managing projects and large initiatives whether IT related or not.  

Both will give you a significant fount of knowledge to draw from while leading people and teams. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, your career is what you make of it. If you’re trying to break into management, be the go-to partner for your teammates. Be the person to whom your boss assigns the special projects. 

Working for a learning and skills development company, any time I interview someone I ask them what the last course they took was or the last skill they studied and mastered. If you can’t remember or it’s been years, then you’re off to a rocky start! IT will leave you behind if you’re not constantly upskilling.

Good luck with your career journey, and I look forward to hearing of your success becoming an IT manager.

Further career resources

Be sure to check out these great resources from Pluralsight:

• Growing Your Career in Technology

• Being a Technology Manager