When I was on the job market last year, I was not interested in a job in IT. Although I’m a little bit rusty in some areas after spending five years in a PhD program, I have the skills and background to work in IT as I’ve done in previous jobs. But I was interested primarily in faculty development and assessment jobs. For many of those positions, I deliberately downplayed my technology background because I wanted to be interviewed and hired because for my research and assessment skills. I seem to have been successful because I’ve found a wonderful research analyst position in a teaching and assessment shop where my none of my job responsibilities involve technology maintenance, development, management, or support.
That has made the last couple of weeks a little bit strange as I’ve taken on significant responsibility in planning and supporting my center’s website as we finish merging our old websites and move them to a new content management system. This is the kind of project I was trying to avoid because it’s completely outside my current job description and I fear being typecast in this role. But you know what? It’s working out just fine. I am able to greatly help my colleagues and they are supportive and grateful but I don’t fear being relegated to being the unit’s tech support.
This is possible because of two things. First, I have wonderful coworkers who are very supportive. They are supportive of my growth as a professional as a higher education scholar, researcher, and faculty developer. They are also very respectful about how my time is used and the kinds of tasks they ask me to take on. Second, I have been very open about setting boundaries. I am always happy to help my colleagues wth technical issues but they are also okay with going through regular channels for larger, more complex issues even though I could spend time solving many of those, too. Because I have been very open with my colleagues about how I would like to use my experiences and knowledge and because my colleagues are wonderful, they have even shielded me a bit to ensure that others don’t try to take advantage of me. For example, despite our official tech support warming up to me very quickly (e.g., it only took a few minutes of me asking the right questions to be granted local admin access to my computer, something that apparently is a rarity here) my colleagues have intentionally made someone else our unit’s official point of contact with tech support to ensure they would not rely on me to solve problems or do extra work.
This seems to be working out well. My background gives me the knowledge to ask many of the right questions when we’re dealing with technology e.g., I can “geek out” with a colleague in IT to more effectively and efficiently probe for information as we figure out which content management system to use for our new website. My skills let me solve little problems in our office very quickly or recognize when problems are out of our control or even unsolvable. My experience guides me to help my colleagues make wise decisions that will be maintainable into the future even when I no longer work here e.g., we’re going to move to Qualtrics as our event registration system instead of using custom-built Google Forms that require significant technical skill to effectively use and maintain.
You can take the computer geek out of IT but apparently you can’t take the IT out of the computer geek. And I’m becoming okay with that.