IT Job Advancement: How to Consider Your Value as an IT Professional

Knowing your professional worth is essential for career growth. Developing your worth means knowing your skills and the value they hold. However, many IT professionals lack this self-knowledge or have an inaccurate sense of their worth.

Learning how to properly assess yourself can lead to IT job advancement. If you’ve ever sought after a promotion or new job and asked yourself what you need to do to get it—an IT skills evaluation is the place to start.

As an IT professional, you owe it to yourself to evaluate the value you offer employers. It’s your ticket to achieving IT job advancement. Failing to accurately identify your value can result in you working for far less than your worth or missing out on opportunities altogether.

In this article, you will discover ways to understand your value as an IT professional and how to utilize your IT skills for IT job advancement.

One of the best ways to assess your value is to look outside of yourself. The job market can tell you how much money other people are making for skills that are similar to yours. Examine job postings that match your abilities and experience, and you’ll see how much employers will pay. There are also websites that list salary ranges for multiple jobs.

Delving deeper than just current salaries, you can also build a sense of whether the market value of your skills has increased or decreased in recent years. Job demands change as tech skills gain or lose popularity. You can follow career trends to see what your value may be in a few years. And it’s not just money, but also your personal career desires. For example, are employers offering flexible schedules or other advantages?

You should check on the job market at least once a year. However, it’s even more important to do it when you’re actively considering a career move. With job mobility extremely high right now, it’s smart to understand where you can take your IT skills as you progress in your career.

The market offers the most accurate and objective info you can find. It will let you know where your skills can take you. If you’re not seeing the results you desire, then it’s probably time to work on your skillset and how you market yourself. Explore the job market to craft your career plan for IT job advancement.

A great exercise is to assume the role of hiring someone to fill your current position. How would you describe your job? Writing a job description for your current role will give you a clearer sense of what value it offers to the organization. By looking at the job from your employer’s viewpoint, you’ll get a new perspective on your professional worth.

A job description contains all of the ways you contribute value to a company. Add as much detail as possible. Your job duties are essentially the services that you bring to the table for your company. This information can also help you evaluate the job market since you’ll see which job categories your skills fit into.

For example, if you are a software developer, your job description may include writing and debugging code. These activities have value, which you can gauge by picturing what it would be like to hire someone else to do the tasks. The programming languages you use and other important details will tell you which specific jobs you can do. As a result, you’ll know your worth from an employer’s perspective.

A self-assessment complements external information about the job market to give you a more complete picture of your IT professional value. This is useful to know since it can land you a promotion or a new career–one that best aligns with your personality and skillset. As with studying the job market, it’s good practice to conduct a self-assessment on an annual basis.

Self-assessments can help you identify your career goals and how to achieve them. Online tests will ask you several questions to uncover the details of your current job situation and aspirations. For example: What initiatives have you taken? What goals do you have for the upcoming year? Any performance measurements you have made can also enhance the evaluation.

To get the most accurate results, it’s best to be honest with yourself for your self-assessment. If you undervalue yourself, you may not make it through the screening processes or earn the salary that matches your worth. On the other hand, if you overvalue yourself, you may not get the jobs you want or feel frustrated with a job you accept.

A self-assessment involves studying your IT hard skills and soft skills, plus any weaknesses. You want to identify both the skills you excel at and how you’ve used them to achieve results. Self-assessment may also extend into your personality, motivations, emotions, and other psychological aspects–all valuable to IT job advancement!

Career mentors can offer useful input about your present and future value. In addition to having experience and knowledge, your mentor can give you a less biased perspective than asking a close friend.

For people who don’t already have a mentor, other references can serve a similar purpose. For instance, you can ask anyone who has written you a letter of recommendation or even people you’ve worked with in the past.

Some of the questions you can ask a mentor include: How can I take on a more supervisory role? What technical and non-technical factors did you consider when planning your career trajectory? What mistakes have you made that I should watch out for?

Assessing your professional value as an IT worker can tell you about your career prospects and help you reach bigger goals. Four key ways to evaluate your worth include studying the job market, pretending you are hiring your own replacement, conducting a self-assessment using online tools, and asking a mentor.

IT job advancement is feasible, and knowing more about yourself makes headway even more attainable. Self-knowledge can help you open many doors in the tech industry. It unlocks your ability to take on bigger jobs and grow as a person.

Growin works with top IT talents to deliver cost-effective solutions on time. We have accumulated over five million project hours, fulfilling the needs of clients while managing the career development of our software teams.

Whether you’re looking for a team of excellent software developers to complete your project or want to join our team and develop your career, contact Growin today!