IT employment

[ascender]

I have to say, if there was something that paid the same as what I do now, but wasn't dealing with IT, I'd do it in a shot. Especially if it involved working outdoors. A lot of the fun has gone out of IT, but I don't know if that's because I'm no longer working in a small team doing server/desktop support or if I've just been doing it for too long.

[Tom Salter]

It's because IT is **** in general :P

Seriously though - a mate of mine runs a baked potato van and sells cheese baked potatoes at ?2.50 a pop. Guess how much it actually costs to make the thing? Yep, prolly less than 10p. Check the mark-up on that >_<

Admiteddly his pitch at places like Glastonbury and Creamfields is running into ?3000 a day, but he easily makes ?6000 a day profit a day at the busier events :O

[Ginger Tosser]

Spud van here i come

[Super Stu]

Well tbh, I enjoy doing plumbing and and electrical work (not at the same time, obviously). I have even less of a clue how to go about getting into that.

Office work is a bunch of soggy ****e tbh :/

[yashiro]

Get into games. It's great, honest.

[Tom Salter]

You lie ;p

How about being a British Gas techy? Last I heard they paid ****loads of money and did all training on the job.

Plus if you **** up you get to blow stuff up!

[Jushin-Thunder-Liger]

As i am re-evaluating my IT career i stumbled upon this thread, very good it is too.

I currently work as an IT Manager on a rapidly growing Win 2003 Network. It took me bloody ages after graduation to even get an interview and in the end had to get a job as an ICT Technician in a school where after another 3 months i got my curent gig.
And how did i do it?
By lying through my teeth in each interview

I got my first job at the school by telling them i was quite adept at PHP/MySQL and had loads of ideas for online quiz's for the kids (I could do a basic online form, but that was it) and then got my current job by banging on about my experiance of AD, creating GPO's and vigilant backup procedures (I had read a book the night before).

The IT industry is full to the brim of bull****, if you can talk a good game in the interview and are the sort of guy who can pick things up quickly as you go along, then you wll be fine.

Oh and if i see someone who has been on an MCSE boot-camp, their CV goes straight in the bin, if i see they are the sort of geek who's weekends are spent learning coding or fixing PC's, they have a shot.

[Nijo]

This thread's new for me too. Some thoughts....

- My first job was via some kind of uni directory ("Get"?). I actually just photocopied my CV and sent it off to 50 places. I applied to all the 'proper' places too using their application forms, but my 2:2 in maths was a downer and in the end some company I'd never heard of picked me up. That was in QA. It's worth a shot at least...
- So based on something Stu said earlier I'd say QA is a viable starting point for IT. It's not as glamorous as programming but it's a foot in the door. Knowledge of the QA process (which you said you have) plus general knowledge of hardware, programming/scripting, and whatever product it is you need to QA all go a long way, whereas the MSCE is really for a different purpose.
- The alternate steps can be more IT related (e.g. desktop support) or something more customer facing if you have the patter. Pre/Post sales consultancy is achievable if you can blag a decent presentation and can relate to customers. Depends what's in your area of course.

Anyway that's my 2p. Maybe since you started the thread you had more thoughts/progress?

[Ish]

Wow. This is a blast from the past.

Well I'm still looking to get out of IT. I hate it these days. Sure it pays well but **** me the software I write is completely pointless. As is most of it. And more and more I feel like us IT guys are working in a sweatshop.

Still I've finally got myself in a position where in a couple of years doing something I love for a peanuts wage if necessary is achievable.

Thank ****. Because really - I can't take much more of this ****ty industry.

[Ginger Tosser]

The IT industry is full to the brim of bull****, if you can talk a good game in the interview and are the sort of guy who can pick things up quickly as you go along, then you wll be fine.

Oh and if i see someone who has been on an MCSE boot-camp, their CV goes straight in the bin, if i see they are the sort of geek who's weekends are spent learning coding or fixing PC's, they have a shot.

Agreed on all counts, the amount of paper mcse's i've met and continue to meet in this industry amazes me. There usually quite easy to spot, they be able to tell you all the port address that windows server uses however ask them to modify a login script to map drives and they're ****ed.

The interview technique is spot on, as a contractor i'm having to bull**** every few months. Seems to work alright.

[Nijo]

Wow. This is a blast from the past.

Oh, didn't notice the year on the original post. Thought the thread was only a month old.

[Jushin-Thunder-Liger]

1 thing i have noticed is that everyone, EVERYONE is useless for a few weeks when they 1st come in to a new job, no matter how ****-hot their background is.

Also being a Network Manager/Admin, once you get beyond the power-trip, is as tedious a job as you can imagine (hence learning c#/java)

it pays good, but its not exactly a "trade" like java where you can up sticks and find work anywhere you like (hence learning c#/java)

[CMOS]

I'm having the hardest time to get into the industry. Like just before I finished college I had my heart set on being an SAP consultant as I could buy a house without a mortgage within 4 years on a SAP consultant salary. But to get trained for the modules is a small fortune so I've had to take up another it career before I can do what I want to do so I've become a good - **** hot vbscript programmer and I'm doing nicely with ASP now. Plus I've started doing ISEB work for software testing, so I've got my two paths either web development or software testing.

Just getting your foot in the door is evil, everyone wants 6 to 12 months commercial experience and since I decided not to go to uni I don?t have my sandwich year experience, so I don?t have that 6 to 12 months. I Agency's love my CV etc... as I can do most things XHTML, ASP, VBSCRIPT, SQL etc.... Databasing theory etc.... The list goes on and on and on, I'm no pro as I haven't got the exposure to the industry, but it's SO damn difficult.

[randombs]

Dragging this thread kicking and screaming out from its six-year slumber.

I promise I'll read through these nine pages but just thought I'd throw this out there:

I managed to fluke my way into working as tech support for a company that owns a group of hotels in and around London(opening some more this year) since late 2010. It's only myself and my manager in the I.T. department and we handle all the issues/requirements/upgrades/etc between us, with me being the sexy sexy face of the department and him taking on the more difficult stuff and dealing with purchasing, vendor meetings, data network upgrades, etc.

In this time, I've been exposed to hardware ranging from Pentium IIs running OS/2 Warp right up to a shiny new Dell PowerEdge server running 2008 R2(which,naturally, I'm not allowed to fiddle with).

It's not all just installing Windows, though - I took over managing the guest wifi network for one of the larger hotels and monitor/manage by myself, transforming it from an absolute mess with often daily complaints to having no more than one single issue in the past month. I've also created some lovely help documentation and training manuals for the various hotel systems and have been involved in staff I.T. training.

I've handled myself pretty well in this time, being able to sort out most issues other than some major server-related ones. I've been using computers and doing support for friends/family since I was a nipper but I'd had no proper experience of large networked environments before this job.

My manager's away for the next six weeks so it's just me and I'm planning on using this time productively. The last few times he's gone on holiday I've literally just sat in the office on the internet waiting for something to break. I get that MCSE's and some other certs may not necessarily mean much in and of themselves but I'm thinking about getting certified in something of some sort as I did Physics(badly) at uni and all my IT knowledge is just what I've picked up over the years, so my CV was pretty crap and I only managed to get this position as the previous I.T. support guy left between my two interviews for an unrelated position - they needed someone in the meantime so took me on as junior tech support. Luckily for me, the guy who had already been offered the position left before his probation was up and I got promoted

By November this year I'll have had two years' enterprise experience under my belt and want to go elsewhere or do something different as I feel like my people skills and adorable shyness could be better used doing something else.

Ideally I'd like to teach I.T., either as a school teacher or training adults, but I expect my knowledge is nowhere near extensive enough(although people tell me I'm very good at teaching difficult concepts). If not that, then something awesome like computer forensics!

Problem is, servers and stuff bore me. I.T. in general bores me when I think about it(and when I'm looking at IT qualifications), but when I'm actually at work and have a difficult task in front of me then I love the pressure and the feeling of satisfaction when I manage to solve it.

I'm trying to figure out what sorts of qualifications I'd like to get and am looking for some advice. So far I've been eyeing up the MCITP Windows 7 Enterprise Support exams(despite our company only having ten Windows 7 workstations - the rest are XP) and I'm wondering whether to get into the juicy server stuff or not. I recently set up a VM on my Mac Mini at home running W2008 R2 trial and created my own little domain(called Skynet!) using a guide in PC Pro Magazine which was fun but then I stopped fiddling after a while.

Sorry for the wordy post!

[smouty]

I think the best thing to do would be an ITIL course. It isn't of any use on its own but as a framework for working practices is invaluable.
It will help you progress from the guy doing the job to strategist and how to improve any aspect of your IT infrastructure.
You have already made the right choices in documentation etc so it sounds like there isn't too much firefighting.