My advice is this (and it applies to whatever the “I” stands for. It honestly doesn’t matter.)
Pick 25 (yes, really) different companies that have CIOs, and research them.
What you should be looking for:
Who is their current CIO?
What is their background? (Experience, Education, Skillset – everything you can find.)
What is the size of the company?
What are their industries?
What “type” of company are they?
Do they have multiple CIOs (one per location, for example)?
What can you find out about the responsibilities of that role for that company?
Once you’ve done that, you should have a fairly clear understanding of the path required to become a CIO – but I’ll break it down for you anyway.
All of the *people* will have similar career paths. They should roughly have similar experiences, having worked at the same types of company before taking the current role, and have similar educational backgrounds.
(If the “I” stands for “Information”, well then all of the *companies* will likely be larger than 1000 employees (probably much larger), with distributed footprints. So, to go down that path you will need to *be* in that type of environment from the get-go. Working in startups is not for you.)
Originally Posted: https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-good-strategy-to-get-a-CIO-job
Originally Posted On: 2015-10-01