The Countless Roads to CIO

It’s difficult to get 10 pages into a human resources magazine or two clicks into an IT workplace site without coming across the often-spoken-of-but-rarely-defined catch phrase “career path.”

It can be even more enlightening to browse different descriptions of the term. From the “defined track a person follows in the pursuit of professional goals” to “a map to the place you know you want to be in when you retire,” one could propose the argument that even those proselytizing the importance of career paths have limited understanding of the ways it shakes down in a real-life job market.

For more on a related topic, see The Changing Role of the CIO

Among many IT professionals, though certainly not all, the ultimate career goal is to become the boss man, the main guy, the CIO. But how many CIOs knew this was what they wanted to be even 10 or 20 years ago, when they landed their first jobs as coders, data center operators or even accountants?

eWEEK asked 13 CIOs to talk about how they’ve gotten where they are today. We asked how many job titles and positions they’d held in IT before becoming CIO, if they changed jobs as a result of a predestined career path or because their previous jobs no longer interested them, and if they’d always dreamed of being CIOs.

Their answers may surprise you.

Read the full story on eWeek.com: The Countless Roads to CIO