07 Sept 2026
"IT" shows up on nearly every job board, but it covers a much wider range of work than most people expect. Different types of IT careers can mean anything from resetting a coworker's password to designing the network that keeps a hospital running.
If you're weighing your options, it helps to see the field broken into its real, practical categories — support, networking, development, data, security, and leadership — rather than one long, undifferentiated list. Below, we walk through each category, the job titles inside it, typical duties, and current U.S. salary data, plus what it actually takes to get hired.
At its core, an IT job involves using computers, networks, and software to help an organization store, move, or protect information. That can mean fixing a broken laptop, building an app, or defending a company's systems from attackers — the common thread is technology that keeps a business running, across support, development, security, and many other IT professions.
Employment in computer and information technology occupations is projected to grow much faster than average, with about 280,000 openings a year through 2035.
Because the field is so broad, IT job titles vary a lot between companies. One employer's "IT Support Specialist" might be another's "Help Desk Technician," even though the daily work looks almost identical — which is part of why it helps to think in categories instead of titles alone.
Support roles are the most common entry point into IT, and focus on solving day-to-day technical problems for other people rather than building new systems. The Bureau of Labor Statistics splits this category into two tracks, with different typical education paths. Pay figures below are from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook's Computer Support Specialists profile, current as of May 2025.
Median pay: $61,860/year
Duties: Handles help desk tickets, walks end users through step-by-step fixes over phone, chat, or in person, and sets up new employee accounts, hardware, and software access. Typically needs only some college coursework, and can often qualify with a high school diploma plus relevant certifications instead of a degree.
Median pay: $76,220/year
Duties: Troubleshoots connectivity issues, maintains routers and switches, and keeps an organization's internal network running rather than fixing individual desktops. More often calls for an associate's degree to enter than the user support role above.
Median pay: about $61,860/year
Duties: A common alternate title for the user support role above — the same day-to-day work answering tickets and resolving basic hardware and software issues. The BLS doesn't track this title separately, so pay typically matches user support specialists.
💡 Global Work AI Expert Tip: A CompTIA A+ certification is one of the fastest ways to prove entry-level support skills without a degree — many hiring managers treat it as a rough stand-in for a year of hands-on experience.
Once support specialists build experience, many move into roles that own an entire network or set of systems rather than individual tickets. Pay figures below are from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook's Network and Computer Systems Administrators profile, current as of May 2025.
Median pay: $99,130/year
Duties: Installs, configures, and maintains the IT infrastructure that support teams rely on — servers, routers, firewalls, and user permissions — and often supervises support specialists directly. A bachelor's degree in a computer-related field is the more typical path in.
Median pay: about $99,130/year
Duties: A common alternate title for the role above, usually with more focus on maintaining servers, operating systems, and the business applications running on them rather than the physical network hardware itself. Pay typically matches network and computer systems administrators, since the BLS doesn't track the titles separately.
Median pay: about $99,130/year
Duties: An increasingly common industry title for the same underlying work, usually with more emphasis on cloud computing platforms like AWS or Azure alongside on-premises hardware as organizations shift workloads off physical servers. Falls under the same BLS classification as the roles above.
Development roles build the applications, tools, and websites that other IT roles support and secure. Pay figures below are from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook's Software Developers and Web Developers profiles, current as of May 2025.
Median pay: $135,980/year
Duties: Writes, tests, and maintains the code behind applications and systems, translating user needs into working features and fixing bugs along the way. The wider developer, QA, and testing group is projected to add roughly 106,100 openings a year through 2035.
Median pay: about $135,980/year
Duties: A common alternate title for the role above, often used when the work is scoped specifically to business or mobile applications rather than systems-level software. Pay typically matches software developers under the same BLS classification.
Median pay: $104,300/year
Duties: Tests applications for bugs, crashes, and usability issues before release, writes structured test plans, and works closely with developers to confirm fixes actually resolve the problem.
Median pay: $92,650/year
Duties: Designs, builds, and maintains websites, splitting roughly into front-end (the visual interface users interact with), back-end (the server logic behind it), and full-stack (both) specialties.
Median pay: $104,000/year
Duties: Focuses more on layout, usability, and visual design for websites and apps than on writing code, working closely with web developers to turn a design mockup into a working interface.
Data-focused roles, sometimes grouped together as data management careers, are responsible for how an organization stores, organizes, and makes sense of its information. Pay figures below are from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook's Database Administrators and Architects, Computer Systems Analysts, and Data Scientists profiles, current as of May 2025.
Median pay: $104,620/year
Duties: Builds and maintains the databases that store an organization's information, handling routine backups, setting user permissions, and tuning performance so systems stay fast as data grows.
Median pay: $139,500/year
Duties: Designs the overall structure a database will use before it's built — how tables, relationships, and data types are organized — so administrators can maintain and scale it efficiently later.
Median pay: $105,850/year
Duties: Studies an organization's existing computer systems, identifies inefficiencies, and recommends or designs improvements, often translating business needs into technical requirements for IT staff.
Median pay: $120,230/year
Duties: Analyzes large datasets using statistics and code to find patterns, then builds models that guide business decisions — one of the fastest-growing roles on this list, at a projected 35 percent through 2035.
Cybersecurity roles exist to protect the systems every other IT role helps build and run. Pay figures below are from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook's Information Security Analysts profile, current as of May 2025.
Median pay: $129,180/year
Duties: Monitors networks for breaches, runs regular security audits, and builds the policies, firewalls, and access controls that keep company data safe — one of the fastest-growing roles in this list, at a projected 21 percent through 2035.
Median pay: about $129,180/year
Duties: A common alternate title for the role above, typically with more hands-on work building, configuring, and maintaining the security tools an organization relies on rather than just monitoring and reporting. Falls under the same BLS classification as information security analysts.
Median pay: about $129,180/year
Duties: A specialized version of the role above, focused on deliberately trying to break into an organization's own systems and networks to find weaknesses before real attackers do, then reporting them so the team can fix them.
💡 Global Work AI Expert Tip: Certifications like CompTIA Security+ carry real weight in cybersecurity hiring, since the field moves faster than most degree programs can keep up with — many analysts stack certifications throughout their career rather than stopping after one degree.
Senior IT roles shift the focus from hands-on technical work to planning, budgeting, and leading teams of specialists. Pay figures below are from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook's Computer and Information Systems Managers profile, current as of May 2025; project and program manager titles aren't tracked separately.
Median pay: not tracked separately by the BLS
Duties: Plans and oversees a single IT initiative from start to finish — setting timelines, managing budgets, and coordinating technical teams — while reporting progress to business stakeholders.
Median pay: not tracked separately by the BLS
Duties: A common alternate title for the role above, usually covering several related IT projects at once rather than a single initiative, and often coordinating between multiple project managers.
Median pay: $175,140/year
Duties: Sets an organization's overall technology strategy, manages its IT staff and budget, and reports on technology performance at the executive level. Most people reach this level after working through several of the IT career paths above.
Median pay: not tracked separately by the BLS; the top 10 percent of computer and information systems managers earn upward of $297,510/year
Duties: The most senior technology title at many organizations, typically reporting directly to the CEO, owning technology strategy company-wide, and representing IT priorities at the board level rather than managing a single department. Falls in the top 10 percent of the same BLS category as computer and information systems managers.
The figures above are national medians, and IT workers' actual pay can swing well above or below them depending on a few consistent factors.
Experience and specialization. Entry-level workers earn toward the lower end of a role's range, while specialists with in-demand skills or several years of experience often land near the top. Information security analysts, for example, range from roughly $75,000 to $200,000 depending on experience and specialization alone.
Certifications. Vendor-specific and vendor-neutral IT certifications, from organizations like CompTIA, AWS, and Microsoft, can substitute for years of formal experience in a hiring manager's eyes and often correlate with faster pay growth.
Location, industry, and company size. IT professionals in major tech hubs, or in industries like finance and software publishing, tend to out-earn peers in the same role elsewhere, and larger companies often pay more than small businesses for equivalent positions.
Not always — and it depends heavily on which of the career paths above you're aiming for.
Entry-level support roles are the most forgiving: as covered above, both network and user support specialists can often qualify with IT certifications and a high school diploma instead of a degree. More specialized roles, like network administration, software development, and cybersecurity, more consistently expect at least a bachelor's degree, often in computer science or a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology.
A four-year degree is still the most common route into the field overall, and it opens doors that a certification alone typically can't. But if you're changing careers or building experience first, certifications and a portfolio of real projects can carry genuine weight with employers, especially for support and junior development roles.
Whichever path you take, employers care most about proof that you can actually do the work.
💡 Global Work AI Expert Tip: If you don't have a degree yet, lead with what you can prove — a home lab, a GitHub repository, or a help desk internship tells a hiring manager more than a resume line ever will.
Start from the kind of work you enjoy day to day: hands-on troubleshooting points toward support or network administration, building things points toward software or web development, protecting systems points toward cybersecurity, and organizing information points toward data roles. From there, compare the typical education path and pay range for each category above against your own timeline and budget for getting qualified.
Among the roles covered here, Chief Information Officer and other computer and information systems manager titles tend to earn the most, with senior managers' top 10 percent earning upward of $297,510 in May 2025. Specialized individual-contributor roles like information security analyst and software developer also rank near the top of the pay scale.
Entry-level support roles, such as help desk technician or user support specialist, tend to have the lowest barriers to entry, since many employers accept a high school diploma or some college coursework paired with a relevant certification. These roles are also a common stepping stone into networking, security, or development later on.
Most IT roles combine some technical foundation — networking, an operating system, a programming language, or database basics — with problem-solving and communication skills, since IT staff regularly explain technical issues to non-technical coworkers. The specific technical skills you need depend heavily on which career path you're aiming for.
Computer science is generally more theoretical, focused on algorithms and how computing works at a fundamental level, while IT is more applied, focused on keeping an organization's existing systems, networks, and users running. In practice the two fields overlap heavily, and many IT professionals hold computer science degrees.
Once you've narrowed down which type of IT career fits you, the next step is finding open roles that actually match your background — not scrolling through hundreds of generic listings. Global Work AI scans the job market for openings suited to your skills and experience, then lets you review and approve every tailored resume, cover letter, and application before it's sent. Take our quick quiz to see which IT roles Global Work AI is already matching to your profile.
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