I did a sideways move out of IT and into a project team.

After eight years in IT you (should) have excellent problem-solving, time-management and people-handling skills. You're also flexible and able to pick up new tools and technologies.

This shee is marketable.

I've just spent all week on site installing a site data scheme change (email me if you're really interested in what that means, folks) and I've dealt with the following:

• The police (it's their control room, and I'm about to make bits of it temporarily not work)


• The system which is being upgraded (running on a combination of VMS, Linux and Windows)


• The outstation equipment (generally attached to the instation via RS485)


• The resident engineers (it's their maintenance contract)


• Our commissioning engineer (regards programmers [correctly] as "softies" who wouldn't know real work if it fell on them)


• Our customer representative (doesn't necessarily know or care about the gory details, needs strategic overview of what we're doing)

The range of skills required to successfully co-ordinate and execute all the above without pissing any of them off or causing them to do the wrong thing is, basically, what I learned in the IT department.