How do I get back into IT? (long)

In My Humble Opinion
1

I am an ex Cobol programmer. I was laid off about 6 years ago, at what apparently was a really bad time to be laid off. I spent a little over 2 years looking for work and couldn’t find shit. Towards the end of this I was applying for secretarial jobs, clerical jobs, any type of low paying office work I could think of. I couldn’t find anything, and gave up. I thought about going back to school but didn’t right away due to a bunch of drama I don’t really want to go into right now.

Fast forwarding to '06 and 07, I took some programming classes at a community college and got a certificate in Web Design.  Why? Well, it covered a lot of ground, Java, Visual Basic, various other low level classes, and I figured I'd get one of the advanced certificates.  I finished the cert and started on the classes for a second when they discontinued the cert.  I started looking for work, but with no experience it was tough.  I was getting a lot of inquiries about my Cobol background though.

So, after going through some severe depression towards the end of 07, I decided after Christmas to try to resume my mainframe career. Most of the interest I had from recruiters was in my former programming experience, and I was positive I could still do it. I did it for 8 years and knew it inside and out, plus it was an old language that never had a lot of revisions. I just needed one company to take a chance. I was willing to start at the bottom, confident that once I got a chance I’d work my way back up. I had a lot of prior experience, so I starting sending out resumes. Every call or email was from contractors, who saw my resume on one of the job sites. There were a lot of emails and phone calls. I had to meet with some of the contractors, but I didn’t get to meet any potential employees. I tried asking some of the recruiters for advice, and was told to just keep plugging away. So I did, but I didn’t get anywhere. I was looking up positions on job sites and talking to a ton of contracting companies. There were a lot of postions out there, so I was hoping to at least get someone to bring me in for an interview and try to sell myself as experienced, reliable, knowledgable, and willing to work for peanuts. No Dice. I got a few nibbles, and a lot of outright refusals. I kept asking the contractor’s recruiters for advice and got nothing useful.

There is an organization I’m working with that helps people find work, but the caseworker deals almost exclusively with low level jobs and hasn’t been much help. She did get me in touch with a recruiter (Bob) who has a similar position at an organization that works with blind people. This guy has been trying to get more information as to why I’m not getting results. He has recently talked to a couple of recruiters from different contracting companies. The situation is basically that there’s a lot of qualified Cobol programmers out there with current, or at least more recent, experience. He said companies don’t really care that I’m willing to work cheap, they just want the work done and would rather hire experienced people. What makes the situation worse is most of the jobs seem to go through contracting companies. When I was programming, I got all of my jobs except one starting out as a contractor, then going direct after a while. Contractors don’t really have an incentive to push me more than anyone else, they just send out big batches of resumes and call the people the company wants to talk to. I don’t really have a lot of connections, so I don’t have any way to get my foot in the door. I’ve explored trying to get a company to give me an internship, where I’d work for free or min wage for a few months, but was flat out refused.
Last week I met with Bob again and he told me there’s pretty much no chance that I’m going to get back into mainframe programming. All of the information he’s gathered from everyone he’s talked to points in that direction. Which is consistent with my experiences so far. He said I should “think about what direction I want to go in”.
That’s my story in a nutshell. There’s a lot more details, but I wanted to get the gist of it down. I’m not sure what to do at this point. I’m working in retail hell, trying to scrape together enough cash for a shitty car to replace my last shitty car. Bob said if I get a degree in Computer Science I should definitely be able to get a job, but I really can’t afford to go back to school. I know there’s financial aid and loans, but I can’t afford the time either. I turn 40 next year, and the thought of 2-3 more years in school fills me with dread.
I have back problems dating back to when I spent a couple years moving furniture in my early 20’s. I can’t really do any type of heavy labor or lifting. I am fairly intelligent but am not a people person. I’ve put together a few computers and know a lot about PC hardware and software. And not that community college is the gold standard in education, but I did pretty well in the computer classes I took there. I’d really like to get some type of technical/IT job as soon as possible. I’m pretty much at the bottom right now, so anything would be an improvement. I wouldn’t mind if it took me a good while to get anything close to what I was making before I was laid off.
I am trying to figure out a path to follow that will lead me back into an IT career. I can work with hardware, software, programming, pretty much anything. I don’t really like dealing with network admin stuff though. I took a Networking class that we all wound up calling “Acronym Hell”. I seriously wonder why network admins don’t top the suicide rate by profession charts. I do really like programming, and enjoyed the Object Oriented programming classes I took (Java, VB, Relational Databases).

Ok this is getting too long, so I’m going to wrap it up. I don’t really want to spend years in school but I don’t seem to have any marketable skills. I need some advice. What are my best options? Some things I’ve thought about doing are trying to get any crappy job at a big company company (print room, etc), and look for opportunities. These jobs seem to be pretty much in the “you need to know someone” category though, and I don’t really know anyone.
I’ve heard about certifications (Microsoft certs? What other ones are there?). Where can I get more information about these? Can you get jobs with just the certs? The impression I got is you pay a fee of a couple hundred dollars or more and take some type of test or exam. Are there full classes for these, or do you just take the cert? One idea I had was get hardware certifications and try to get a job building/fixing PC’s. I do quite enjoy working on my computers, and wouldn’t mind doing this for a living. There seem to be quite a few small little computer places around here too, so I could possibly have work out here in the 'burbs without having to drive to the city every day. Maybe open my own at some point.
I have some financial knowledge from my Cobol days and programming for banks and other financial companies, but I don’t have any classes or non-programming experience in that area. I don’t think I could be a bank teller or anything like that. I was tested by a temp agency for data entry, my scores were on the low end but passable. But I couldn’t do data entry for a living, the sheer mind numbing carpal tunnel monotony of it would drive me insane after, oh, about an hour.

Any ideas? If you’d like more information on what experience or knowledge I have, feel free to ask. Serious responses please, I’m looking for some advice on what career path to choose, and how to get there. I don’t want to get sidetracked on things I could have done or other meaningless BS. I’m trying to get my life back together and get some type of halfway decent income going here. I feel like I basically wasted the last 3-4 years, but I don’t know what else to do. I’m willing to move, but I’d have to have a job waiting for me, I can’t afford to move somewhere to look for work there. I am in the Pittsburgh area btw.

2

I do not directly hire candidates, but I do interview and submit written opinions that weigh heavily on the hiring decision for a Fortune 100 company (for IT positions).

That said, you have no skills that would get you past the first round with us unless you had a contact inside the company. COBOL is still maintained, but it is a widely known language and no one is hunting for that skill. PC repair is rapidly becoming a dead skill as well. The ‘mom and pop’ stores in medium to larger towns cannot compete with the ad budgets of Geek Squad and their ilk, nor do they usually have enough income from that department to pay a career wage (not that Geek Squad / Firedog does either). Even at my company, we increasingly retire equipment rather than repair, since the replacement cost is failing to be equal with the repair cost.

I hope that wasn’t too gloomy; I was just trying to explain why those skills aren’t overly valuable.

Programming skills that are valuable - Java, .NET, almost any flavor of C, and almost any web development suite (enterprise level, not talking free web apps). HTML is simply expected, ASP / PHP / Perl a bonus. Web graphic design is usually in demand, but it takes time to build a decent portfolio. Most new hires do that while in college (senior projects and what-not) so there is a strong barrier to entry for the self taught.

Non programming IT skills that cannot be outsourced - information security and its attendant specialties, network ops, database management and software maintenance / distribution (electronic, enterprise methods, not CD / DVD loading). Any of those areas seem to provide stable, long term career paths and don’t currently seem overly vulnerable to outsourcing, or at least less than direct support or break-fix roles.

If I were in your shoes (and I read the lack of people skills to mean you would fail at management) I would most likely pick either databases (an SQL variant) and bust my chops getting those certifications and classes done, or an information security path and do the same. The generic Microsoft certifications aren’t going to be worth your time or money. Assuming you live in or near a decent sized city, there should be many places that offer everything from one week to six month classes, then give the tests at the end. In both the database and security fields, vendor certs are very valuable and usually appropriately difficult to acquire.

Good luck!

n.b. - This, of course, reflects the culture at large companies. Smaller companies are more likely to be “wowed” by a pile of certifications and have less rigorous screenings, and sole proprietors often hire based on gut feelings so all rules are off.

3

The problem is that most devices have become so user friendly. Ten to fifteen years ago, I would take a highly trained technician to install/maintain a network. Hardware repair was important as those components were expensive.

Now, any idiot can set up a wireless network and if your PC breaks, you throw it away and buy a new one if it’s out of warranty.

IT is nothing like it was ten years ago. WAN architecture and IT Security are still big things and growing. Obviously sense you have a background, it would give you a boost and help you learn things faster than you might otherwise, but you do have a long way to go.

Best of luck…

4

And complete lack of people skills is as much a killer as no technical skills. The days are gone where your only choice in Unix guys was the one that didn’t bathe and made Star Trek jokes while assuming that the corporation had endless piles of money to feed his pet projects. I don’t have time to baby a team (I’m an IT project manager) through ‘we can’t get along’ and ‘we don’t understand the business needs’ - not when there are people out there that CAN get along and actually understand the concept of ROI.

5

I’m going to go in different direction and say that your self diagnosed failure to thrive occupationally is not due to a lack of credentials, but that you have defined yourself as “not a people person”. This usually means “leave me alone” and/or “I can’t handle myself socially”.

This IMO is what you need to focus on and 40 (I’m 51) is not too old to get up off your duff and dedicate yourself to being more clued in and socially aware, even if you have to use to acting skills to get by. Unless you have mad technical skillz (and it doesn’t appear that way) it is going to be extraordinarily difficult to achieve anything meaningful occupationally given your age and educational background unless you can learn how to get along and manage (even to a limited degree) other people.

I would suggest attending a local Dale Carnegie class. It would time and money well invested.

Failing that (and this is not a recommendation but simply an observation) what a number of desperate people do in your circumstances where they have out of date credentials and or experience is simply to lie about current experience and take their chances, and once they have gotten the first or second job completed drop the fake stuff off. The risk here is not so much that you will be found out by random background checks, but that you will not be able to perform to expectations and then they will check your credentials at which point you may become utterly unemployable via contractors.

6

I agree with what other people have said. In addition, find a local Java/C/Ruby Users Group and attend. If you can’t find a job to give you experience, find an open source project and contribute. Axis or Spring would be great to have on a resume. It’s not going to be easy without a degree or immediately relevant experience. Best of luck.

7

It’s not a “complete lack of people skills”. I was just trying to indicate that I feel much more comfortable in technical roles. I could see myself doing a lower level management position (leading a team), but not as a middle/upper level manager. However, I do have some fairly serious hearing issues, which is difficult for some people to handle. Although I think I am fairly intelligent, I’ve been told by a couple people that the way I talk, does not always make the best impression. Exact quote “sometimes you sound like you’re retarded”. Unfortunately there’s not really much I can do about it. It’s an 80% loss in the left ear, 50% in the right.

Well, the classes that I took at the community college were along these lines: I did very well in Java, Advanced Java, and Visual Basic. HTML was a little bit more difficult for me, just getting stuff to line up right on a page was a huge pain in the ass for me. I took Relational Database Management, which used MS Access and SQL, and did fairly well there. Some of my classes (VB) had a little of the .net, enough that I think I could handle an entry level position. Also took Digital Graphics (Adobe Illustrator), which I got decent marks on. The Networking class I hated with a passion. Too many acronyms and too much jargon. I understand that any actual networking job would only use a fraction of the available technology, and the class has to cover as much ground as possible, but I don’t think I could do something like Network Administrator. I have done some volunteer work for an organization for the blind. This mostly involved setting up hardware and software, upgrading and troubleshooting PC’s. It was ok, but there’s very little chance of getting a paying job with them, as they’re facing some severe budget issues. When I was doing my job search, I focused almost exclusively on mainframe stuff, as I had experience and felt I could still do it. Maybe I should have tried to focus more on html/java/vb skills, but I wasn’t getting a lot of interest in that area.

The issues are mostly related to my hearing. I will say that doing low paying retail jobs and working with customers every day has improved my people skills a lot, and I am much better at dealing with people now than I was when I got laid off. I would still rather deal with hardware or software than sit in meetings, but I don’t think I’d describe myself as having no people skills.

Some other things from my background:
I do have the ability to learn complicated things very quickly. At one of my programming positions, I was asked “Do you know CSP? No? Here.” <handed me a 4 inch binder> “Learn CSP. Write these programs.” <Handed me a stack of program specs> “See you in a couple months!”. The clients were very hostile to us (they were ordered by a court to revise their billing system, long story), and provided almost no help. I learned enough CSP to write the programs, and got the job done. Object oriented programming is a bit of a tough concept for some people to grasp, especially if you’re used to procedure oriented languages like me, but I didn’t have any trouble at all with Java and VB, and often would help some of the slower students out.
I can survive, even thrive, in high pressure situations. The last couple Cobol positions I had involved heavy production support. Which meant that I’d get at least one middle of the night phone call from systems about jobs that went down and HAD to be fixed by 6:30-7am. I never failed to have the system up and running by morning, and often helped out other people on the team when they were on call.
I am pretty good at documenting and explaining things to other people, whether they have technical knowledge or not. I’ve put together “tip sheets” for the mainframe. At first they were just for my own use, just a way of remembering shortcuts or easier or better ways to do things. Then they started to get passed around to other people on my team, then went bank wide. I ran into someone a few months back that told me he still uses them.

I’ve tried applying for the Geek Squad, it would at least be a step up from where I’m at now. I was told all of the positions require at least one certification.

I do have training in Relational Database Management (SQL, MS Access). I wouldn’t mind going this route, I liked working with DB’s and SQL. Where do you get certifications for this? Are they taught by vendors? How can I find more information on this? Information Security would be interesting too, although I don’t really have a lot of knowledge or experience of this, and it sounds like something you would need to be on the absolute cutting edge of.

Thank you for the responses so far, you’ve given me something to think about and I will appreciate further comments or advice.

8

I’m most familiar with Microsoft certifications, but I’m sure other companies offer similar options.

Here’s the link to the certification exams related to SQL Server: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/cert-sql-server.aspx

As you can see, there are quite a few exams, so I would suggest that you read through the various options and see what seems the most likely. MS provides training courses and study material, and I’m sure you can find other providers who will run lab-based study programmes. The books typically come with evaluation versions of software, so you can install them and study at home as well.

Typically, for a DBA track, you’d start with the basic Implementation and Maintenance exam and then take it from there. I wouldn’t say that you have to be on the cutting edge to learn any of this, but it does assume a fair knowledge of database design, SQL and familiarity with Windows infrastructure.

9

Just to chip in with an alternative you may not have thought of.

Testing.

I got laid off as an Oracle developer (Pro*C, Forms, Reports, lots of SQL) which the development director termed “legacy skills”. I got taken back on (at the same company) as a tester for a Java development team. It turns out that testing now is not what it was a few years ago. Most of my time is spent writing or maintaining automated tests written in Java using a tool called Selenium***** rather than plodding through test scripts. I do write test scripts but other people do the plodding through bit. I sit and watch my tests run themselves.

I hope at some point to get back into programming, but probably not the Oracle stuff (the C was OK but Forms is no fun and Reports is a type of torture). The skills I’d need here would be Java (OK so far) and ::deep breath:: J2EE stuff, Spring, Hibernate and whatever they’ve written the UI in (Richfaces?) these are all utterly different to anything I’ve used in the Oracle world and I can’t say I understand how they all fit together even after a couple of months on the project.

I don’t plan to be a tester forever but being competant (nearly) in Java would not be suffcient to get me a development job here, I would need to know all the framework stuff too.

For testing interviews, do some research into Selenium and Fitnesse and make sure to use the term equivalence partition. Worked for me.

*** **Google it and skip the vitamin ads.

10

For the MS certs (link provided by someone else, above), look for training companies in your area that teach official MS curriculum. For example, the largest company that does this is New Horizons Computer Learning Center – there are other local and regional companies as well. You can take the courses and take the tests at their centers.

If you would rather go the Geek Squad route, look for the A+ classes and certs. New Horizons does these as well, but again, there are others, too.

11

I strongly disagree with the sentiments expressed above. It still takes a highly trained pro to **properly **install & maintain a network. The same with a complex IT system, telecomms setup and so on. In fact with the complexity of current systems it’s even more important to have properly trained and skilled professionals.

The misconception that IT and related fields have become more user friendly is almost solely responsible for the decreasing level of service on offer in most organisations (along with outsourcing but I’ll leave that for another post). IT’s not got any easier - just some of the software has been redesigned by somebody who understands the words “usability study”.

I’ve seen this over a long career. For example, the UI between consumer Windows and the server OSes is now quite similar. So we get people who’ve maybe built a few machines who are now applying for a large-scale server role. Yet scratch beneath the surface and they’re largely clueless.

User friendly UI is fine until you have a problem. Then your staff are lost as they can’t use GUI tools and need to actually understand the components of the system they are trouble-shooting.

Maybe the above is true for very small organisations, but it just doesn’t work like that in any reasonably sized organisations.

True. It’s much more complex. MPLS versus X.25? Windows 2008 Active Directory versus Windows NT4 domain? Vista desktop versus Windows 98?

Things are increasing in complexity all the time and I’m not sure there are many industry figures who would agree with your ideas.

With regard to the OP, I’d advise picking an area that a) you have interest in and b) shows up as a pretty popular skill on current recruitment sites. You will be competing against more people for the jobs, but you’re not stuck with a niche skill. Get all the “proof” of your skills that you can. A CV showing use of these skills is preferable, but in the absence of that go for certification. But pick something you are interested in as you’re going to have to live it day in day out for a long while. Initially whilst you up-skill and then longer term when it becomes your job.

Good luck!

12

One other thing: Volunteer. Lots of volunteer organizations need IT help – fix computers, set up a network, build/maintain a database or a web site. In the absence of NO current experience, volunteer work is better than nothing if it was a substantial project.

13

I can only speak from the IT Support side of things as I have limited experience with the computer programming world.

In general, with limited prior paid experience in IT Support, you would usually only qualify for an entry-level position as some kind of desktop support technician. People looking for these types of jobs typically do volunteer or internship work supporting small user bases for a year or two. Either that or they have some equivalent support experience at college help desks or in the military. IT Support Certifications (A+, Microsoft Certs, etc…) are useful for getting your resume past HR at the larger companies, but are of somewhat limited value when applying for jobs at smaller companies. In any case, come time for the interview, it’s your recent prior work experience that will count.

Regarding your people skills, entry-level IT support involves a lot of end-user interaction. The more senior folks certainly don’t want to spend half an hour on the phone explaining to the user why he isn’t allowed to email his 50MB kitten AVI. This may be a problem if you’re not good at maintaining a pleasant attitude and keeping the end-user relatively calm while explaining, for the fourth time, that he needs to turn off his Caps Lock before he enters his password. But you have retail experience so this may be a non-issue.

If you’re looking to get back into some kind of programming work from an IT support angle, you might consider building up your work experience through whatever means available, paid or not. Then, start off in the bottom rungs of IT support at some small-to-medium sized company, working your way up to systems administration/back-end support after a couple of years. I would try for positions supporting a user base of less than 100 (less than 150?) employees where there would be a very limited number of IT support personnel (maybe you’d be the only tech). Reason being, you want to be able to get your hands dirty with some stuff you might not be strictly qualified to handle based on your job classification at the time. In smaller companies, you wind up getting stuck with some of the higher-level work simply because there’s nobody else who is really qualified either. This involves a lot of take-home reading, but hey, that’s IT Support for you. If you pick the right company, you may wind up supporting things like web-based CRM applications and small back-end databases. After a year or two as a sysadmin, you’ll likely gain some scripting experience (VBScript, PERL, ASP, etc…) From there, you might be able to branch into web-app programming and Database Admin-type work, and you can then go from there.

If you’re trying to jump straight into programming work, like I said, I have limited experience with that side of things. But I will say I haven’t encountered any programmers at any companies of a reasonable size that didn’t either have some recent programming experience or a recent bachelor’s degree in CS. Well, late 90s excepted when some shops seemed to be hiring anybody with a pulse.

14

Can you do tech support?

If so, State & local government needs you.

And the benefits are wonderful.