The milestones along the traditional path to IT leadership look a lot like this: Earn a computer science degree, serve an IT internship, take development courses, gain coding experience, obtain certifications and sign up for management training specific to technology. However, as IT increasingly becomes a business strategy enabler, IT leaders are being promoted from places like the sales or marketing department.

Francis Li, vice president of IT at technology solutions and services provider Softchoice is a perfect example. Francis’s early years at Softchoice began in hardware, and he later moved on to roles in the marketing and sales teams.

This initial experience sparked his interest in and aptitude for information systems, giving Francis the ability to segue into more technical projects — and he now leads Softchoice’s IT department and sets strategy around business intelligence, ecommerce and infrastructure, according to Li.

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