What to Consider Before You Accept a Management Role

This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free!The Individual Contributor–Manager Fork: It’s Not a Promotion. It’s a Profession Change.When I was promoted to engineering manager of a mid-sized team at Clorox, I thought I had made it.More money. More stock. More visibility. More proximity to senior leadership. From the outside, and on paper, it was clearly a promotion.I had often heard the phrase, “Management isn’t a promotion. It’s a job switch.” I brushed it off as cliché advice engineers tell each other to sound wise.It turns out both things were true. It was a promotion. It was also an entirely different job.And I was nowhere near ready for what that meant.A Shift in PrioritiesThere’s surprisingly little training for new managers. As engineers, we’re highly techni