I'm currently 21, I've always been building flight time to be a pilot even though thats not what I want to do for a career. I dropped out of High School,got a G.E.D. and have completed almost a full year of community college (basics, my gpa is a 4.0 so far as well). I've worked at a taco bell since I got my G.E.D. so it's going on 3 years, I feel I'm stuck in my life going no-where. I want to start a family and be able to provide especially now more then ever as my girlfriend has a son and I see her in my future but I understand you can't snap your fingers and suddenly have money or a great job. I love computers I was thinking of something along the lines of an IT career but don't know much about it or how difficult things are, or how to go about it for that matter. I know theres a lot of board members in the IT career. Can anybody on these boards offer some career advice and what I should be trying to do specifically? I work hard, My work ethic is un-believable and I bust my ass, I just don't know with all the factors where I should go or do to succeed. My situation, I'm very lucky, I pay rent to my mom and my insurance it only comes out to 400 or so a month, my girlfriends lives with her parents now (she lived on her own for a little bit thus her frustrations of being back home are getting to her as she wants out with me). It hurts to know I've wasted some years.. I'm such a reliable hard working person that I cringe being around the girlfriend and the son knowing I can't do anything for them now, I can't bite the lip and trudge forward with all my might relying on my physical will, ethic and determination for our situation to be ok, I have to hit a book or something.. I have to build a base for our future. any tips, advice, analysis, counseling to gather a game plan would mean a lot.
IT is broad term. Which area are you interested in? Software development? System administration? Web design? One thing I can tell you is that despite the economy, the job market for IT is still very good. Pretty much all the CS students I know have received a dozen offers before even graduating.
Are you interested in getting back into school? I know i have some students who are going to school for the IT Field. One just recently graduated with his associates and he got a good paying job at the company I work for..
It's such an upward battle that doesn't pay off in the end, it wont lead to a happy life, if I was a bachelor it probably would.. plus if I did go that route theres still a ways to go ahead and money to be invested. Growing up and my dad being a pilot, never seeing him because he was gone.. not really getting a chance to build a relationship or being able to celebrate most holidays (waiting two weeks for christmas) until he got home, it's not something I want my kids to go through and it destroyed my mom and his relationship. Tuff to find work, then again I want to be in helicopters but the hours I've gotten are in airplanes.
Probably System Administration, I'm good with computers but don't know a whole lot about the IT careers or how to go about achieving one. What company do you work for if I may ask? School seems like the only logical option, gather a skill. It seems thats the only way to achieve the goals I want, if theres a way to succeed without some school or skill but on work ethic and will then sign me up haha because my relationship situation is tuff in the position I have us in, even with school I still need to find a way for us to get by as I build a future.
System administration gives you a lot of flexibility on education. You can get an associate degree from a university or even from tech school like ITT. Then you have to get administrative certifications like MCTS from Microsoft. After that you should have enough to find an entry level job. The bad thing about system administration is that the first 7 or so years you are not going to get much money. You have to pay your dues before getting that nice paycheck.
Go back to college and get an associate degree in computer information systems. During your final semester, you can sometimes get an internship which will help you get experience. A lot of people start out with a job at help desk and just moves up from there.
I started working as a lab assistant (yes, showing peeps how to BOLD in Word) at the university where I was studying to become a teacher. That was part time. I changed my major and continued to work in the IT department, going through the ranks first as a Technical Support "specialist" and then up to Learning Technology. I read books on my own, practiced Internet technologies at home, built web servers on my own, and learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript, configuring web server software, etc., and then I became the "web guy". I was fortunate enough to be allowed to finish school here too, but the process I am mentioning took about 5 to 6 years. I finished with a totally different degree in humanities that had nothing to do with my line of work. All I know now I learned either through practice or through reading books or going to training (although I haven't gone to training for anything in YEARS). You could do it faster than that. Like someone else here said, you must learn, practice, and go through paying the dues before you get the big bucks. Now I do web gigs on the side to get a little extra cash, and am still thinking about coming back to school to get a masters in Education or professional writing to go along with my undergraduate for humanities. It takes practice and perseverance. Stay abreast [no puns, please] of the newer technologies, don't be afraid to try the different flavors of all the branches of an IT department. Do you like hardware or software, network or system administration, Mac or Unix or Windows, programming? Learn on the side yourself. Practice makes [almost] perfect.
I am actually the opposite of you Realjad. I'm in the IT world (executive desktop support for an oil and gas company here in Houston) but I took an introductory flight last year and have not stopped thinking about it. I plan on taking lessons for my private pilot license next year and see where it goes from there.
I started playing around with web sites and graphic design at 18...I learned the technologies on my own and I picked IT as my major at UH. The classes weren't that deep enough for me to know much about a certain area of IT. They were pretty much "Database class", "ASP.NET class", "Networking class" so on. I graduated and got a job with my company pretty quickly. When it comes to IT, you have to learn things on your own. IT is so broad. I knew I didn't want to be a network admin or system admin so I went down the web developer area...even now, I still prefer the design side but I need to improve my design skills, which I am doing right now. I am considering going to HCC and get a web/graphic design certificate. There are just so many possibilities in IT, all you need to pick which area.
Please know you haven't wasted any years if you're 21 and okay! You'll be fine. If you enjoy computers, I agree with those encouraging you to pursue IT. Where I work, we can never retain good IT people. The good ones, with good communication skills, seem to have dozens of job offers anytime they snap their fingers. I think IT people are the new class of lawyers (or going further back in history, shaman class). There is just all this freaky mysterious stuff that most of us don't understand, and IT people are all powerful.
IT is still an emerging field, and this means, like other people have posted, that there are lots of different routes that you can take to get to where you want to go. And it also means that your interests may change along the way...you may get bored with hardware and go into programing. Or you might love hardware and stick with it. I know folks who have gone both ways. Honestly, you don't have to get any kind of degree to go far in IT, except for management. Once you're in a good IT department, your skills will shine. But don't discount the people-skills side of IT. It's still a good-old-boy network. If you get in good with your boss, your chances of advancing are better than if you're a quiet tech sitting in the corner doing your job well. To start out- try to get a job in a help desk or a part time or volunteer job in a college IT department. It may not pay anything or just a little bit, but what you get out of it is practical experience as well as building your resume. Get a few basic certs to flesh out your skills. You might think you know a lot about computer hardware, but an A+ cert will help round you out. Don't go for the tougher certs until you've been in the field for a while. You don't want to be one of those paper-only cert guys. I'll have to stop here because my 2-year-old is climbing on me. If I think of more later I'll add it. Good luck.
I just mean that you are powerful and scary to mortals. I mean that most of us can't get certain tasks done without one of you. To us, it seems that you come into an office, sprinkle cow blood around, dance in a circle, and now I can access the server again.
A portfolio is just as good or even better than a certificate from any school, especially for Web Design. My stance in this is that if you can show your potential employer or your potential client of how well you do things and how organized you can make their site, you will have more credibility than showing a certificate from a community college in which you learned how to declare variables in Server-Side Includes. Working as an individual, having creative freedom to make your own design, not being bound to standards and policies of a company is much better for you and your client to establish communication on completing tasks and to clearly reach a mutual goal to create a site. I hate having to say "YES" to management when they want to place a "button" (an image) on every dang link, even though we can do with a text link instead of an image... then they say I am I am going on ranting about web design stuff... when Realjad might not even choose that route... but I thought I would mention this since I had also considered getting a "webmaster certification" and I really didn't need it to stay working where I am or where I would go next. [whew!] Web Design has some advantages, though, Realjad... but don't make that your career. When I started, Dreamweaver, FrontPage, Adobe InDesign, etc., didn't exist.
Why not transfer from your college to a 4 year university and get a BS in Computer Science or Computer Engineering? It's a field that's bound to expand in the future. Considering your 4.0 GPA, it shouldn't be hard to get into a decent state university with lower tuition fees. You'd probably be able to apply for federal grants that save money. In my opinion, if you can get the bachelors in Computer Science, the IT degree isn't worth it, unless you want to work as a low-level technician for the rest of your life.
CS and CE major isn't for everyone. If you don't enjoy high level abstract math, then you probably won't make it through those majors. In the UT system, only 1/3 of people who applied for those major actually graduated with them. And what you said about IT degree limits your career is also not true. I know plenty of people with associate degrees in IT making 6 figures as system or network administrators for Fortune 500 companies. If you want to do software development, then a major in CS or CE is probably required in order for you to be successful. But that's not necessarily true for IT, which is much more than just the coding jobs.
