A few years ago there was a huge shortage in IT jobs. Now it seems as though it is completely different. There seems to be more people training in IT than there are job vancanies. Now, I'm currently doing an IT course at college and the amount of people on my course who believe they will finish college then automatically get a £30,000 a year job is unbelivible. Its very unlikely for graduates to get that sort of pay after 5 years of experience. Even though i'm currently doing IT, i'm definitely going to look for a career path away from IT. Though, the course i'm doing will definitely be useful as pretty much all jobs require some kind of computer qualification. Now heres a few questions for you all just for general interest. For those who work in the IT industry what kind of job did you start off with? How many years ago did you start, and with what qualifications? And also how has your career progressed? For those of you looking to get a career in IT what are your plans? university? modern apprenticeship?
Personally at the moment i'm looking towards Police Force or the Army. Good money and the pension scheme is excellent.
some family members i know just worked part time for a year or two in different jobs looking for a IT job they were studding for. this is the position im in soon but ive decided to take a gap year from uni sooo it dont mean sh*t if u have a degree coz it dont mean u will get a job. i think its a bit futile to study so hard then get nothing and all ur left with is debt.iam indian so this is what im pushed into coz our parents want us to do well but i really cant be arsed to follow other people who sat on their asses for a year or two looking for a job they were "supposed" to get rite after they left uni. i believe that education is not everything as ive seen many smart people with little or no commonsense. Spiral Architect i would go towards the Police,at least u wont get killed or be sent of to iraq or worse. myself im gonna apply for the police(scotland yard) as my mum(anti-terrorist dept) works there and so i would be able to start from the bottom an work up but also i like to do sum sort of management course as it might be handy.
I'm in my first job in IT right now. I don't get a paid a lot and I'm basically the office do-everything guy (everything from building PC's to Access programming to going to Tesco for coffee). I'm quite happy though, I get enough and the people there are great...although one day I am going to uni and I am going to get a qualification. You're right - there is no longer a shortage, and to be successful in I.T you have to be good. Be prepared to work hard, and start off in a job where pay is virtually non-existent.
i would like to get a job in IT.. but its kinda hard these days to get a decent job with out all these pieces of paper saying that u can do things..
I went to a small tech school for two years and got an associates degree. The whole time they were talking us up and telling us about how people are graduating and getting paid up to $70k for these networking jobs. That doesn't happen. While I was going to that school, I worked part time for those two years doing help desk stuff for Ruby Tuesday part time. Left there to come to Ohio, and have struggled to get jobs. I ended up going to a large engineering company and worked at the "help desk"(more like computer services call screener) for a little over a year. I've ended up at a decent position here though, doing Linux and Unix support. At least I like what I'm doing, still only making around $24k I think. I was getting to the point that I'd almost rather be homeless than work another day on a help desk.
Go for the police job, both my grandpa and dad were ( and still are) police men. My grandpa was the chief constable of derbyshire ( the top-man ) and hes no living a very good life on his pension. As for pay, my dad gets around £15/hr as a Sargeant(sp?) for a local police station, he works in the cells, no wandering the streets for him anymore. Its also intersting, i hear a fair few funny stories, but theres a lot of forms to fill in etc.
When I left school I asn't sure what I wanted to do for a job, so I ended up having a number of jobs all in retail. I then went to college and did a 1 year computer maintenace course & followed that with a 2 year electronics course. I ended up with a BTEC national diploma in electronics, & several part GNVQ qualifications etc etc. I couldn't afford to go to Uni, even though I was working 2 jobs so I just went full time with both jobs (one was in the evening). I ended up deciding that I'd go into IT and as I live near a large trading estate I drove around and wrote down the names of various companies that looked like they were IT related. I searched the internet for the companies web sites & sent them my CV with a covering letter asking if they had any suitable IT positions available. One of them got back to me asking to come for an interview. I got the job, and I'm still there almost 4 years later. I'm currently earning about £22,000. My job title is: computer operator. I do lots of backups, report processing, website monitoring, faulting out hardware, resolve customers problems, etc etc. I'm due to start a new job in 3 weeks within the same company, but for a different division. The new job is as a system support engineer specialising in Oracle Databases. I'm earning about the same as I was previously (a little more, but I no longer work shifts + I get on-call allowance etc). In a couple of years I should be on £30,000, so overall I don't think I've done too badly. Ofcourse I had to put up with various rubbish jobs, but hey I've been earning money for 4 years in this job, which to me seems a lot more sensible then going to Uni, and missing out on over £80,000.
Currently working as an IT Technician (hardware/software frontline support) for a large School in a university (1500 PCs) I got the job as a trainee: 3yrs of training with day release for college. It was crap pay for the hours I did (£8K, £8.7K & 9.5K for respective years), but you have to start low and work your way up as you get the experience. Luckily for me they skiped the third year and now Im fully trained in their eyes and earning ~£25K mark. I started the traineeship with 1 Alevel and a city&guilds certificate in computing maintenance. Did an HNC during day release and am now also doing some CISCO units as evening courses which work is paying for. I was damn lucky to get my traineeship, dunno what Id be doing if I hadnt!
IT Monkey (Technician/Help Desk) Mostly Technician though, I managed to avoid the “joys” of help desk work Years ago, but not as much as most people in my position (I was very lucky with my progression). Not much, I dropped out of Uni, and fubared most of my other qualifications. Remember that experience is key in the IT field. Now that I’ve been around, I’m certified to the hilt with Microsoft this and Cisco that, but I generally don’t need them which leads me to the next question. I’m now a IT Manager (which is why I don’t need my MCSA etc ). It was never my goal to be a Manager and the career I had chosen doesn’t really lead to it either but there you go.
slightly off topic everyone in my old college think that as soon as they leave people are going to come knocking on their doors with job offers and mercs.
A bit off topic I worked in IT very breify after college decided it wasn't for me. Since I was getting forced into going to uni (great having Asian parents ) I decided to do a non-IT degree. A few of the people I've lived with whilst I've been at uni have been doing Computer related degrees (CS, ICT etc) and I can safely say that none of them have a clue when it comes to fixing "real world" computer problems. My advice would be work your way up from the bottom.
You'll only ever get a great job out of uni in I.T if you are something special. Otherwise, its back to the bottom of the pile. I think your friends need a club about the back of the head.
I see the same thing on my computing degree. People think that by just getting a 2.1 degree they will be able to walk into a nice job. As :: Phat :: said you need to make yourself into something special. So many of them go to uni do the uni work and thats it. Sure they do enough to get a degree but they dont learn anything else outside of uni.
I'm 16 doing GCSEs and learning web-design/programming atm. Although I've got a lil business with a mate, atm it doesn't seem I've got a hope in hell of getting a job in a few years after uni as there are so many webdevelopers around. I'd like to know if there are any other similiar jobs that are in shortage or whether there's a possibility of web-development somehow? Any help appreciated <A88>
Yeah, it was a real eye-opener when I first arrived at uni this year. I'm doing Computer Science now and I can safely say that, well, perhaps 5 of the 80 persons that are in my class are justified. I don't think if you can't even create websites when you're my age, you should do something other than IT. Also, the 70 others probably won't learn by themselves anything else besides what they teach in our class, which is, tbh, just rubbish. For example, the class Programming. I've been programming for several years now in an OOP-language, and when I entered the class, the teacher said "If you already know an OOP language, then you can leave now and come back next year. You won't learn anything new this year anyway". I'm planning on doing so, 'cause the first hour was terrible. They were really, really starting from the beginnings, like teaching 10-year olds what an "object" is. I've never been to that class since. So I can safely assume that when the only experience with specific IT tasks (like programming) is out of uni, you probably won't get very far. I'm planning on practicing my C++ in my freetime, and reading more books about datastructures, algorithms, and so on, 'cause uni won't provide me with any of those. The only thing uni is good for, is to show your employee you're at least that good in math, and that you're intelligent, stable, and won't freak out any time soon.
i was also thinking of a career in IT but im kinda glad i didnt take it. remember cahtting to a guy called blacklaw (maybe some of you know him from OCS or even here in times passed) and he was telling me of his mate who was on 112k/pa doing a cisco kind of thing, and i was thinking christ it might be worth giving it a go. thoughts changed and now im kinda glad i didnt, as i can see the amount of jobs there are left going and if i was doing i degree it might be somewhat useless towards getting a job at a place whereby people can immediately start work for them after GCSEs and do courses part time, making them some 5 years (possibly more) of experience ahead of myself. ive taken the path of business finance (at durham) and have applied for spring intermships at the likes of JP morgan and goldman sachs, quite optimistic but any experience in the field, if its not at those two is helpful. possibly the sweetest job ive seen is a manager for aldi. starting salary of 36k and a new audi A4 (and you thought aldi were scutters!) we have to do webpages as part of our IT tutorial (compulsory classes) and they started us of with double clicking etc! it was quite funny when we had an exam, but also quite worrying for people i knew (and intelligent people at that, straight As at a level and the sort) were stuggling with graphs in excel and then copying + pasting into word. ah well, some things never change some people just cant handle technology (usually old people )
To be honest I don't see a whole lot of a future in IT. Yes, if you manage to get a good job it can pay very well and you get to play with all sorts of fun stuff and so on... It's a lot of people's idea of a dream job (other than the part where you have to deal with users, that part sucks ). But when some teenager (such as my self) who has had no formal training or even anyone telling them how to do stuff can walk in and do 80% of the tasks required of a standard IT person, that doesn't say much for job security. And I consider myself an average computer enthusiest! Plus the ammount of constant learning you have to do in order to keep up with the industry. For some people (like myself) we do it anyways, so it isn't a problem. But it's something you can't get out of easily (unless you're like the head IT guru at my workplace, who isn't very caught up on the hardware scene). At this moment in time I'm planning on going into Electronic Engineering, even though it seems to have similar problems, there are not as many avalible hires for those positions (plus the idea of designing the hardware rather than trying to figure out how to make it work appeals to me ).
