I'm currently a Principal Cloud Architect at a publicly traded company, focused mainly on Azure, infrastructure, identity and access management, automation, security, and disaster recovery. Unfortunately, there aren't many opportunities to advance into leadership where I am now. Earlier in my career, I spent about three years as a Service Manager leading an 11-person IT team for a managed services provider. Since then, I earned an MBA and moved into a senior individual-contributor role, but my long-term goal is to return to people leadership and eventually work toward a director-level position. I'm applying for remote IT Manager, infrastructure leadership, and Microsoft-focused IAM management roles. For anyone who has made a similar transition, what can I do in my current position to demonstrate that I'm ready to manage again? Are there particular responsibilities, certifications, or leadership experiences that hiring managers value when someone is moving from a senior technical role back into management?
4 Answers
Certifications can help your résumé get noticed, especially ITIL for infrastructure or service-management roles, but they won’t replace recent leadership examples. Use your current role to show that you can manage priorities, budgets, risk, vendors, and stakeholders. TOGAF or ITIL may be useful if they align with the jobs you want, but focus first on documenting measurable outcomes and examples of influencing people without direct authority.
Start demonstrating management behaviors before you have the title. Take ownership of cross-team projects, organize meetings when coordination is needed, prepare thoroughly, and bring useful analysis or recommendations to leadership. You could also review key systems, identify risks or cleanup opportunities, and present practical improvements in a way that focuses on business value and avoids creating unnecessary alarm. Those examples give you concrete leadership stories for interviews.
A practical way to rebuild recent management evidence is to volunteer for initiatives that require coordination across teams. Lead planning, assign work based on people’s strengths, track dependencies, communicate status, and handle obstacles without taking every task back yourself. Hiring managers will usually respond better to specific examples—such as reducing risk, improving delivery time, developing a teammate, or managing a difficult stakeholder—than to a list of credentials alone.
Management is largely about managing people, time, expectations, and budgets rather than configuring technology yourself. Build stories around delegation, developing teammates, handling difficult conversations, setting clear responsibilities, and balancing competing demands. Your earlier experience leading an 11-person team is still relevant—frame it around the results you achieved and the management practices you used, then connect it to the leadership you’re doing now as a principal architect.
That makes sense. My main challenge is getting back into management when my current organization has no obvious openings. I’m going to focus on creating stronger examples of cross-team leadership and may add ITIL to complement my existing MBA and technical background.