Good people need other career paths
The traditional IT Career paths are flawed. Operator to programmer to analyst to team leader to IT manager to IT executive or similar doesn't work. The reason is that the skills carried between the roles often do not outweigh those that need to be learnt for the new role. Some HR departments now follow the idea that their needs to be a technical career path and a management one. That is only a half-way solution. One persons "technical" role is another's "people facing" role.
People with natural talents to interpret a pattern into the detailed code of programming may not have the talents needed for the analyst role that looked at the business processes and found the pattern. How many times has a good programmer floundered as an analyst? How many times has an average but reliable performer suddenly turned into a high flier when asked to look after a team while his manager is away?
The answer is to prevent some of these Peter Principle promotions. Learn your own natural talentsand strengths and build your career around these. Pay attention to talents when selecting people. Build organisations that value employees for their strengths and don't force people into positions just because that is the way the career path has always been. Grow people by creating opportunities for them to be excellent at what they do and benefit from their outstanding performance. Reward great performance in all types of roles (not just highly paid executives). That means you'll have people who are good at developing people helping build employees careers, techies performing at a very high level, project managers who really understand how to plan accurately and juggle priorities at the same time.
