My job now is a glorified Help Desk position.It’s more involved than resetting passwords, but it’s pretty dull. I Make 40k a year.
What area of IT or what certification would have the best opportunities from a tech school? I’m not concerned with my passion or anything like that. Where is money? Everybody and his brother has/had an MCSE for example. Should I learn Oracle? Unix? Where’s the $$ short term?
That’s a hard one; I know many people with no degrees or with 2 year degrees who make plenty of money, but most of them have been in the industry for a very long time.
Speaking out of my ass, I’d say that barring extreme luck, you’re more than likely looking at some sort of technician type job if you get the right certs- PC tech, help desk, lower-end network guy (setting up routers, etc…, not designing networks) Essentially technical grunt work, if you want to look at it like that. You might get a lower level DBA or developer job with some of the right certs and languages, but I’d say it’s kind of doubtful that you’d move into a project manager/software designer/network analyst type position, or even a BA type job without a 4 yr degree.
The problem is right now a lot of companies are really holding back on hiring IT people. They make due with low level paid clerks.
Part of it is outsourcing. I was outsourced out of a great job in 2003. They simply moved my job to India and hired a 9.00/hr college student to do my job part time. When something came up he just called the MIS guy in India who walked him through it.
It didn’t work out nearly as well as having me there, but it worked well enough and it save a LOT of money.
Ask yourself this, WHAT JOBS in the IT field cannot be outsourced. Those are the areas you want to get into.
Certifications are nice, but in the old days, experience was much better. No one would ever take a guy with year of experience over a guy with a certification.
Unfortunately now, with so many out of work you have people WITH certification and experience, so now you need both or your at the bottom of the list.
So first of all ask yourself
Then figure out where you want to go.
Now that you got this, the trick is find a job in a company you’d like to work for. Help desks are great way to get an “in” with the company. So if you want to work at Acme Corp, find a job at the help desk with Acme Corp then train for the IT job you want.
Once you get your training, when the job at the Acme Corp comes open, since you’re already there, you have an “in” with H/R.
IT is learning the lesson the rest of America will learn. Middle class jobs and upper level jobs with education will be outsourced. If it can it will.
A guy I play racketball with is an It with a masters degree in computer engineering. He is hoping he can hang on to his job long enough to get 30 years in and get his retirement and health insurance. He suffers every single cutback ,hoping he can hang in a little bit longer. he needs 2 years.
Depends on how broadly you define IT.
If you include anything tech related then sales by far makes the most money, but you have to be good.
If you are willing to travel - consultants for large applications (SAP, Oracle, etc.) - these roles typically require a mix of business and tech knowledge but are on-site - more difficult to outsource.
Most IT jobs that pay well require experience. Formal education and certifications, while useful, aren’t enough. If you’re looking to advance on the pay scale, I would say you’re best bet is to get to know your SysAdmins. Get involved in the work they do; offer to schlep a server around or install an OS during busy season. After you’ve built some rapport with the Admins, apply for a promotion/transfer as a SysAdmin. Once you’re working with the back-end systems day-to-day, it becomes much easier to try to transition into DBA work, Systems Design, App Admin, or what have you because you can actually touch the systems involved.
If you have proficiency with networking technologies and understand how the various protocols work, you could try to get involved with the Network Admins and the work they do. In this arena, earning something like a Cisco cert would probably be useful.
Data reporting/Business Analyst skills are usually useful to have. It also something you can break into from a Help Desk level if you have such folks on staff. There’s always a report template that needs formatting or a simple field that needs to be added, and you usually pick up some basic DB skills in the process if the source data is stored in a database (which it often is).
Bottom line, though, is to try to get involved in the actual hands-on work at higher levels in the chain.
My two year degree in Programming got my foot in the door (28K in 1987). It took years of experience before the degree became irrelevant. I moved to 70K a year in 1997 with only a 2-year degree and 10 years experience. Never had a cert in anything until 2008.
I’ll echo what Lanzy and Caldazar and some others have said: for the higher-paying jobs, experience is king. I have an advanced degree, but none of my degrees is in anything even remotely related to IT. The only thing gets me interviews and offers is my experience.
I’ve been doing what I do (database development, broadly) for 25 years, but got into it as an aside to my regular duties. As others have said, if you can wiggle your way into getting some experience while continuing in your current job, I think it is likely to help immensely - even if you don’t stay at your current location.
I don’t know what sort of money you are looking for. In many areas (such as Atlanta), experienced MS SQL Server developers/admins make $80K-$120K. Sometimes, industry experience rather than purely technical experience counts for a lot.
And I’ll echo it too. My story is similar to Lanzy’s with the exception that I didn’t even have a certificate. I taught myself to program when I was a kid, worked in a computer store in high school and a university computer lab in college, and had oodles of job offers in the early 90s. But back then, they were practically sending out mobsters to round up anyone who knew what a DOS prompt was and offering them jobs. (True story: I was working for the first time in my life at a “fun” job - at a wine store - but couldn’t make ends meet so took a part-time job doing keyboard entry at a place that did translations. Once the figured out that I knew what I was doing around computers, they offered me a full time job with benefits and all that. I called my parents crying, I wanted to keep working at the wine store but there was no way I could turn down the money & benefits. To this day I’m not sure I did the right thing. Yeah, I make a ton more money than I ever could slinging wine, but wine is still WAY more fun than computers.)
Here I am 20 years later, with 20 years of experience, and so far, no problems getting jobs, even living in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no high-tech around me. So my advice is: get your foot in the door. Learn stuff. Keep learning stuff. Don’t let your skill set age, keep picking up new technologies, keep doing good work so you have a chain of people who will give good references or hire you when you need a job.
I’m in a similar boat. Been doing low level IT and .net developer stuff + other non IT stuff for over 4 years now. I’m still going to school trying to get a degree in software engineering. Unfortunately I’ve flipped flopped so much on my major that It’s taking me years and will likely take a few more. Of course now I live in fear that no one will hire a 30 something with a BA and little experience over some hot shot in India who will get paid 1/4 of what I would here 
So I’m heeding any advice on this thread.
I had four years of college but never finished writing that last paper - in Art History. Systems Administrator -> Systems Engineer and Architect -> Project Manager. (I managed a group of IT consultants in there too.)
Get in. Be willing to do anything. Doing helpdesk stuff - offer to script something that needs a script. Offer to pull reports out of the helpdesk database. Learn how it works. Be open to new opportunities inside and out and be patient. It takes a LONG time.
I’ll echo just about everyone else - those I know in various IT positions that don’t have more than a 2 year degree or equivalent are there because of experience. The experience they got by being willing to learn about anything that came their way, and by offering help to the other IT folks around them. (Even if it was just doing ‘drudge work’ that freed up the more experienced people to concentrate on higher-priority things.) Unless you have a bit of good luck, be prepared for this to take a long time. And also expect it to take you in directions you hadn’t anticipated.
For Kinthalis, an area in IT that isn’t as prone to outsourcing (over seas that is) is security and auditing, even more so if you’re involved with government or military related businesses. Much easier to deal with the various legal aspects if everyone is in the same country. There is the possibility of the company cutting back this function (if they’ve been doing it in-house) and contracting it out, however.
(I took a very atypical route to get into what I’m doing, so I don’t think my experience will help much.)
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I’ll expand on “security and auditing” to say specializing in Data Security is very lucrative right now. So many companies really have no idea how exposed their data is, and data security folks, especially consultants, make a LOT of money doing this. If you can find your way into hanging out with those guys at work (they tend to e a close knit and secretive bunch where I work), you can do pretty well.
I’m skipping everyone else’s comments so as not to taint my opinion (or get it buried in someone’s taint). For your education (and presumed experience level, without knowing your experience level), CISA (Certified Information Systems Auditor) is a good start.
Bear in mind, I do security for big audit houses… so YMMV.
CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional)is attainable by anyone who’s willing to listen to a knowledgeable CISSP; same goes for CISM (Cert. Info Sys. Man. - I’m getting lazy on the acronyms).
Speaking of C’s - Cisco certified anything is very useful (more technically involved than the previous C’s which are ISC2 certs). But damned near every large company uses at least 30% Cisco hardware (and needs someone who knows IOS at the CLI and at the GUI - the first time I ran into the GUI, helping a firewall admin because I was “experienced” with Cisco products, I had to confess I didn’t know a damned thing). Thus ends the longest sentence I’ve ever written. And the most parentheses.
Also, as to organizations to seek out (in security, since that’s my area) ASIS is good for physical, ISACA is pretty good. And if you want to be a cool techie, get them to send you to the NSA schools on infosec. Prospective employers love that as much/more than they do the CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker).
Bottom line - think about what you want to do - a CBCP (Certified Bus. Continuity Mgr.) is something most folks can digest with a little bit of study. Start by getting a few letters after your name. Sadly, this is partly how it works (oooh - he’s a DR??? ahhhh - she’s a JD???)
No offense to the lawyers out there, but to me a JD is a glorified MA; and the MD is… well, my ex is one. And she ain’t all that smart - I taught her molec bio in undergrad (I was a Philosophy major - “bitch, balance the fucking equation!!!”). 