How To Sell Your Skills To Land Your First Managerial Role

Systems wizardry alone fetches a nice salary, but leveling up to a managerial role takes more than technical chops. If you’ve ever wondered why a specialist reports to someone who usually knows less about said specialty, it tells you intelligence comes in all different types of knowhow.

Ever feel like you have the ability to manage a technical team but lack the experience? If you need experience for the job, what can you possibly do to meet that requirement? You have to revisit that awful egg-and-chicken problem from the beginning of your career over again.

The good news is you’ve done this once. But how do you jump the gap from systems administrator to senior engineer or architect?  Whatever your career, how do you look as a manager? How might you put a “lead” in your title for the first time?

The trick? Presenting what you know and presenting it well. Same problem as your first job, same solution. Only this time, you want to put front and center the management-like experience you’ve gained. Think long, think hard--what you lack in title you make up for in experience.

Identifying your nascent manager 

Think about your managers. Or don’t. Maybe that’s why you’re here.

Traditionally, desirable managerial attributes across the professions look similar. Common threads of good leadership combine expertise, organization, and soft skills. The weird part about shifting from specialist to manager is the expertise role you’re used to is less relevant. You have to showcase other assets.

Here, a good manager knows when to rely on his or her specialists for guidance. Get in the right mindset: think about your favorite teams, and nail down what each person brought to the table. Imagine the sum total in context of the company at-large. Explain that like you’re casually conversing about your job to somebody in a different line of work--that’s practice for a lot of what a manager does.

“Talking the talk” is currency

It’s critical to effectively communicate laterally, and even more important to communicate upward. Can you explain blockchain encryption to somebody with high-level aptitude in accounting, but a rudimentary understanding of application development?

Boiling code into value adds and pain points--it’s not hard science, but is the most important facet of the job for many managers. If finance doesn’t understand what you do, your IT budget will suffer. Guaranteed.

Polished presentation in speaking and writing

Talking is a prominent part of  job listings for technical managers. Look at these distributed system architect jobs in New York City or the Bay Area that fetch $250-$300K annually. We see terms like “thought-leader” and “subject matter expert.” What does that mean? They’re splitting time between the lab and the podium--speaking at conferences, pitching the technology, and crossing the rifts that typically demarcate tech from suit.

Can you communicate different messages to different audiences? It’s quite important for everyone.

• Marketing teams rely on understanding why customers need what you’re making.
• Your developers and engineers need to believe you know what the heck you’re doing.
• Financial stakeholders need to believe that your efforts will yield ROI.

Don’t talk like a specialist to investors

We know. Evangelist is one of those irritating tech buzzwords, but it’s a dictionary definition for the role-- walk the walk and talk the talk, appropriately, for whatever audience is present at the moment. That’s management in a nutshell.

How do you get there? Action items for self-presentation

The advantage of a specialist role is the niche in which you spend 40 hours weekly immersed. How you work is important. Present that in a blog or a GitHub page or on LinkedIn. Different media has its own codes, but the overarching message should contain three items:

1.  Demonstrate a need; show a problem or pain point;
2.  Show how that problem was solved by your ingenuity;
3.  Illustrate that you think like a manager in your presentation. Show. Don’t Tell.

TL;DR how to present a managerial character without official manager experience:

1. Acknowledge contributions in a team context.
2. Have awareness of workflow methods you might have used or should have used.
3. Present in a way that shows value to investors, customers, and fellow technical personnel.