Tech Careers: Quick Reference Guide to IT Job Titles

This reference guide explains key roles across the IT industry, helping current and aspiring IT professionals choose the right career path and understand their next steps.

Christopher Tozzi, Technology analyst

September 13, 2024

1 Min Read
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Sometimes, IT job titles can be almost as complicated as IT technology. There are a variety of terms that refer to different roles. Sometimes, varying job titles are more or less synonymous, but in other cases there are important implications in using one title instead of another.

To help clear up that confusion, we've prepared the following Tech Careers Quick Reference Guide to job titles that are common in the IT industry. It explains common job titles across several key domains within IT, including software development, DevOps, IT operations, cloud computing, cybersecurity, data management, and AI.

Before we dive in, let's discuss a couple of caveats.

First, we can't tell you exactly how a given company might interpret each job title or map it onto roles and responsibilities because different businesses apply IT job titles in different ways. We can, however, provide a general sense of what each title implies, along with the pros and cons that come with these titles from a career perspective.

Second, this isn't a complete list of job titles that exist in the IT industry. Organizations are constantly coming up with new roles and new titles to accompany them — as well as applying new names to existing roles. That said, we endeavor below to cover the major job titles that are common within the IT industry today.

Download your free copy of our Tech Careers Quick Reference Guide today!

About the Author

Christopher Tozzi

Technology analyst, Fixate.IO

Christopher Tozzi is a technology analyst with subject matter expertise in cloud computing, application development, open source software, virtualization, containers and more. He also lectures at a major university in the Albany, New York, area. His book, “For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution,” was published by MIT Press.

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