IT employment

[Sarkster]

Well I completely disagree. as the entire concept of IT wasnt even relevant until very recently in the history of man, an "aptitude for IT related things" cannot feasibly be a predetermined factor in how our brains work. therefore, you are both wrong (and incredibly modest to boot )

[Pij]

Arf.......It isnt using the ****ing force, mate. It's I.T.

yea but like anything, theres levels of understanding/ability. E.g A good salesman can sell something even if he doesnt know anything about it.

[Ish]

cannot feasibly be a predetermined factor in how our brains work.

I agree its not. We've not evolved to be good at IT. Neither have we evolved to be amazing quantum physicists.

But we have evolved to be good general purpose problem solving machines.

And some peoples brains just happen to be better suited to solving some kinds of problems than others.

[RuBiQ]

The guy was right in page 4 that said having a MCSE DOES help

I wanted to get into IT for years but didnt have the qualifactions, knew a bit from breaking and fixing my own pcs and friends so went on a MCSE course, ive never finished it yet tho i started it 3 years ago due to lack of free time to get it finished, but 'edited my cv' a bit to make it look like ive had experience, got my foot in the door of my first IT job about 3 years ago, wasnt great money, but 18 month later i swapped jobs and doubled the pay, now on IT job3 and it is less responsibility but more money than the other 2 jobs where i was a solo IT admin on my own with no support at all

Edit your CV a bit seems to work, if you wanna look at mine, email or pm me mate

[Ish]

There is one way into development if your open to coding as a career or starting point:

Get yourself self taught (with something like Java or C# and SQL for business, C++ for gaming) and contribute to or start your own Open Source project.

If I see on a CV that someone works on code in there free time and there is something I can look at then that CV immediately goes onto my further consideration pile.

(If your wandering what I do for a living: I'm a coder / team leader / occasional project manager for a reasonably large shrink wrap software company who's a bit bored and looking to get out of IT!!)

[Commander Marklar]

The guy was right in page 4 that said having a MCSE DOES help

Any qualification will help, in addition to some kind of tangible proof you're good at what you claim to do. Some MCSE's go into a great deal of detail on the various subjects they cover.

Somebody with self-taught skills and no kind of proper background, especially in things like source control and development processes is a liability -- nobody wants a code monkey who'll hack away at things until the cows come home. With something tangible though, especially if you can explain the development process, how it came about and any problems (etc) you tackled whilst in development (sound familiar?) will put you in a good light.

Probably already covered in the thread but still...

[Commander Marklar]

I'm not dull, I've got a good degree and a tump of PC experience, just nothing on paper with the words MS or Cisco stamped on it. See, I've had accronyms like MCSE and CCNA bandied my way, but I don't want to spend a week's wages on a set of books for an exam I've no idea if I'll pass or lead to a job anyway.

Disregarding what I said above It'd be a waste in your position -- I think MCSE's are great if you're in employment and want to further your career but as a tool to getting a job? No, nothing I would consider CV worthy given a short time scale.

It can be difficult from your position but you seem like a nice chap and all that so I would put more emphasis on getting your interview technique down as I imagine you to be fairly down to earth and quite talkative, in a good way. Somebody who would get on well in an interview but can also comes across as knowing their ****. However, getting this into a CV is always difficult so I'd probably put that as a secondary measure and start phoning around, get your foot in the door early like. I've seen so many people just send their CV in, or a quick email and then forget about it, expect us to chase them... doesn't work like that, not from my perspective. If you cba, then why should I?

Can't remember where I was going now, my code just finished building so I'm off to test and check some stuff in. Narf.

[Super Stu]

All useful tips generall, thanks gents. It's unfortunate that moving is unlikely to happen, but I question whether it solves the problem. The "simple helpdesk" jobs mentioned, wherein you're starting at the bottom effectively, exist round here. I'm simply not being considered, so you see my problem. I can't believe that London, say, would suddenly have so many more of these jobs (compared to numbers of people applying - hell, it's London) that I'd be more likely to get a look-in. The work exists round here, I just can't seem to get my foot in the door, so I'm trying to take a proactive stance.

Tedious MCSE debates aside, 5 years experience on some highly advanced server application doesn't necessarily prove you have good problem solving skills. It just means you got a particular job and have been doing it for 5 years - perhaps you never encountered a ball busting problem, although entirely likely of course. I'd have thought my degree would have shown that I've demonstrated problem solving (clearly not of an IT nature) to a specific level, although it seems not.

To be honest, I can only see three things:

- no professional IT quals
- not a great deal of frontline IT experience (did a year at BTopenworld, 2nd line)
- this damn degree which, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread I believe, hints of "wtf is this guy doing applying to us, he'll be off when the first big science job comes up *bin*", whereas ironically very little has been forthcoming in over a year of applying and I'm forced to open mail and take minutes all day long

Yeah, done quite a bit of C over the years btw. That said, again I have nothing formal to demonstrate as such, other than descriptions of projects done in the past. It all comes back to the same thing.

[Ish]

Somebody with self-taught skills and no kind of proper background, especially in things like source control and development processes is a liability -- nobody wants a code monkey who'll hack away at things until the cows come home.

I agree with this apart from the 'proper background' part. But generally its nothing to do with people being self taught. Your just as likely to get an idiot with a degree, an MCSE, a PHD, whatever. None of those things are 'proper backgrounds' for actually doing the job in my experience.

In fact probably the only 'proper background' is experience.

But in SuperStu's case given he has no prior experience he's basically looking at a junior/trainee position. And for a junior position enthusiasm and general good problem solving skills are the most important thing. Personally (again talking about coding) I'd rather see a serious interest in that via contributions to something like an open source project than an MCSE. A degree being nice but not essential.

[Super Stu]

Commander, here's an interesting statsistic for you - in over a year of applying for jobs, I've made the sift once, nailed the interview (as informed by them) but was pipped to the post (a science one, as it happens) by someone with more experience liaising with schools. Can't possibly recall how many, but it's at least one a week. Putting the same effort into those damn selling yourself boxes is becoming quite a task, as you can imagine the dent to self confidence this whole situation has.

I believe I have my CV online here somewhere, I could link that here if anyone cares to kindly have a butchers. I don't see it as the problem though, as 99% of forms I've encountered specifically say they don't want your CV, but rather you fill the form out as intended.

[Ish]

Yeah, done quite a bit of C over the years btw. That said, again I have nothing formal to demonstrate as such, other than descriptions of projects done in the past. It all comes back to the same thing.

Then you need to get something formal together to demonstrate and go for every position you can.

It can work.

I got into the IT industry (11 years ago now admittedly) by writing a shareware application during my summer holiday while at school and then touting that round everywhere I could until I got a job. I had no idea about schedules, source control or any of that. I was just a code monkey. But I didn't pretend otherwise and went to interviews with the attitude of "look I can code, here's the proof, but I don't know much else but I'm up for learning".

I finally got a job writing training software for switchboards on a crappy wage (I took a pay cut from my job in a warehouse) and learned about the other aspects of development on the job. Moved into working on embedded software, then development tools, then.. then... ooo all sorts of stuff by now

[Super Stu]

Hmm. OK, well let's say my experience with C goes back to Borland 3.0 for DOS Did some interfacing with x86 back in school, largely general guff through college and then direct electronics control in university (working stepper motors and what have you via the lpt port). Win32 stuff is limited to Visual Basic unfortunately, although my final year project involved writing a suite of programs to remote control our telescope via the lan.

Anything recent has just involved monkeying around with web guff like php. I find it terribly difficult to "just code" without a project, as it were.

Any ideas how I might proceed?

And thanks again for all the feedback thus far, hopefully this is useful for other folks too.

[Ish]

If you know PHP I'd have a search for open source PHP based projects on SourceForge and see if any interest you. There's all kinds of PHP projects going on.

Alternatively set yourself a project. It doesn't really matter if its not terribly original or grand (games database, anything) - your looking to sell your skills not the project. In fact small, finished and high quality would be preferably to large, unfocussed, scrappy and unfinished.

If I was taking you on a for trainee / junior C# job it wouldn't bother me terribly if you didn't know that but knew another language or environment. Its really just a demonstration of aptitude I'd be looking for.

[Valken]

Arf.......It isnt using the ****ing force, mate. It's I.T.

Yup, stick with those flow charts mate!

There's more to developing applications that are of some use and implementing infrastructure than following a set of proceedures and looking at manuals.

These things have their place but to be not any monkey can be taught to be good at this stuff.

[Sarkster]

true....it seems you need an ego to begin with