Management Experience

Bigbill810

I will be scheduling a couple exams in January and I was curious about something.

Once I secure my A+ and 70-680, I'm going to double my efforts to make a career change. I fully understand that I will have to start at the bottom and accept that. However, I have been a retail manager for over 10 years. I have supervised teams as small as 3 and as large as 20+ with success.

I'm curious about how this could affect my job status after say, 5 years of IT experience under my belt? I'm ultimately going for CCNP Security, but plan to study CCNA Security hard after getting the CCNA complete. Would the management experience help qualify me for a leadership role? Or should I wait more for the 10 year mark?

Thanks!

paul78

Good luck in your career change. It sounds like you have the right plan.

As for your desire to get into IT management, depending on your previous supervisory role, it will certainly give you an edge up with the experience. I suspect that the skills in managing retail teams are very transferable to managing a service desk for example.

If you possess leadership talent, there really isn't any time-frame or wait that I would expect. It could be 1 or 10 years or anything in-between. It largely depends on your aptitude and whether it's recognized by the management in whatever company that you land at. As I recall, I entered my first IT management role at around my 3 or 4 year mark.