There are a couple of ways you can change career paths from IT (engineer) to IT (manager).
Before you start though, consider that management and engineering are two distinctly different job fields. An IT engineer who has no management responsibilities is solely responsible for mastering the technical, theoretical and application-specific portions of thier craft. A manager must be knowledgable in hard-skills such as accounting and law but must also master their soft-skills such as communication and intrapersonal communcation.
An engineer is expert at the tools and algorithms necessary to perform the technical portions of thier jobs. There is also the implicit understanding that a good IT engineer understands the theories and principles used to make the IT do its job. Be it from networking to computer programming to architecting, an IT engineer is responsible for all technical portions of thier job. The more an IT engineer can master their field and the tangental technologies the more respected they will become.
A manager of IT is understood to have a good-level understanding of technology, but must also master accounting, the laws of human resourcing, contracting, etc. and must also be good to varying degrees at soft skills including deriving business objectives from customers/executives and then explaining requirement to IT professionals.
On any given day, a high-level IT professional such as a technical lead, will be expected to take specific technical requirements and break them down into tasks that one IT professional will be able to understand and accomplish. They are also expected to understand their overall technical goal and apply technologies and algorithms to meet those goals. Lower level IT engineers are expected to have a good-to-firm grasp of a specific set of technologies and/or tools and be able to quickly perform the tasks the technical leads provide them.
On any given day the manager must review the costs of personel, identify the performance of a group of professionals, speak to IT professionals, and prepare reports for customers and executives which range from cost-accounting to your groups ability to meet various performance objectives. Additionally, the manager is responsible for meeting with the Sr. IT leads on a various number of topics including personell performance, task objectives, schedule, and how well the IT professionals are able to meet thier objectives. Also, managers are expected to review thier IT Leads expectations of IT professionals and periodically rate and review them. On a regular occasion, managers are also required to provide reviews on all of thier assigned personnel, explain thier reviews, and then assign raises and bonuses. Lastly, if an employee is unable to perform, refuses or is unable to improve thier perfomance, and knows of the problem, the manager is the person that fires them.
Now that you know the difference between a manager and IT lead, its time to think about how you transition.
First and foremost, make sure you are someone who will perform well in a management position. Here's a top-x list of things to keep in mind.
1) At home, do you account for all of your spending and balance your bank-account? Or, do you prefer to spend as you wish and then live inexpensively for a week or so until your next paycheck comes in? If you account and budget, you'll be good at management. If you don't, you should acquire the habit, because that's how you'll be driving your projects if you want to be successful.
2) When a fellow co-working comes up to you with a problem, do you listen to them or do you prefer that they go to someone else? You can be a manager without the ability to emphathise, but you must listen if you want to be a successful manager. Regardless of who you are talking to, knowledge is power and the ability to listen is one of the most important aspects of management. Knowledge is power, and you cannot gain that if you interrupt or try to finish the sentences of the people you're talking with. Lastly on this point, do you talk TO people or WITH them? Talking TO someone is a one-way communication process where you unload what you want and then go without getting feedback. Talking WITH someone is a 2-way process where you interact and LISTEN to what they have to say.
3) Can you understand the difference between business goals and technical objectives? As a manager, part of your job will be talking with customers and determining the overall business goals they have. In this case, your customer could be your executives, your paying customers, and the end-users of your product. Your job is not to define the specific technology or technical route, rather it is to document the actual goals. "I want 1,000,000 more visitors to my website with less than 1 minute downtime a year" is a business goal. "Using J2EE technology, load-balance a system across multiple geographically distant server-farms with automatic failovers" is a technical goal. Be able to understand the actual business goal.
4) Can you let go of Java as the end-all, be-all of software engineering? Recently I was asked to manage a website. My goals were specific, get it up and running quickly and have an administrative interfact which allows someone with absolutely no web knowledge to run it. I chose a PHP-based server called XOOPS. Why? Well, the customer may have been able to do better with Java, but thier human requirements clearly wouldn't allow it. Addionally, the server host was convinced Java would create problems. As such, to meet the timeline, I chose a non-Java Technology.
Ok, that's all for now. Let me know if this helps.
