IT Career Road Map

The below article presents the career Road map in a typical Indian IT services company

It depicts the path of an individual from entry level upto the Top Management positions.

The following must be noted before going through the below diagram:

• Individuals with qualifications like BSC, BCOM (with a comprehensive IT course), BA (with a comprehensive IT course) and Vocational Diploma holders will generally start at the Junior Engineer/Junior Test Engineer positions
• Individuals with BE, B.ARCH degrees will generally start at the SW Engineer/ Test Engineer positions
• Individuals with MBA degrees (in addition to Bachelor degrees) will generally start at the Business Analyst/ Business Development positions
• Specific names and terminologies for career positions (depicted in the below chart) will vary from Organization to Organization. I have attempted to only depict the journey
• I have not mentioned number of years typically taken to jump to the next level in the chart, as this depends on many factors including Individual talent and performance, company policies, industry environment  to name a few

As depicted in the above chart, a typical career in IT Services Company follows 3 main streams:

• Technical - code implementation, Technical architecture
• Testing - automation/manual testing, testing tools, test strategy
• Functional – Business Analysis, Business Development, Package implementation, DW/BI

Needless to say, professionals can switch between these streams by getting the requisite level of training, experience, mentoring or exposure which is needed for the stream they intent to enter

 After acquiring requisite expertise in their streams, professionals can enter the consulting landscape adding value to their respective client businesses, anchoring-designing-envisaging solutions and approaches, defining business and technology road maps for clients, improving technical-process-operations efficiencies, providing automation-optimization strategies and setting up centers of excellence for the IT services company. This pool of consultants plays a vital and pivotal role in Pre-Sales activities responding to proposals, RFIs bidding for projects. They are often entrusted to set up knowledge repositories and centers within the IT services company which can be tapped into by other project teams. Bringing domain/functional/package skills, technical trend settings, testing strategies is the forte of these consultants. They work interchangeably as Consultants, Product managers, Senior Project/Program managers depending on the individual needs of clients/partners. These are one of the most respected batch of individuals in the IT services company who are often used as crisis managers. They bring in loads of knowledge and direction into any assignment based on their experience, skills and expertise. Some believe these consultants work for the sheer challenge of their assignments.

General managers, Account managers require mature decision making skills, ability to understand the developments both within the projects and the domain in order to quickly comprehend positions while handling multiple projects, contemplate in advance explicit staffing requirements, understand cost-schedule overruns and take corrective actions. They must be individuals with level headiness, pleasant personalities and advance motivational skills. They are generally well connected within the IT services company and are required to co-ordinate across various departments, domains, practices, teams and individuals in order to get the specific needs of their projects fulfilled.  They are also entrusted with grooming senior Project managers within the organization and planning succession/ back-up plans for individual project managers/senior project managers within the preview of their projects.

Geography/Vertical heads and Vice Presidents are generally given quarterly target based deadlines and they are entrusted to anchor and execute revenue growth from their Verticals/domains/geographies and large accounts by aiding in bringing more business and anchoring and mining existing accounts and projects.   They also have a say in company strategies, decisions to enter new geographies and verticals and company investment decisions and needs

 The TOP management is generally the face of the company to media and clients, managing investor relations, identifying organic and inorganic growth opportunities, managing partner relations, building the company brand and setting company strategies and visions.