I am in the process of looking for a job at the moment and this has brought into focus the skills that I may need to further my career. I am looking for a job in IT, but I have only had limited experience working in this field (less than 1 year) and do not have much in the way of qualifications. This could be a problem, one that I wish to rectify.
To this end, I have been looking for courses that I could take. I have looked at websites for online places and some schools/colleges etc.
I would like people’s opinions on the different options. Which is better, online or distance learning, or learning in a classroom? Are “boot camps” which claim to teach things like CCNA in 2 weeks any good? Is this even possible?
If any IT professionals could tell me which courses/schools/online places they would recommend (either through personal experience or through having worked with people who studied that way) that would be a great help.
My background is that I worked for a bank in their disaster recovery department, monitoring the backups and resolving any problems with them or the offsite tape copies. I was the first line support. Any serious problems were escalated to second level support areas. I have worked with NT4 and use Win 98 at home. I have completed a Win NT admin course, but everything else was learned on the job.
I’m in a quandary about what to learn. Any opinions would be greatly appreciated.
Rick
Well, I’ll just tackle the on-line vs. physical classes aspect, and let those ‘out in the real world’ give their views on the rest.
Advantages to on-line courses:
*Do 'em when you want. 2 in the morning? No problem. While munching on chips and dip? Go right ahead!
*Go (mostly) at your own pace. (Within the limitations of deadlines, of course.)
*No sitting around in a classroom, counting ceiling tiles because you’re bored to death.
*Interaction with clueless classmates is kept (normally) to a minimum.
*As long as you have access to the 'net, you can do the class while you’re on vacation and not have to worry about making up tests, etc.
Disadvantages to on-line courses:
*You need to be really good about keeping up with the course. It’s very easy to forget and fall behind without having the stimulus of showing up at class X times a week.
*Usually no direct (as in face-to-face) teacher-student contact.
*Not much in the way of spur-of-the-moment really great classoom discussions/debates.etc.
*Usually no direct (again: face-to-face) contact with your fellow classmates (which may not be a bad thing…), so no asking the guy next to you if you can borrow their notes from last week.
*Lag time. If you e-mail a question the day before a big test is due, you may not get a response back in enough time to do any good.
Distance courses have much of the same advantages/disadvantages as on-line courses do.
Keep in mind that these advantages/disadvantages may vary depending on the setup of the course: one instructor may have a weekly manditory chat session, for instance, while another may just say ‘as long as everything is turned in by X date, turn things in whenever you want’. Also, a lot depends on your learning style. Generally, those who learn better by reading (or watching as the case may be) tend to do well in an on-line course, from my experience. Those who want/need personal teacher-student-classmate interaction don’t do as well, because you’re lacking the dynamics present in a classroom situation.
I’m sure I’ve forgotten some of the +/-'s (taken 6 on-line courses myself, so it’s gotten to the point where a lot of this is now second nature to me), but I hope this helps!
At this point I would suggest classroom based. There are a lot of IT people sending out a lot of resumes right now, and most of them are getting ignored. The jobs that are being gotten are happening because somebody knows somebody who knew about the job and knew the hiring manager. So getting to know as many people in the field as possible is a major help in getting a job.
Look at what you can do yourself, also. Do you have access to Unix/Linux? Big IT shops run on Unix and some basic familiarity can go a long way. Can you get exposure to a database? (Not MS Access, a real db.) Learning some basic SQL and how to do dumps and loads expands your reach tremendously. Networking knowledge is always a good thing - do you know what the basic components are of your network and what they do?
Realistically, you’re looking for an entry into IT, so exposure to a variety of things will help as much or more than classes. The more skills I see, the more likely I am to give you a call about something. And if you represent yourself honestly as an entry level candidate with a basic comfort level with the stuff in my environment - that’s good enough. I’m always looking for people that I can pair with the gurus so they can off-load their day-to-day stuff and start doing something more exciting. But I don’t want to train them on the operating system - I want to train them on the job skills.
Here’s why classroom knowledge sometimes cuts less weight with me: I interview a lot of developers who want to show me the web site they put together in their Java class where they learned to make colored balls bounce around the page. Very nice. Can you connect to a db backend? Very few of my customers are looking for bouncing balls, but I have a lot of demand for data-driven applications.
With network folk I get a lot of well educated people with strong opinions about what the best network design is according to their class. Great, but I’m not changing my network design right now. Can you trouble-shoot routers? Can you tune the load-balancing of my web servers?
My best general advice would be to think of employers as customers. Find out what they need, learn what you think would make you most marketable to them, and then sell yourself to them based on the fact that you can do what they need done.
Which forces me to add that the biggest turn-off in potential employees are the ones who tell me that I’m sure lucky they came along because everything I’ve done so far sucks and I need them to fix it. This is not what I mean by “what they need done!”
I am nearing completion of an assoc in CS/programming. Just my opinions and a couple observations:
Online/distance learning is eternally considered second or third-rate. There is a presumption by employers that it is not held to as high an acedemic standard as a typical classroom setting. Not that typical classroom settings can’t be pretty sad, but at least a classroom course proves that you can show up on time.
The couple people I know of who’ve taken “boot camps” (bachelor’s in 14 months) got screwed. They paid a bunch of money ($10,000+) and neither seemed to have gotten an education you couldn’t match by reading a couple programming magazines a month for a year. And it shows: they’re both intelligent enough people normally, but when I’d start talking about assignments and how to code this-or-that, they’re constantly saying “we never did that”, “we never did that”, “we never did that”. Where I spent eight months on Java programming, they spend one month on it.
The vertification programs I can’t speak of either way, except that they’re usually very-not-cheap also.
Getting hired the first time isn’t that easy anymore, if it ever was. Most ads want extensive experience in the software and hardware that they run as well as an advanced degree, and starting out you have neither. Most places want someone with experience, even for a starter position. Having none, I took my resumes down because they were rarely getting searched or viewed. I have an internship during my last semester that I am mostly pinning my hopes on, either as some form of extended/perm or at least as experience. - DougC