After spending a decade working as an IT leader for a non-profit I felt very fulfilled but financially behind the curve. With a growing family to provide for, I decided I needed to make a change.

Here's what I did.

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Impostor or Rockstar?

Image Source: @rundavidrun on Twitter

In the IT industry, many of us suffer from the impostor syndrome. This means that although we may have an incredible ability to figure things out, we instead focus on how much we don't know and fear being caught not having the answer on hand.

This fear drives our self-esteem to the floor and keeps us from being confident enough to succeed.

The way to combat this is to focus on past accomplishments and growth velocity, instead of the mountain of unexplored territory in front of us.

What I did is I put together my portfolio. I filled out all those silly things on my LinkedIn profile, and also put it in a doc for later. Things I listed:

• All my work history,
• Every significant project I have worked on,
• Any team leading or management roles (even without a title),
• Every piece of technology I have worked with, and
• Made special note of anything of which I had a degree of mastery.

This also formed the basis for a good chunk of my "responsive resume" that I changed depending on what job I was applying for -- more on that later.

I spend a good chunk of time thinking about all the things I had accomplished in the past ten years, both professionally and personally. The list got pretty long, and I realized I had been very effective with everything I had faced. Most of those things I had never done before.

This leads me to the next thing I saw as I put together my resume -- growth velocity.

After college, I had started out as a lowly helpdesk technician, learning to crimp cat5 cables and fix Outlook issues. Within 18 months I was promoted (by necessity) to helpdesk manager. I kept moving up, growing in both my technical abilities as well as my leadership skills. I looked at every problem as an opportunity to learn something. When I didn't know the answer, I found someone else who did (or google). When I needed help, I didn't just ask someone else to do it for me, I asked them to show me how they did it.

I learned so much. Sure, I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I always learned from those too.

By reflecting on all this, I realized that I could go almost anywhere and be successful. But how do I land a job when my skill set is so diverse? What kind of jobs do I apply for?

Find out next time...