Identifying the prototypical career paths of IT professionals: a sequence and cluster analysis

Abstract

This study seeks to understand whether there are prototypical career paths in IT. We use sequence analysis to analyze actual work history of individuals who had held jobs in the IT profession. Our findings suggest that, contrary to the traditional view of a dual career path of IT professionals, IT professionals' careers actually follow one of three career paths: technical; managerial; or protean. We also find that individuals in the IT technical career path have significantly more IT technical experience compared to those in other career paths. We conclude this paper by discussing these results and identifying the implications for research and practice. This study makes a key contribution to the literature on IT professionals as being one of the first to analyze empirically the actual career paths of IT.