What Do You Do If You’re A Middle Manager with Rusty Technical Skills
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
What are the best strategies for a laid-off middle-manager to get a job if they have a technical background which has gone rusty?
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Hi, I’m Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter. Exc- excuses me for starting a little awkwardly, but I forgot to put my microphone in front of me.
There was a question on Quora and I thought it was an interesting one to craft a reply to. And I’m not going to post it on Quora because Quora doesn’t like video responses.
But the question is really very simple: “What are the best strategies for a laid-off middle manager to get a job if they have a technical background which has gone rusty?”
So, there’s a little bit of unclarity uh at- to the question, but I’m going to work with one definition of it.
So, the definition I’m going to work with is one that says, “I work in IT. I’m not really technical any longer. Uh I’m not in the Bay Area uh, but I’m somewhere in the United States. My skills are rusty from a technical standpoint. What’s the best things I can do?”
Now, from a technology standpoint, it’s not likely you’re going to be a programmer, so you want to update your technical skills up to a point. But if your goal is to become a coder and earn less money than what you do as a manager, then by all means deep dive in there and be exc- extraordinarily uh technical. Take classes, work hard at being a technologist, and that’s the kind of salary that you’ll earn.
Another approach is to go whole hog into the management side and lightly update your technical skills to make sure that they’re not so obs- obsolete that as if you’re asked questions from a technology standpoint, you’re going to you know, get blown out of the water.
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Now, ultimately, I want to be clear, the question for you is: what do you want to be doing? What kind of role do you want to be in? And if the role is to be a technologist, you’ve got to get your skills up to date. If the role is to manage technologists, you want to make sure that they’re current and sufficient enough that if your staff has an issue, you can help them, but not so deep that you’re going to wind up uh coding aggressively.
In environments that code aggressively, they’re smaller. Uh they are um generally more poorly funded, there are exceptions to that. Uh but if you’re living in most of America, they’re not really essential.
So, at the end of the day, you you’re better off diving in harder into technology project and program management and getting those certifications rather than getting a a C# certification for the you know, to use one example. Uh on the other side, you’re better off demonstrating uh management attributes and that you manage technologists and you deliver projects on time and with bud- within budget and have formalized training than going the other direction.
I’m Jeff Altman. Hope you found this helpful. My website is thebiggamehunter.us. There’s a lot more there to watch, listen to, or read to help you find work more quickly. If we aren’t connected on LinkedIn, send a connection request at linkedin.com/in/thebiggamehunter. Hope you enjoyed this video. I’ll be back tomorrow with another. Take care.
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