Role profile
IT manager
Also called: IT director · Chief information officer (CIO) · Chief technology officer (CTO) · Engineering manager (overlaps) · Information security manager · Help desk manager
IT managers plan and run an organization's technology: the people, budgets, vendors and systems that keep the business working. Nearly every mid-size or large employer has them, from hospitals and banks to software companies, government agencies and IT consulting firms.
- Median pay, 2025
- $175,140
- $107,550 to $297,510 (10th to 90th percentile)
- US jobs, 2025
- 685,800
- Computer and Information Systems Managers
- Outlook, 2025-35
- +16%
- Much faster than average
- Typical entry
- Bachelor's degree
- Experience: 5 years or more
What the work looks like
- Set priorities for the IT or engineering team and decide what gets built, bought, upgraded or retired this quarter.
- Own a budget: license renewals, cloud spend, hardware refresh cycles and headcount, and defend it to finance.
- Hire, coach and sometimes let go of staff, and run one-on-ones, performance reviews and on-call rotations.
- Negotiate with vendors and managed service providers, and read the contract terms nobody else wants to read.
- Translate between executives and technical staff, turning a business goal into a project plan and a technical risk into plain language.
- Answer for security and compliance: audits, access reviews, incident response decisions and policy sign-off.
- Step in when a major outage or incident happens and coordinate the response and the follow-up review.
How people get in
This is not an entry-level job. The BLS lists a bachelor's degree plus five or more years of experience in a related IT role as the typical path, and the type of experience usually matches the team you will run: help desk managers tend to come up from support, security managers from security analyst roles.
The common route is to become the strongest senior engineer, administrator or analyst on a team, then take on informal leadership first: leading a project, mentoring new hires, owning a vendor relationship. A team lead or supervisor title is often the bridge into a formal manager role.
Some employers prefer or require a graduate degree, often an MBA or a master's in information systems, especially for director and CIO roles. A project management credential can help with the planning side, but hiring managers mostly look for a record of delivered projects and teams that stayed intact.
Skills employers ask for
- Budgeting and cost forecasting
- Vendor and contract management
- Hiring and performance management
- IT service management (ITIL concepts)
- Project and portfolio planning
- Risk and compliance basics (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI depending on industry)
- Cloud cost management
- Incident management
- Clear written communication for executives
- Enough hands-on technical depth to judge estimates and trade-offs
Outlook to 2035
The BLS projects 16% growth from 2025 to 2035, much faster than average, with about 53,500 openings a year once retirements and job changes are counted. Demand follows the simple fact that more of every business now runs on software and data, and someone has to be accountable for it. The catch is that the path runs through years of hands-on work first, so this growth mostly benefits people already in senior technical roles.
How the pay compares
IT manager highlighted against the other 13 roles we track.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Computer and Information Systems Managers. Pay is 2025 median annual wage; outlook is projected employment change 2025-35.