12. Share the Wealth
Anthony Hill, CTO of Golden Gate University in San Francisco, says that beyond exhibiting technical competency, the best thing an IT worker can do is to share ideas and knowledge with co-workers and colleagues.

“The No. 1 attribute of technology leaders who get promoted quickly is their willingness to share their ideas and teach others,” Hill says. “You can be a brilliant programmer, but if you just display your brilliance in your code and don’t cross-pollinate, you won’t become a thought influencer and leader.

“Selfishly hoarding your knowledge and skill is part of the old economy,” Hill adds. “In the new economy, the more you give away, the better you do. It’s not about how smart you are. It’s about how many others you can bring along with you.”

13. Be Your Own Cheerleader
“Being the best doesn’t matter if nobody knows about it,” Chubb’s Drewry says. “You’ve got to find a way to get your accomplishments known. You can’t assume everybody knows what you’ve done.”

On the other hand, jumping up on the conference room table with pom-poms and a megaphone won’t win you any friends, either. So how you go about promoting your accomplishments is nearly as important as what you’ve done.

Turn your good deeds into agenda items when you meet with your supervisor, suggests Carly Drumm. “Just talk about them matter of factly -- ‘Here’s what we’ve accomplished so far, and here’s what we still need to do,’ “ she says. And, whenever possible, tie your accomplishments to their effect on the organization’s bottom line.

“Frankly, if you don’t do it, you’re not just cheating yourself, you’re cheating your company,” Drewry adds. “What happens to them after you’re gone and they don’t know what it took to make something happen? You truly owe them the full complexity of your accomplishments.”

14. Build Your Own Portfolio
When it comes time to review their own performance, many IT pros find themselves tongue-tied -- and their career at loose ends.

“One thing we often find missing in technology experts is an ability to communicate the successes they provided to the company,” KForce’s Bair says. “If you completed a project that was 30 percent under budget or developed an innovative technology that let the firm recapture millions of dollars in cost, that’s a big deal. But many IT pros don’t know how to communicate their impact on the firm.”

The solution? Keep an ongoing written portfolio of your accomplishments, which you can then present to your boss at the appropriate moment. It can be as formal as a list of achievements you’d clip to a résumé or as simple as handwritten notes. “The important thing is the ability to talk about how all the good you’ve done for the company over a period of time,” Bair says.

Develop a set of metrics that proves your worth to the company, adds Paul Groce, who runs Christian & Timber’s CIO recruiting practice in New York. “Successful managers ‘measure’ everything, from uptime, to availability, to head count per million dollars of revenue,” Groce says. “Some of the more successful are very aggressive about dashboarding and sharing performance metrics -- not only with internal management but also on the view of IT’s importance to the success of the business.”