MIS careers—a theoretical perspective
Communications of the ACM
The joint impact of internal and external career anchors on entry-level IS career satisfaction
Information and Management
Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMIS CPR conference on Computer personnel research: The global information technology workforce
Careers in software: is there life after programming?
Proceedings of the 2010 Special Interest Group on Management Information System's 48th annual conference on Computer personnel research on Computer personnel research
Software practitioners dropping-out: a research proposal
Proceedings of the 49th SIGMIS annual conference on Computer personnel research
Legacy job titles in IT: the search for clarity
Proceedings of the 50th annual conference on Computers and People Research
International Journal of Information Management: The Journal for Information Professionals
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This study seeks to understand whether there are prototypical career paths in IT. We use sequence analysis to analyze actual work history of individuals who had held jobs in the IT profession. Our findings suggest that, contrary to the traditional view of a dual career path of IT professionals, IT professionals' careers actually follow one of three career paths: technical; managerial; or protean. We also find that individuals in the IT technical career path have significantly more IT technical experience compared to those in other career paths. We conclude this paper by discussing these results and identifying the implications for research and practice. This study makes a key contribution to the literature on IT professionals as being one of the first to analyze empirically the actual career paths of IT.