8. Stay on the Cutting Edge
Your tech chops can keep you out ahead the pack but only if you keep them sharp. Jump on any offer for training opportunities that involve emerging technologies such as SOA, collaborative apps, or data warehousing. “You need to stay on the cutting edge,” says David Bair, vice president of technology staffing at KForce, a professional staffing company. “A stale skill set can be one of the most fatal flaws in a technology career path.”

If your company doesn’t offer training in bleeding-edge technologies, find a course and pay for it yourself. “If spending $2K now means a $20K bump down the road, that’s a pretty good return on investment,” Bair says.

9. Feed Your Mind
Education shouldn’t stop at tech skills. Business courses and professional certifications may pay off even more handsomely in the long run.

Dave Simon, IT director at the Sierra Club, says one of the things that helped propel his career was becoming a certified public accountant, which he pursued at the encouragement of his boss.

“Getting the CPA certification paid off well in that it gave me both business knowledge and more credibility with line management,” Simon says. “I was no longer just viewed as a techie.”

Sapphire’s Howell says he’s currently enrolled in a high-tech MBA program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which he’s paying for out of his own pocket.

“I’m constantly trying to push myself, to make myself grow in more than one way,” Howell says.

10. Find Your Yoda
For many people, finding the right mentor -- or mentors -- is the single most important factor in their career development.

“I’ve been with three firms, and in every one I partnered with individuals who were not only paramount in helping with my professional development, they also had the ability to influence decisions that affected my career,” KForce’s Bair says.

Usually it’s up to you to seek out like-minded individuals. However, at companies such as Sun Microsystems, mentoring is built into the organizational DNA. At any time some 150 to 200 employees worldwide are enrolled in the SEED (Sun Engineering Enrichment and Development) program, a one-to-one mentoring regime that matches Sun’s most promising employees with senior-level engineers and executives. New hires meet with their mentors for one to two hours every two weeks for a year; more established employees sign up for at least six months. But many end up doing much more, says Katy Dickinson, director of business process architecture at Sun. One mentor/mentee pair ended up writing a book and filing 13 patents together, she says.

More important, SEED graduates earn four times the promotions and receive double the number of top performance ratings as the average Sun employee, Dickinson says.

“We’re looking for people who can become the future leaders of the technology or business sides of our company” Dickinson adds.

11. Take Deadlines Personally
Deadlines and meeting budgets can often fall by the wayside when IT projects -- err, business projects with an IT component -- come round. Unfortunately, that’s given techies a bad rap in some circles, which is all the more reason to transcend the stereotype.

“Late and over budget is a moniker of sorts for IT people,” notes Reid Carr, president of Red Door Interactive, an Internet consulting company. “Part of that is probably because they’ve not been the ones to set the expectations, but are forced to comply.”

Professionals who fail to make deadlines and pay attention to details “are likely going to find they are low on the list of potential candidates for a promotion,” Hudson’s Taylor says.