Whether you plan to stay with your current company or look for a new job this year, promoting your own personal brand should be a priority. Making sure your best light shines and ensuring career sustainability come down to delivering measurable enterprise value in a consistent manner, writes Thornton A. May, executive director of the IT Leadership Academy at Florida State College at Jacksonville.

The IT profession is on the cusp of enormous change, and CIOs must stay in step with the transformation if they want to maintain their careers, May argues in a post at Computerworld. It is no longer adequate to serve as "a plumber, a mechanic, a project manager, a digital baby sitter for a tragically technology-illiterate senior management team, or a janitor who cleans up data messes," he writes. It is possible for CIOs to do all of these things correctly and still get fired.

To succeed today, IT leaders have to know how to educate themselves, connect with thought leaders and deliver value to the business. "Your organization isn't going to fund your career development," May warns. "The fastest and most affordable path to self-education is relating to and reaching out to thought leaders who are moving rapidly down the learning curve of emerging technology sets."

Looking ahead, IT leadership increasingly will demand a combined expertise in data science and value delivery. "The right kind of IT leader is an entrepreneur, an innovator, a data scientist, a change agent, an educator and a diplomat," May advises.

For more:
-Thornton A. May's post at Computerworld

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