Hi all!
Cracking win last night and buzzing this morning!
Loved reading all this. Nice to see others in a similar boat to me. Loved Buck Pete’s success story with Prince2 (which I’d never heard of) congratulations!
Can you all sort my life out now please?!
I’m 34. Academically, I have nothing in IT. I left school at 16 and I have worked my way up to be a right-hand man/office manager/Techie of a small retail business for the last 10 years. The entire business is very disorganised and is not going anywhere because the owners will never change. I’m demotivated and bored out of my skull and am looking for a way into a professional IT career with a future. I earn 30k and can afford a small drop to around 25k in the short term to cut my teeth somewhere if needs be.
I am quite handy as a general small business go-to tekky for basic IT stuff. I set up PC workstations. I can wire ethernet ports, patch cables, configure switches/routers/access points. OS installs, Hardware/Desktop builds, software installs, MS Office 365 administering exchange/sharepoint etc. I also task all web development and bug fixes to our 3rd party developers and give things the final check before they go live. Testing etc. I am a bit Windows type-cast at present, but I have mucked around with Ubuntu a bit and despite my hatred for Apple I can find my way around a Mac with help from Google too. No real server experience sadly. I’m essentially a useful and resourceful guy who finds the answer to problems with logical research, but am not a professional in any specific IT field.
I’ve spent the last few years trying to figure out what area I want to go into. I’ve dabbled with loads of free online learning courses in Python, Java, PHP and so on, I’ve discovered I just don’t like code. So web development and database code stuff is probably not for me, sadly. It’s now clear to me that I enjoy the hands-on stuff more than the coding stuff. So I guess an ‘infrastructure engineer’ is the way forward for me. The Project manager (Prince2 etc) stuff I’ve read on here is also potentially interesting. This could lean on my 3rd party web developer managing experience, but I worry I might not have enough technical knowledge for it on a larger more corporate scale.
So, with the above in mind - with not a single relevant qualification to my name and only office experience in day-to-day small business IT to show, what qualifications should I start with to get a foot in somewhere with more career prospects? I can’t seem to get an interview with my current CV.
If going the infrastructure way, do I start with ComTIA A+/Network+? Should I really tick these off? Or should I jump in deeper with CCNA? MCSE? Maybe something else? Do I need ITIL?
There’s so much out there it’s hard to know where to start. Shortcuts are great. I was hoping there’s someone reading this in the industry who does this sort of thing who can advise me the quickest way in to the industry, so I can learn on the go and get trained on the go, i.e. just tell me the best thing to study and pass short-term to get a foot into a bigger more structured business where I can develop? Or is this delusional?
Oh by the way, I also have 2 young kids and no spare time or cash for learning anything and spend what little time I have following Liverpool, reading Rawk, and tracking private jets in transfer windows