The path to the top: insights from career histories of top CIOs

The goal of this article is to track the career paths of senior information technology (IT) leaders -- chief information officers (CIO) -- and use that information to guide the skill development and career progression of today's IT talent. More specifically, the research objective of this article is to identify the defining career experiences and educational characteristics of the rungs of the do ladder to provide insight for both the firms that hire CIOs and the IT professionals who aspire to be CIOs. The career histories of many CIOs can be discovered through social media data and is the source of the data in this study. They used an inductive methodology to analyze these histories in order to elicit the key identifying features of IT workers who move up the CIO ladder. They categorized the raw data into industry and job types in order to develop a framework that captures key insights and themes that can be used to guide the actions of aspiring CIOs and the firms that recruit them.