Working as an IT

i prefer networking myself, I know help desk jobs can range anywhere $25,000-$40,000 a year. Network Admins can make just about anything really, Anywhere from $40,000-$250,000+.

 

Network admin here ("junior" network admin, although my official title is "IT Specialist", it was written by an HR person, not the IT guy).

And you know what's funny? I have no certifications... at all. If you know your shit from working with it all your life, it's almost as good as gold to get that internship opportunity to show the senior IT admin that you know your stuff. I have my AAS in Information Technology, and that was how I got the internship (which turned into my current $13/hr job).

I suggest:
- learn Microsoft Exchange. Even if you don't like it, the company you go into will likely have been set up by "best practices" and "industry standards", and Exchange is industry standard, no matter how crappy and often-broken it may be.
- learn TCP/IP routing. The basics of subnetting (255.255.255.0 or 192.168.4.0/24 should mean something to you) are important. Routing itself - that is, how one Cisco router is configured to pass things off to another Cisco router - isn't necessarily too important until you climb up to senior status (and have access to those devices).
- Play around with Windows Active Directory - that is, domain management and computer/user enrollment. Group policies are a fucking amazingly powerful way to make sure ALL the computers in the office are set up with certain options you configure. You only have to set the options you want, everything un-set will behave like a normal computer. Yeah, Active Directory can be a convoluted bitch, but it's definitely industry standard and it's designed to support anything from a small 10-user office, to a 2,500+ employee multi-location company.

Once you've practiced those things, look around for IT admin positions and see if they'd be interested in you working for an internship (for free) to demonstrate your skills. They might just hire you.

Also, I've taken the certification practice exams. I found errors in them. Enough said.

 

I own and operate a software development company (mostly web but branching into game development) and the money can be very very good.

The most ever I charged was $150/hour but that was for a very specialized consulting project. The usual rate I get is between $20-$100/hour depending on the job and the finances of the client (yes if you can pay more I charge more).

If you do stuff independently like me the money can be amazing, however work is not guaranteed and sometimes it gets quite slow. A regular job pays less but is guaranteed income.

Creativity and a unique ability to troubleshoot are the best talents that lead to more money in IT. If you can get shit done faster, that means people will push more work your way cuz it costs them less to work with you rather than a slower dev/support. You'll make more money that way in the long run too cuz you'll get more repeat business and because you offer premium output, you can charge a premium rate.

My advice, start doing real jobs for real money ASAP - degrees and certs are not important if you know your shit - my first paid IT job was when I was 14 years old.

Also delve into programming. Any serious Admin knows how to do shell scripting. Do side projects and read books about programming and do the practice projects. Hell if you think you're up to it, take a project on you have no idea about. Thinking on your feet / adaptability is the most important trait of a good dev/support. My first several jobs I had no idea about the programming language they required, I picked it up on the fly.

 

Your a clever dude, i see your posts in this section and think you would be a good person to smoke with

Anyway, you make a valid point about learning tcp/ip and the different classes of IP adresses but OP if you arnt going to get into a job until the summer i would suggest learning ipv6 as ipv4 (the current standard) is going to run out of adresses by the summer (estimate) So if i was you i would learn as much as you can about ipv6.

Certs certainly don't mean shit. I have A+ and all that is really is basic knowledge, when i started my job as a it hardware engineer i found that no matter how much education you have nothing can touch on real life experience. I thought i had a good leg to stand on, had a passion for computers and electronics since i was little but there is SO MUCH to learn that you wont pick up until you are working in the field.

Help desk isnt really the thing i would go for as it's just answering the phone to pissed of people (IMO) so i managed to skip that and go straight into IT support <<The place you want to be.

Whatever you chose OP IT is a good thing to get into, the money is good and it's nice to work with people that share the same passion you do. It's also nice to share your knowledge with helpless end users as you feel like you are really helping them.

Apply for as much as you can and sell your self in the interviews, tell them your passion for IT and no matter how experienced you are employers will always want someone who is going to have passion and learn quickly.

Good luck OP, smoke a joint and apply for some jobs

 

Meh, actually I hate working in IT, but it's probably because I live in a city where I'm at the top of the IT "food chain"... I really only know a small handful of people that even know what "TCP/IP" refers to (I'm talking maybe 5 or 6 people I know), and even among those I'm usually left cleaning up after all but 2 of them; those two guys are pretty cool but we're pretty much on par with each other. So it's lonely not having anyone to ask for help for most things, except Google. That just gets frustrating sometimes. :/

I'd much rather be working in aviation. Now that's some job satisfaction. The money might not be great (actually, pay in aviation is shit), but at least it's fulfilling...

 

See Falcon, I went to school with teachers that I could talk to. Right across the Street is Cisco Systems US HQ here in Indy. The place that I work at now, my boss has like 40 certs, over 20 years in the business. And he really only comes in like 3-4 days a week. lucky SOB

 

glad i found this thread, good information
i want to get into the IT field also

 

What do you have to learn to make a career out of this?

 

Learn how to learn, that's pretty much all you can do. If you just fill your head with bullshit facts and figures of networking and computers, you'll fail miserably.

 

They just did.

Ipv6 is just more characters.

If you want to program, start doing it.

 

Easier said than done. lol. I gave up on the programing in anything other than SQL.

 

I find most of my use in "for" statements, like so:

for %X in (*.avi) do handbrake ... -i "%X" -o "..\processed\%~nX.mkv"
(very simplified statement, obvs handbrake needs more than just -i and -o)

Step by step...
for %X <-- this specifies the variable to be used. It actually needs to read "%" to the "for" statement, so if you're using a batch file, you'd need to escape it with "%%". "X" is uppercase because the later "modifiers" (read on) use lowercase letters as their parameters, so I use uppercase to avoid confusion.
in (*.avi) <-- this specifies what the "for" should work with - that is, all "AVI" files in the current folder. Being the current folder, "%X" will only contain the full filename of each entry, not the path. If you use, for example, "in (C:\Users\Public\Videos\*.avi)", your %X will contain "C:\Users\Public\Videos\" before each filename. That can sometimes cause problems, so it's often a good idea to be in the working folder, and use relative paths.
do <-- End of the "for" parameters, everything after that is what will be run for each one.
handbrake ... -i "%X" <-- Runs the "handbrake" command (with various other parameters omitted by "...") using "%X" as the input, which will be the name of each file found by the "for" statement.
-o "..\processed\%~nX.mkv" <-- Now this is a little more complicated. This is using cmd's ability to "break down" parts of a path in a variable. Using "~", you can get the drive (d), folder path (p), or base file name without extension(n), out of a file name in a variable such as "%X". So here I'm extracting the file's name and changing the extension to "mkv" (instead of avi) in the output. And, having it put the file in the "processed" folder, up one level from the current folder (".."). So, if I'm working in a folder called "queue" with a folder called "processed" next to it, it'll tell Handbrake to give it an "mkv" extension and put it in the "processed" folder. Neat trick.

There are many more advanced things you can do with "for", like stringing together multiple commands using parenthesis:
for %X in (*.avi) do (
echo Processing %X
copy "%X" "..\foo\%X"
)
...and that will run both those commands from the same "for" statement. You can also work with numbers to do a network scan:
for /l %X in (1,1,128) do ping 192.168.1.%X -w 200 -n 1
...which will ping each address from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.128, time out after 200ms (LAN addresses usually reply within 10ms, if it's offline, why waste the time), and only ping it once. You can watch it as it pings and Ctrl+C when you see one that replies
"for /l" - means to use numbers in parenthesis instead of files (read on)
"(1,1,128)" - means start at 1, step in increments of 1, and stop at 128. You can also reverse this, e.g. "(128,-1,1)", which would start at 128 and count backwards to 1.

Yeah, "for" is pretty powerful, and probably one of the most-used functions in scripting. Do "for /?" to learn more about it. Hell, you can usually do "/?" on any command you see to learn more about it too

 

Most places won't hire an individual with no experience or over-qualifying education for an admin position. Try helpdesk work, that is your best bet.

 

you need to know how to script. That and know how to use linux, Most servers run some form of linux. IF you can use linux and understand how UNIX based system works. you will be fine, not that it is hard, but it is a change, knowing the difference between them is important.

 

I'm doing a year out of uni to work for a software dev company atm and I know its going to help my career possibly more then my degree will, as its a small company and all the it staff quit (all two of them) just before I arrived. So I had to learn a lot to get going(how there network works, what there servers doing, what services are running...etc). Even though its hell it will look great on a CV.

If you have trouble with programming I suggest you install python and pyscripter and have a look at project euler to give you some simple problems that you can solve in python (I think Python is possibly the easiest language to learn).

Oh and listen to FlaconFour he knows much more then me

 

I've always wanted to work in IT. I think working at a computer repair store will teach me much more than what uni is and give me some hands on experience in the process. I just hope this interview goes through tomorrow.