The purpose of this qualitative interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) study was to understand how white collar African American male senior executives within the defense industry contractor IT organizations make sense of their career advancement into senior management positions. The 12 African American males that participated in this study were located in the Washington, DC metropolitan area and had a minimum of 20 years of experience leading and directing employees. The seven master themes that emerged were: 1) African American challenges, capturing the challenges that the participants experienced and to understand their feelings towards them; 2) attributes/competencies, reflections from the participants on their attributes and competencies that they found to be essential to their career success; 3) education, where the participants made sense and conveyed how their need for continued career development and education affected and continues to guide their success; 4) mentors and social internal/external networks, with participants expressing that extending pathways and mitigating challenges to their career success could be attributed to having mentors and social capital; 5) performance, could be attributed to part of the participants' successes whether measured in number of promotions, career motivations, managerial level, or compensation; 6) interpersonal skills, their ability to properly interact with their peers and employees within their organizations was very important to their success; and 7) leadership skills, the participants recognized the importance of developing into an effective leader in their organizations. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]