Q&A: GM's Szygenda--Career Advice From The TopQ&A: GM's Szygenda--Career Advice From The Top

General Motors CIO Ralph Szygenda paints a clear career strategy for business-technology professionals: "Move to the middle." That means people need to build a deep technology foundation, build up their business knowledge, then find a role in the middle that draws on both specialties. It's partly influenced by his belief that companies over the coming decades will all look like GM--with hands-on IT done by outsourcers, and GM IT employees functioning as IT "brokers" who use IT to change business models.

Szygenda shared his thoughts on career development with executive editor Chris Murphy. Following are some edited excerpts.

information: Where do you see the opportunity for IT professionals?

Szygenda: Corporations are looking for people with a higher business content--still with great IT knowledge, but business content as well. So there's a sweet spot now, and the sweet spot is in the middle. That's where companies are hiring.

Corporations want people with great tech understanding but also business understanding because now they want precision business-process change. That means I'm not going to make a change unless I can really get bottom-line benefit, and I'm not going to apply information technology unless I know that. I call it precision business and IT direction. To do that, you have to have both of these knowledge bases.

Now realize, getting there is not the easiest thing. You don't start from Day One and you're an expert in business and an expert in IT. So you're going to have to have more experience. That's why you're typically going to find people staying at companies longer, because they're going to have to pick up the knowledge about business and technology.

I don't think you're going to see as much moving around of CIOs as you did years ago. I think they might lose their jobs, but they aren't going to move from company to company to company, because people are going to be looking for this business knowledge, not just the IT knowledge.

information: When you look at your own career--Texas Instruments, telecom, the auto industry--is that kind of movement going to be more difficult?

Szygenda: I'm not too sure I could do that today. I did spend 21 years at Texas Instruments, and did the defense systems business, the semiconductor business, the IT business; so when I went to the telecom business, I was an IT guy and it's an IT business. And at GM, I had been in the defense business, building missile systems and radar systems, which have high manufacturing content that is very similar to the automotive business.

Notice I didn't go off to the retail business to sell merchandise and clothes. But I'm still not so sure you can get away with the same career in the future. Because of this sweet spot, your flexibility is limited--you're going to have to learn business and technology quicker and put them together if you're going to protect your career.

information: Do IT people have the right salary expectations today?

Szygenda: If they still have the expectations of the dot-com days, that an average salary was $5 million a year, they're probably missing their expectations. But I'd say if you have great business knowledge and IT knowledge you can still demand very, very high wages. If you're a pure IT person, at the lower end you have the chance of commoditization or offshoring happening to you and you might not be commanding the same salary you did three, four years ago.

But remember, you're at the bottom of a recession. You shouldn't just look at the future by the bottom. The IT industry in the last 20 years has never seen a recession like it just has, so most IT people haven't seen a recession. Will the IT industry come out of it? Yes.

information: If I'm entering the workforce today, how do I get that technological foundation that you were able to get at Texas Instruments, if there are fewer of those jobs, as basic programming becomes commoditized?

Szygenda: It's going to be hard. Typically they might be going to work, to start, at an outsourcing company, an IBM or EDS or someone like that. In our global growth, they might go to another country for two or three or five years, or they might go to a Microsoft. You might go to a traditional corporation, but understand there will be fewer IT jobs there because they're being outsourced. There are places to get that.

But you might make less money than you would've five years ago at an entry-level spot. There's a possibility of that. But have patience. If you start building on that foundation with business knowledge, you can go into a corporation and bring that knowledge. I hire MBA students with maybe five to eight to 10 years experience in information technology. That's my entry point.

information: As we train computer science students, should we try to create this person "in the middle" right out of school, or should we give them as much technology as possible because no one will pay them to learn that anymore?

Szygenda: You get grounded in your bachelor's degree, you go learn technology. You can't go off and do the things you want in life without that grounding.