From business to IT: Exploring unconventional CIO career paths
The traditional CIO career path often involves a computer science degree and IT experience. Yet, many CIOs emerge from business backgrounds, including supply chain and marketing.
The path to becoming a CIO is not a one-size-fits-all journey.
While many IT leaders follow traditional career paths through IT, an increasing number are emerging from unconventional backgrounds. CIOs and other tech leaders often bring experiences from business operations, such as supply chain management and marketing, which helps them blend technical knowledge with broad strategic insight. This shift reflects the evolution of the CIO role from infrastructure and systems management to one that drives business outcomes through technology.
We asked four seasoned IT executives to share their perspectives on the unconventional paths they've seen or taken themselves. Their insights reveal that success in technology leadership hinges on technical expertise, adaptability, business acumen and knowing when to lead from both technical and strategic vantage points.
What are some unconventional paths to becoming a CIO?
"There's a mixed bag of potential paths. My path to CIO was more conventional. I studied computer science and became a software engineer originally. I then grew up within the IT realm, moved into project management and climbed up from there.
However, there are other more unconventional approaches that I've seen -- and they're not uncommon. Take, for example, a leader who's grown up within an operational environment. Perhaps they've been running sales operations or supply chain analytics and therefore have a lot of rich business experience within a function or a group of functions.
Then suddenly, they find there's a vacant CIO position, and they are moved into the CIO role. They might cover things more with an operational angle and less of a technical lens. They might rely on individuals within their organizations to fulfill that technical lens."
"Mine wasn't conventional. I spent the first 15 years of my career in supply chain. I was the business guy who couldn't get IT to do what he needed them to do. Then, one day, the CFO said, 'Well, if you're so unhappy with IT and you think you could do better, why don't you run IT and see if you can bridge the gap from the other side.' That's unconventional, but not unprecedented. It wasn't a linear path through IT.
I studied economics and marketing at university, not computer science. The CIO role is no longer about managing the infrastructure and the operations. It's about using technology to meet business outcomes, because technology has been completely democratized. If my mother-in-law can use ChatGPT, our marketing people don't need me to tell them what technology is available to manage campaigns. They know that.
So, the IT leader's job and other jobs within that group, like the chief data officer or the CISO, is to make sure that they're looking at what the business needs to achieve and how they can use the available tools and technology to achieve those goals. The job is more about business strategy than running the technology."
"There are conventional and unconventional paths to becoming a CIO. Some people are brilliant technically and will just become a chief technology officer (CTO) and a technical specialist, and that's it. There are some who become CIO and generalists who have a lot more breadth. You've got to work out whether you're going to be a technical specialist and the best in your field -- the CISO, a CTO, etc. -- or you take the generalist path as a CIO, which is more broad and strategic.
The problem with specialists is that they often think they can be generalists, but they often can't. Aspiring IT leaders must identify their strengths early in life and discover their unique superpower.
If you know a little bit about everything and not a whole lot about one thing, you have a chance as a CIO.
Joe LocandroCIO of Rimini Street
I was very fortunate, because in the last century, I completed a postgraduate degree in marketing and degrees in economics and commerce. I came from the business side and learned the technology. I don't think that's as easy these days, because technology underpins a lot. The CIO career path today is to get as broad as possible within the realm of technology.
In my previous role, I assigned my replacement CIO to various components, including architecture, application development and security, to offer a well-rounded network and infrastructure. If you know a little bit about everything and not a whole lot about one thing, you have a chance as a CIO."
"I never meant to be a CTO. I didn't wake up at 15 and say, 'I want to be a CTO.' The unconventional path I took was to dive in deeply, become a key expert and then learn to relinquish that expertise. That is the trick to becoming an unconventional CTO -- becoming the key player in everything in a company and then stepping away from it entirely and letting it go beyond you."
-- John Armstrong, CTO of Worldly
Tim Murphy is site editor for Informa TechTarget's IT Strategy group.
