I'm currently a Principal Cloud Architect working mainly with Azure, infrastructure, IAM, automation, security, and disaster recovery at a publicly traded company. Advancement opportunities are limited, so I'm exploring remote IT Manager, infrastructure leadership, and Microsoft-focused IAM management roles. Earlier in my career, I spent about three years as a Service Manager leading an 11-person team at an MSP. Since then, I completed an MBA and moved into a senior individual-contributor position. My long-term goal is to return to people leadership and eventually progress toward a director-level role. What can I do in my current position to demonstrate stronger management readiness? Are there particular responsibilities, certifications, or experiences that hiring managers value when someone is moving from a senior technical role back into management?
4 Answers
The biggest shift is showing that you can get results through other people instead of personally solving every technical problem. Look for opportunities to mentor, delegate, coordinate cross-team work, run projects, remove administrative or budget obstacles, and turn broad leadership goals into clear tasks for the team. Hiring managers will want evidence that you can develop people, set expectations, handle conflict, and make sure the team has the tools and training it needs.
Management-oriented certifications can help you get past screening, especially ITIL for infrastructure and service-management roles. TOGAF may also support an architecture or enterprise leadership path, but certifications won’t replace recent evidence of people leadership. Be ready to explain how your MBA, technical background, and prior experience leading an 11-person team translate into managing people, priorities, budgets, and stakeholder expectations.
Create visible leadership opportunities even if your organization doesn’t have an open manager position. Volunteer to lead an initiative, organize recurring project meetings, perform an audit of an important system, or present practical recommendations to leadership. Focus on measurable outcomes such as reduced risk, better reliability, improved processes, or faster delivery. That gives you recent management-style accomplishments to discuss in interviews rather than relying only on older experience.
You probably don’t need another long list of credentials. Make sure your resume clearly describes the leadership parts of your work: mentoring, delegation, influencing without authority, planning, budgeting, vendor coordination, incident leadership, and executive communication. A strong manager doesn’t stop understanding technology, but their main responsibility is creating the conditions for the team to succeed rather than doing every technical task personally.
That makes sense. My main challenge is getting recent management experience on paper when my current organization has no obvious path back into leadership. I’ll focus on leading initiatives and documenting the outcomes, and I’m considering finishing TOGAF followed by ITIL.