What should I learn? Please advise,

[paulcan69]

I hate the motor trade and I'm only in it due to a love of cars (more years ago than currently) and the only job which came along at the time when I left home and needed dollars.

Now, want to break away, but have bills to pay, not wanting to lose our house (mortgage) I need to slowly learn something, no option to live at Mum and Dad's and get the government to pay for it (+ my old folks do not need to hear me and the Mrs "at it" or smell my 4am "fry up's" after a couple of beers now and then)

I wish to break away from the motor trade totally to go into I.T and need the advice of you guys as most of you are in some way involved in the I.T world and earn sh*t loads of money.

Before you all shout "I'm skint" I guarantee more money passes through your hands per year than it does mine, I promise!

I know I can do it, if I put my mind to it, it's in there, I do seem to be the undercover I.T guy at work, who's quicker to use as they don't have to log a call with a call centre then wait 3 days for action, so they come to me. (Which my boss loves

)

I will never be a programmer as I feel you do not 'learn' programming, you either can or can't do it, it's not for me...I can't handle that much math.

Lastly I was talking to the main I.T for our dealership and he listened to what I said and told me to get my Cisco ccnp as he said there's some money in that and there always will be the need for networking!

How do guys feel about that?

What would your advice be to me?

Please tell me your true thoughts and/or ask me any questions.

Many thanks for any advice I may recieve.

 

[guddler]

Well, quickly, since I'm up fixing support issues at nearly 2am, following a stint at 4:15am yesterday.

• Take serious note of the above. It's far from all rosy. Just ask Tim. Unlike Tim, I, like a HUGE amount of the IT industry am on straight salary and so don't get a penny more for times like these.
• I'm a programmer and have been for 20 years now. Well, actually, I'm not any more I'm a "Software Development Manager", but I have been a programmer. My maths is appalling so that's not a reason to not go for that side of it if you fancy it.
• Finally, it absolutely shouldn't be about the money. And it sound like it is for you, so I'd say that's wrong for starters. I'd trade this life for a simpler and cheaper one in an instant if I could but I've got myself in a situation that means I can't.

Just a few, potentially unhelpful words of wisdom.

 

[DanP]

Hi Paul, wow that's a lot to answer. Firstly yes from meeting you in person I'd say you definatley could work in IT no problem. Programming is relativley easy, easier than it used to be because you don't need to understand hardware or really worry about things like CPU and memory contraints too much anymore. You don't need to understand complex mathematics to program, you just need a logical and ordered approach and to learn the top 30 things you need to know to get up and running in any language. These days with the advent of the Internet and Google it's even easier, there's usually many examples available on google for anything programatically you'd would want to do.

Personally I would steer clear of networking, only because I find it mind bendingly tedious in the deep down level. I know enough to connect things together and to pinpoint when an issue is caused by a network latency issue and that's all I need to know

It's difficult to advise you where to start because I don't know how much you need to earn to eclipse your motor trade salary. Basic things are;

1) You will earn more working in London, but obviously this adds the whole commuting pain to the equation.

2) You will probably earn more working as a contractor/consultant than a permanent employee but you sacrifice a level of certainty (i.e you can be let go at any time) and will have to run yourself as a limited company (which takes some time). Knowing roughly where you live there are some jobs available in Colchester, Chelmsford, and Ipswitch (and Norwich if you can take the commute) but they will probably pay 50% of what you can get in London.

3) IMO At the start of your IT career you should be prepared to move jobs fairly often in the first few years to bump your salary up. Obviously only move jobs when you have another in the bag.

4) As Gudd points out, sometimes the hours are either long or irregular (I had to work 24hr shifts for a few years), and you can find yourself on 24hr call out depending on what you choose to do.

Before embarking on IT as a career you should try if possible to get some sort of certification in whatever field you choose. It will open doors and get you in somewhere. Once you've got a year or two behind you in a real job it's the real experience that will probably count.

Final word of warning, there is a move to oursource a lot of UK IT out to India/China/etc at the moment, it's too soon to tell if this will get better or worse as frankly the quality of outsourced IT is dire, so hopefully this trend will reverse or at least slow. That said you should be prepared for the odd redundancy during your career.

Here's my summary of the types of career you can look at to start in;

1) OS System Admin/Operator (either UNIX or Window)

2) Product System Admin, examples are Exchange Admin, Database Admininstrator, Web Admin, Application Server Admin. All would need the right certs.

3) Help Desk, not well paid but usually easier to get into

4) Project Management, you'd need to appropriate certs (Prince/Prince2), but the skills are transferable outside IT

5) Network Admin/Specialist

6) Web Designer (if you have a flair for that - which I don't)

Hope that's useful - good luck!

Dan

 

[G-man]

[]
G-man2011-08-07 22:01:53

 

[paulcan69]

Thanks for the honest responces, just what I was looking for and I thank you for that.

This kind of info is gold, and although people will tell you if you ask, you can't just google this type of thing.

If I was a manager of a huge company I would go down to floor level and ask the people in the thick of it "Why doesn't this work, and what would you do to fix it and why?"

You get much more of an idea of what's going on instead of going to a managers meeting where they talk cr*p about things they know nothing of.