I’ve been the director of technology department at a small private University in Baltimore for the last seven years. I’m good at what I do and I do a lot more than my $60k salary is worth. I took this job when I was 25 and with only about four years of basic IT experience at the time. My role has so many duties that it has basically become impossible for me to become an expert anything other than management. Here is the jist of what I do. I manage a small IT staff, manage the department budget, support 300+ end users (I personally still take help desk calls and fix issues; printers, email, phone, applications, basically everything tech related), I am the administrator of over ten different instructional technology systems, I run a medical simulations lab, I serve as a project manager for all new implementations, I personally help set up A/V for campus events, and I have to keep up on researching the newest educational technologies. That still feels really incomplete when it comes to everything I do. I’m not burnt out or anything. I’m really good at what I do and always get very high performance evaluations. The University has been having budget issues for some time and I know that a higher salary is not in my future. With living expenses, I’m still basically living paycheck to paycheck and have barely put a dent into my student loans of 80k. I’m married and do own my own home and am comfortable enough. However, I feel that I could be somewhere else making twice as much money doing half has much work. I have interviewed a lot of other places and have made it far through the interview process only to be beat out by someone else in the end. Some of the feedback is that I am overqualified (I always thought that was a myth) or that the other person had more diverse experience (how can I get that when no one will hire me?) I just want some advice on what I should be doing to find a good fit for me.
My guess is that you’re overqualified for IT dept related roles. Unless you really want to keep doing that you can pivot to customer success manager at a tech company. You won’t be overqualified there and it should give you the runway or upward comp growth. Customer success is abt implementation and ensuring customers are happy after purchase, eg. Saas
Start thinking engineering work now. As in project management for engineering in a big enterprise company. You will run rings around those folks :) and easily get 120k plus. Because you’ve been at the same employer for a while maybe you take a lesser salary to gain some confidence:) In short - reframe your work :) Meg
Keep applying, you have good skills and you will find a good fit. It took me months to get my current job, and lots of rejection, but I prevailed. I now have double the TC I had at my old job.
White glove IT support for executives. Could double your salary.