“20 ways to rekindle your passion for IT: When the flame driving your career flickers out, it’s time to tap into a new energy source” on CIO; December 10, 2017
It creeps up slowly and then, suddenly, overwhelms its victim: the feeling that IT has become just another job, not a driving passion.
For Alan Zucker, the moment arrived over a decade ago, shortly after he left his job at MCI Communications. “We were innovative and implemented new products every few months to take customers and revenue from AT&T and the Baby Bells,” he recalls. “The culture was entrepreneurial and empowering; it was a great place to work.”
Zucker’s next job, a director at a large financial services company, managing massive IT programs, was remunerative but dull. “I liked my job, but needed to reignite my passion and enthusiasm,” he explains.
A routine day-long training session gave Zucker the motivation to recapture his old love for meaningful IT management. Observing the instructor, he realized that the only way to restore his passion would be to help other people perform their jobs more efficiently and effectively. “Over the next couple of years, I started writing and speaking about project management,” he says.
Zucker became particularly interested in agile software development. “Agile gave voice and structure to how we built applications at MCI,” he notes. In March 2017, Zucker left the financial services firm and launched a new career providing training and advisory services in project management, agile development and leadership. “The change has been wonderful,” he declares. “I’m working harder than before, but I’m passionate and enthusiastic about what I am doing.”
Zucker is hardly the only IT leader to watch his early enthusiasm spill into a drain of frustration, boredom and ennui. A 2016 Stress and Pride survey, sponsored by IT talent management and solutions company TEK Systems, found that a sizable number of senior-level IT professionals are dissatisfied with their jobs. In fact, 24 percent of respondents stated that while they were proud they had chosen IT as a career, they were not proud of their current role, assignments and responsibilities. Worse yet, a discouraging 16 percent agreed that if they had to do it all over again, they wouldn’t go into IT.