Well, you covered quite a few professions or career paths in your examples. The easiest way to move into business is to realise that you will need to understan

Well, you covered quite a few professions or career paths in your examples. The easiest way to move into business is to realise that you will need to understand the business. This is not some nebulous Zen crap I'm pulling here, but a fact. If all you've ever done is work for a blue chip software company then it's likely that your only "experience" with "users" are those you sell your software or services to: in most businesses your users are the ones you write internal software for. Moving into it can be as simple as asking for training and a transfer to another department or business area (if you work in big corp) or simply involving yourself in the day-to-day workings of your users. If you show a genuine interest in learning how they do their work you can use your existing IT skills and your honed, technical mind to making their lives easier. You'll be surprised by just how utterly inefficient most things are. Fixing these deficiencies range from yanking data from crufty Excel spreadsheets on network drives into a proper database or munging crap data or other sort of automation tasks. The only real way to learn a business, aside from domain areas like finance where you're as likely to receive in-house training, is to sit next to them and help them do their jobs. (Sneaky Ninja edit: Your line manager may hate that you're leaving as he's losing a developer, but the business may well end up loving you even more. You're no longer a cost centre but you're actually improving the business.)