There is no career path from this location in IT. Jacksonville, FL Is not one of the talent centers for Allstate, so if you want to move up from your spot here, you have to move out of Jacksonville. Even doing that is very challenging unless you are interested in hyper-specializing, as IT jobs in Jacksonville are far broader than other positions in other areas of Allstate. You'd better have the minimum required skills for those hyper-specialized positions you're applying for, too, otherwise you won't qualify for anything but a lower ranked position, translating directly into a pay cut for your career "progression" which you need to move out of state for.
If you have no interest in becoming a manager, there is a very real glass ceiling with Allstate. There is no opportunity for non-managers in higher ranking roles. Promotions will stop beyond a certain point, and raises will start to become limited...unless you become a manager, of course.
Many management changes, especially senior IT management, have not been able to produce their advertised results. The culture in Jacksonville (and why it is the way it is) was not understood at all before a grand new IT strategy was set into motion. Peter Drucker's assertion, "culture eats strategy for breakfast," manifested in multiple failed attempts at replacing legacy software, failure to reduce technical debt load, and retreat from demands of far more rigor in IT operations to a "just do it when they ask for it" servitude.
The business model for the Jacksonville location is completely different from that of the business model of Allstate proper. Different markets, different customers, different products, all translate to completely different business needs placed upon IT. While Jacksonville-based IT understood this concept well, too many man-hours were spent in meetings trying to explain the differences between the business models. This was a problem with IT strategy and execution, security requirements, compliance requirements, privacy requirements, and even simple data exchange with customers because of the square peg/round hole difference in business model.
There is too little truly deep understanding of both the business in Jacksonville and the IT ecosystem of Allstate. Some have deep knowledge of the business, e.g., how it works, what needs to change, what you should be doing to be a market leader. Some have deep knowledge of the corporate technology portfolio, e.g., emerging technologies that could provide benefit, how to leverage Allstate's efficiencies of scale, where the technical debt is. Very, very, very few people have both. Full stop.
