CIOs in transition: 5 tips for landing your next IT leadership job

• Communities such as Apex Assembly, the CIO Association of Canada, the Gartner Peer Community, the Global CIO Forum, HotTopics CIO Community, the IDC CIO Executive Council, the MIT Sloan CIO Community, SIM, the Digital Trailblazer Community, The Technology Leadership Board, and the Women Tech Network.
• CIOs and IT leaders local and virtual IT leadership events from C-Vision, CDM Media, Constellation Research, ET-x, Evanta, Foundry, Forrester, Gartner, HMG Strategy, Info-Tech, Sinc, and others. 
• Open and free-to-register events scheduled by public cloud providers and other technology companies.

Assess your skills and intangibles

Networking will help IT leaders in transition find opportunities, test their pitches, and learn about tech trends. Beyond networking, however, CIOs should also develop their soft skills and leadership competencies even — or especially — when in transition. Start with a thorough self-reflection on communication tendencies, collaboration skills, abilities to inspire teams, and competencies to influence colleagues.

Joanne Friedman, PhD and CEO of Connektedminds, says CIOs and IT leaders should become pragmatic vision painters and must develop their “E-skills” of being empathetic, displaying entrepreneurial mindsets, developing deep expertise in areas of interest, broadening their experiences, and finding ways to empower people.

Puglisi recommends adding a sixth E for enthusiasm, especially around driving transformative change, and I add E for educate, seeking people who have used their expertise to teach leadership, colleagues, and their teams. Heather May, president of May Executive Search, adds an eighth E for excellence, because “you want to show what you’ve accomplished and demonstrate the gains you’ve driven,” she says. 

Soft skills and collaborative competencies are broad categories, so CIOs should focus on the ones that resonate with their leadership styles. For example, Trude Van Horn, CIO at Rimini Street, recommends, “To secure the role of a CIO, it’s essential to develop diverse skills, including bravery, resilience, creative solutioning, building collaboration, and talent magnetism.”