Planting my Tree: Positioning myself in my career

As part of a continuing assignment in EME5054, we are supposed to begin evaluating the career options and choices available to us as Educational Technologists. I find it simultaneously invigorating and daunting to know that with a degree in this field, we can do almost anything we want. From a limited perspective, its like Educational Technology is the Swiss Army knife that can be used to assist, repair, or improve any of field of study.

My main goal since joining the Ed Tech programs was to become a Technology Administrator for K-12 or Higher Education. After perusing jobs in Monster.com, district school websites, and more, I think this job posting from Chronicle.Com is right up my alley. The position is for a Director of Academic Technologies, which lists some job duties including:

"Develop programs to support the faculty in the use of technology in teaching; and through continual research, apprise the academic leadership of new software and hardware products relevant to the College's educational mission."

For me, I'd need to develop some of my existing skills more:

• Improve my researching ability
• Develop/improve scholarly writing and publishing abilities
• Improve Teaching ability

Some of my existing skills sets could be most useful in this kind of job setting:

• I LOVE Technology
• Comfortable learning/trying out new technologies
• Have cross-platform experience (Windows primarily, but increasing experience with MAC & Linux)
• Have experience creating documentation to aid others in the learning new technology and applications
• Strong troubleshooting background can help when trying to implement new systems
• Able to examine the finer details and present important points and issues in normal speech, avoiding techno-jargon which easily confuses new/inexperienced users.
• Developed the necessary people skills and communication to help users become comfortable with change

While I still have much to learn before I could enter a career like this Director of Academic Technologies, I believe that this gives me an over-arching goal I can follow as I seek to drill down my career even further.