What keywords am I supposed to put in here?!

April 2, 2007 7:29 AM

What should the next step be in my career? I'm a techie who has moved into business for purposes of upward career mobility. I've excelled here, but I'm ready for the next step, and I'm not sure what I should be looking for.

The key problem is I have no idea what kinds of jobs would appeal to me, I just know I need change.

I'm going to be 29 in under a week, so I'm several years out of college and have 2 semi-lengthy job experiences since. Here's the synopsis though:

I decided halfway through college, where I majored in Computer Science and Mathematics, that hardcore programming was not for me. I finished my degree anyway, and got a job as a web developer.

After 3 years and becoming incredibly unhappy where I was at career wise, I made a great move to a financial services company.

My time here has been good, and I've received very favorable reviews, been promoted once, etc. Now I'm about on my 3rd year and for various reasons I've decided it's time to seek out the next step in my career.

I've got technical experience/skills and business experience/skills and I'd like to best use this combination to my advantage. My resume [pops] is relatively up to date for reference.

Miscellaneous useful info:
- I'm interested in managing people (which I believe I'd actually be good at) and/or large projects
- Despite my technical background, I'm known by my coworkers as friendly, outgoing and well spoken - a "people person"
- If location vastly limits things or helps in ideas: I live in Chicago on the northwest side. Downtown would be nice. Suburbs would be less than ideal.


My questions:
- Given my skills, what kinds of jobs might I be good at?
- How the heck do I guess good keywords / job titles to search for based on the answer to the above?

posted by twiggy to work & money (6 answers total)

I like your resume, looks good.

Have you thought about IT consulting? There's a tendancy to drop people in the deep end there and you'd definately get amongst the team lead experience you're after.
posted by kaydo at 7:35 AM on April 2, 2007

Oh and consider re-wording the objective, I assume that's what you're looking for in the keywords part of your question. I guess leadership is one aspect, but it would be worthwhile considering what field you'd like to be in - do you want to keep a foot in the technical camp or head 100% business?
posted by kaydo at 7:37 AM on April 2, 2007

kaydo: I've thought about consulting. I'm not sure where to look for such jobs, or what keywords to plug in aside from "consulting".

I definitely need to reword the objective.

As far as tech vs. business: If I keep a foot in tech, I want it to be at a high level. I don't want more than a small percentage of my job to be writing code. I'll write some here and there, but primarily I want to manage projects and people, and staying in business seems to allow me to keep that distance. I wouldn't mind tech to a certain extent though.
posted by twiggy at 7:45 AM on April 2, 2007

Cool, I might email you some thoughts then.

(tomorrow, it's 1am here)
posted by kaydo at 8:05 AM on April 2, 2007

Steve - just sent you an email. With your skills I would be definitely looking in the consulting space.
posted by cmicali at 8:53 AM on April 2, 2007

Alternatively, you might want to look at project management of some kind. Ideally, PM'ing requires an understanding of the technical skills required to complete the project at hand, with a lot of people/business/negotiation skills mixed in.
posted by coriolisdave at 4:17 PM on April 2, 2007