Career Paths and Goals for Higher Ed Web People
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my career in higher education and what I’d like to do over the next five years.
For the last 10 years, I’ve managed the websites at two great schools and spent some time in the private sector side in between my jobs at those schools.
I think that private sector side experience gave me two things. First, it gave me a good business understanding. I learned about RFPs, contracts, managing developers and the business side of things. The other thing I found out is that I didn’t get the thrill of the deal or the big contract. I enjoyed getting paid, to be sure, but making sales calls was a chore and I enjoyed focusing on the code side of things.
While there’s less pressure to track billable hours and be chasing new deals in higher ed, there are sometimes even bigger pressures when it comes to technology, enrollment, and so on. There’s opportunity to explore new ways of communicating and delivering information, which is fulfilling.
If you’re in the private sector side, one nice thing is that you have a somewhat clear career path. Worker -> middle management -> upper management. That is, if you want to ascend up the career ladder. In higher ed, that path is a little less clear, especially for web folks. The way it stands today*, it seems like you can go one of two routes, the IT route or the marketing route.
For example, a larger and larger part of the communications oversight of a college or university involves the web and electronic communication. This position, for example, requires experience and understanding of the web as well as video. What is the endgame of this path? Vice President of Marketing and Communications?
On the IT side, you could leverage your technical, programming and project management experience. This position requires those skills as well as budgeting and experience managing teams. The endgame here may be CIO or VP of IT.
* = I think a trend we’re going to see a lot more of are hybrid positions. These would include positions like this open Director of Web Communications at the College of Wooster. In a position like that, it looks like you’ll need to be a jack of all trades when it comes to the technical side of things as well as the marketing and communications side. When you take that job, send me a sweatshirt. Thanks, Kyle, for the tip about this type of position.
I don’t intend this to be the end-all-be-all guide to higher ed web careers. I’m just trying to figure out if there are clearly drawn lines any more. It will be interesting to see what sorts of positions are posted on Karine’s HigherEdExperts.com job board. There’s nothing yet, but it may be a good look into the trends of what jobs and job descriptions are developing into.
What’s your career goal or dream job?
Me, I’d love to be a CIO at a small school like the one I’m at. I think it would give you the opportunity to not only use my knowledge and full-blown geek-fu, but I think it would also allow me to be involved with many, if not all, of the departments across a college. This would allow me to give them the tools, software, connectively and so on they need to succeed.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about this too. In regards to the Dir. of Web Communications position, I think that Wooster has the right idea, but all too often it seems that the same title at other schools is nothing more than a manager of marketing on the web (it’s also interesting that Wooster has it reporting to the VP of marketing, which may be telling as to the actual function of the position).
They are going to have a really tough time filling that position as they have it posted and, honestly, I don’t know if I would want it. That person is going to be expected to be a superstar in everything and it’s almost a bit unrealistic, particularly for the salaries that higher ed people make. You can’t expect to recruit people to work for you that are at the top of their game when you don’t offer top of the line salaries.
I’m sure you would do a fantastic job as a CIO, Mike.
Thanks for posting about higheredexperts.com/work. Actually, I’ve just validated the first job posting for the position of the director of Web services at Augustana College.
There really is no clear defined path for Higher Ed Web people. Heck I’ve been working at Wofford for five years now and in that time held four different jobs in three departments (Information Technology, Information Management, and now Communications & Marketing). Did I do this by moving up the chain… nowhere close to that. I had honestly just gotten my MCP and was going to start working on my MCSA or maybe some Oracle certs because I saw my career path going towards being a DBA or Server Admin before hoping over to managing the website and really digging all into Online Marketing.
I don’t know if every college/university is like Wofford, but I just don’t think the senior administration have really figured out how to handle our careers as IT and Web are still such young and new industries especially to administration who still remember a time before them.
Great post and something for all of us in the field to think about as we move up the ranks. So many job titles, hybrid roles and strange names out there that I find myself searching for a bevy of different titles. What’s also interesting, is just because the title says something, the institution’s idea of what that person actually does might be completely different than another place. Frustrating lack of uniformity. Provides us with a blank canvas, but also, could be the source of potholes.
Anyway, good conversation piece.