The majority of my career was in the area of Pharmaceutical IT. I consider this a subset of the typical IT Office type of IT establishment.

This area is not the place for the typical IT ticket based churn & burn approach. This requires a situational awareness of what you are doing.

For example: Testing devices typically interface to computer systems which nearly always means a vendor supplied program.  The standard IT approach that it's not on our standard deployment or image and needs an exception is irrelevant. The purpose of the computer is to run the vendor program and supply the result to support the Quality testing or Product release/development.

I would advise anyone that wants to enter into this field become familiar with SQA (Software Quality Assurance), Validation and Change Control.

Another part of my career was in the Cybersecurity area specifically the CMMC, CUI, and DoD compliance areas. I would have to translate regulatory requirements into policy and procedures to support audits and generally justify compliance or where changes need to be made.

One thing that comes up periodically is credibility. I have a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, and a Masters of Arts in Information Systems management and before I retired I maintained a CISA and CISSP certification and have over 30 years of experience in the IT field.