What is the best book to learn about IT management?
Asked by Neil M
I am going to accept voluntary redundancy from my firm where I have worked for 5 years as a technical support specialist - SQL server, in the UK. I have decided that I am ambitious and am prepared to take some risk in seeing whether I can move my career forward to IT manager, then on to IT director and higher. What book(s) could I read to help me achieve this ambition? What else can I do to help achieve this objective? Do an MBA perhaps? I am a graduate from a good UK university. Thanks Thank you Dave - very helpful. Any other answers?

Best Answer:
It depends on where you want to go in life. If you want to stay with the IT career field and move up, you have to go back to the classroom and get some "higher skills" in order to stay employed. I am speaking as a Yank, so take my advice with a grain of salt, but here in the US many of the technical support specialist have gone to the "BRIC" yard, so to speak (Brazil, India, Russia, China). The Indians and these days even the Chinese and Russians are speaking better and better English, and with the advent of the ubiquitous internet, technical jobs can be off-loaded anywhere. What can't be off-loaded, however, are the higher skilled IT management jobs that require a complex set of both soft skills (communicaton, people management, political saavy, etc) and hard technical knowledge (some of which you all ready have). I don't know about the UK, but here in the US they have not been able to outsource the IT manager, IT director and/or the CIO and CTO positions. I suspect that it is the same in the UK. So how do you move into these positions? Hard to speak about the UK, but in the US the perferred degree for these positions is a MS in Computer Infomation Systems. Seems the MBA folks are 'a dime a dozen' and a good majority of them are rather clueless about how to leverage IT within the company to give it a strategic advantage over its competitors. This is a fact which is well known in the US, and where 10 years ago the IT management staff might have MBAs, today it is no longer the case. So I would suggest that you look at a MS in Computer Information Systems or something like that. (BTW, I have a MSCIS and it resulted in a $30K annual salary increase within 3 months of my graduation - you got to like that :-). Hope this helps.

Don't bother. Cwjobs and theITjobboard have loads of stuff in your line.
Answered by Joe Kool