Page 58 - Using MIS

Guide

fIve-CoMponent CareerS

Some years, even some decades, students can wait the organizational requirements are and then with technical
until their last semester to think seriously about jobs. They people (and others) to help develop that system. You work as
can pick a major, take the required classes, and prepare to a cultural broker: translating the culture of technology into
graduate, all the while assuming that job recruiters will be the culture of business, and the reverse.
on campus, loaded with good jobs, sometime during their Fortunately for you, many interesting jobs are not
senior year. Alas, today is not one of those periods. captured by the bureau’s data. Why fortunate? Because
In the current employment situation, you need to be you can use what you’re learning in this course to identify
proactive and aggressive in your job search. Think about it: and obtain jobs that other students may not think about
You will be spending one-third of your waking life in your or even know about. If so, you’ve gained a competitive
job. One of the best things you can do for yourself is to begin advantage.
to think seriously about your career prospects now. You The chart on the next page provides a framework
don’t want to find yourself working as a barista after 4 years for thinking about careers in an unconventional way. As
of business school, unless, of course, you’re planning on you can see, there are technical jobs in MIS, but fasci-
starting the next Starbucks. nating, challenging, high-paying, nontechnical ones as
So, start here. Are you interested in a career in MIS? At well. Consider, for example, professional sales. Suppose
this point, you don’t know enough to know, but Figure 1-3 you have the job of selling enterprise-class software to the
should catch your attention. With job growth like that, in Mayo Clinic. You will sell to intelligent, highly motivated
a category of jobs that is net of
outsourcing, you should at least
ponder whether there is a career
for you in IS and related services.
But what does that mean? If
you go to the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics, you can find that there
are more than a million computer
programmers in the United States
today and more than 600,000
systems analysts. You probably
have some notion of what a pro-
grammer does, but you don’t yet
know what a systems analyst is.
Examine the five components in
Figure 1-4, however, and you can
glean some idea. Programmers
work primarily with the software
component, while systems ana-
lysts work with the entire system,
with all five components. So, as
a systems analyst, you work with
system users to determine what
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