I am a 22 year old Internet developer. My skills led me away from finishing college to a well-paid position as a Webmaster. I then worked at a small Internet startup, but left due to poor management. I currently work as a contractor in the San Francisco Bay area for a major company. What is your recommendation for someone in my position who wishes to have more of a managerial position.

Finish college! If your aspirations are to manage in a large-scale corporate environment, you will be bucking against undergrads and MBAs. It's becoming increasingly difficult to continue professional growth beyond what's just technical in nature without a degree. Your alternative will be to stay in the smaller startup arena that will have less emphasis on educational requirements. Invest the time; the degree will be with you forever and help you in ways that any new mastered technical tool never could.

I'm a corporate account manager for a company that provides NT training. I have a liberal arts degree and I'm working on the MCSE. But I actually don't want to be a network administrator or systems engineer. I want to use my MCSE to go into sales or marketing for an international department or company. I also have a degree in international relation s and speak a couple of different languages. What's the best path?

You would have great appeal to high-tech communications corporations like Microsoft, Cisco, Cabletron etc.. Having good technical grounding married with multilingual experience is outstanding. The most effective sales and marketing professionals are those that can walk the walk. Also, it's hard to find a company that isn't focusing its attention on Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Lastly, you're focused on exactly what you want to do; so many people teeter back and forth that they serve as their own career derailers, never quite understanding why their career isn't' heading in the right direction.

I have a bachelors degree in computer engineering and more than five years of experience in programming for client-server applications , ActiveX and COM. I am contemplating a change of career to an ERP-related field (SAP, Baan, etc.). Is that advisable? Will I have to train myself or will companies be ready to employ and train me?

ERP experience is never a bad choice. It would be a nice complement to your application experience and will aid you in the area of application integration as it relates to package implementation. Depending on how hard you work, your search should be able to find a company prepared to train you. Smart decision! So many technical candidates can't get themselves out of the woods to see the bigger picture. My compliments to your big-picture, broad-based thinking.

The lab that I worked at as a chemist was closed recently. I have seen the huge demand for jobs in IT and would like to retrain to enter the field. However, I am torn as to how best to do it so that I can eventually advance to a information ma nagement position and not sit in front of a computer all day as a programmer punching code. Should I just take a few programming classes at the local community college, or should I enroll in an accredited MBA program with an MIS emphasis? I am willing to go the distance if I know it will pay off in the long run, but I'd hate to go to school for a graduate degree and find out that I didn't need to.

As a new entry into a very competitive field, you need to make the right decision. This means as a career move you need credibility. An MBA without those days of punching some code is not going to give you the fundamental understanding of application development to support business initiatives. You don't need to spend a great deal of time coding, but it would be essential as an entry point and give you credibility when you're managing people. I would venture that your career as a chemist must have involved doing some of the things you may not have liked so much but gave you the foundation (and earned your stripes) that helped you build your career.

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