Career and education advice
ck86
Member Posts: 62 ■■□□□□□□□□
This board has always been great for advice and I'm kind of stuck in how I want to proceed with both my career and education. Apologize in advance for the length, but I feel the information may be pertinent.
My experience in IT dates back to my teens with lots of time doing break/fix and PC builds. I joined the military at 19 and for five years basically did help desk level support with a little networking. As a civilian I've worked as a Jr Windows Systems Administrator for a year and six months as support for Unix-based servers.
I'm currently working as a system administrator for a small start up. We provide IT services to a dozen clients either in healthcare or law firms. My scope ranges from tier 1 support to server and network configuration and maintenance. Over the past year I've learned a lot and gone from a very basic understanding of servers, networking and overall infrastructure to managing multiple VM environments (converted clients from physical to virtual), more advanced server support, more advanced networking (setting up multiple firewalls, tunneling, etc), and gained much better perspective of infrastructure and network design. I have also gained a bit of experience in medical IT by implementing EMR and learning some of the security and compliance side of things. The original system administrator had a falling out with the CEO which led to me picking up what I could as quickly as I could. I consider myself lucky to be thrown into the fire and get hands on with all of the different aspects of managing IT for clients. All of that said, I know that I need to continue my education and utilize my GI bill.
I'm having a hard time deciding which direction to go both school and career wise. I do some aspects of the system administrator role and have envisioned eventually working myself into a system engineer type with business education to provide high-level consulting and designing of IT architecture. I figure that, with plenty of experience in medical IT with a healthy dose of security & compliance and DR strategy would be a solid career assuming I stay abreast of future technologies. In this case I feel my education would be best aimed at high level virtualization and networking certifications with formal education around business management.
On the other hand, I feel like I'd be truer to myself and what I enjoy if I went down the road of software engineering. I have only a handful of experience learning code language, dating back to messing with C++, HTML, CSS in my early teens. I feel little passion for the work I currently do, and often want to change course. The path for this would likely be starting a computer science course at a local school while maintaining my current job with the intention of in 6-12 months self-teaching a language and attempting to find a job where I'd use it.
I'm now 28 years old (damn, time flies) and I want to fully commit to a path and drive full speed ahead. Based on your experience/experiences in IT, what should I do? What aspects do I need to plan out?
Any input/suggestions/feedback/further questions are appreciated. I know this isn't fully thought out yet.
My experience in IT dates back to my teens with lots of time doing break/fix and PC builds. I joined the military at 19 and for five years basically did help desk level support with a little networking. As a civilian I've worked as a Jr Windows Systems Administrator for a year and six months as support for Unix-based servers.
I'm currently working as a system administrator for a small start up. We provide IT services to a dozen clients either in healthcare or law firms. My scope ranges from tier 1 support to server and network configuration and maintenance. Over the past year I've learned a lot and gone from a very basic understanding of servers, networking and overall infrastructure to managing multiple VM environments (converted clients from physical to virtual), more advanced server support, more advanced networking (setting up multiple firewalls, tunneling, etc), and gained much better perspective of infrastructure and network design. I have also gained a bit of experience in medical IT by implementing EMR and learning some of the security and compliance side of things. The original system administrator had a falling out with the CEO which led to me picking up what I could as quickly as I could. I consider myself lucky to be thrown into the fire and get hands on with all of the different aspects of managing IT for clients. All of that said, I know that I need to continue my education and utilize my GI bill.
I'm having a hard time deciding which direction to go both school and career wise. I do some aspects of the system administrator role and have envisioned eventually working myself into a system engineer type with business education to provide high-level consulting and designing of IT architecture. I figure that, with plenty of experience in medical IT with a healthy dose of security & compliance and DR strategy would be a solid career assuming I stay abreast of future technologies. In this case I feel my education would be best aimed at high level virtualization and networking certifications with formal education around business management.
On the other hand, I feel like I'd be truer to myself and what I enjoy if I went down the road of software engineering. I have only a handful of experience learning code language, dating back to messing with C++, HTML, CSS in my early teens. I feel little passion for the work I currently do, and often want to change course. The path for this would likely be starting a computer science course at a local school while maintaining my current job with the intention of in 6-12 months self-teaching a language and attempting to find a job where I'd use it.
I'm now 28 years old (damn, time flies) and I want to fully commit to a path and drive full speed ahead. Based on your experience/experiences in IT, what should I do? What aspects do I need to plan out?
Any input/suggestions/feedback/further questions are appreciated. I know this isn't fully thought out yet.
Comments
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the_Grinch
Member Posts: 4,165 ■■■■■■■■■■
If you feel more passionate towards software engineering then I would suggest going that route. I know plenty of computer science majors who loved programming and go jobs right away. With that I also know plenty of computer science majors who hated programming, but loved IT so they went that route. If from there you decide you want to go the business route an MBA is always an option. You have to figure you are picking something you plan to do for the next 30 years or more so make sure it's something you love.WIP:
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puertorico1985
Member Posts: 205
You have to determine what you enjoy the most and go that route. My undergrad is in Computer Science, and I dreaded my programming classes, and decided that I did not want to go that route. I went with the networking route and couldn't be happier. I did not enjoy programming, and decided not to pursue a career in it.
You have to choose what you enjoy most, and go that route. That being said, I would follow the_Grinch's advice and do my CS, that way you have a little bit of knowledge in multiple IT areas, and then get an MBA if you decide that you still want to advance to BM. -
spicy ahi
Member Posts: 413 ■■□□□□□□□□
Gonna repeat the message: Do what you enjoy! Honestly, between your two choices you can't go wrong. And it's not as if it's impossible to shift from one to the other as you further progress in your career. Now if you were choosing between programming and animal sciences/vetrinary services then yeah, I would give it a little more thought. But from what you've said, I don't think you'd fall too far behind if you choose to go with one and find out later it's the other you really wanted to do. So start with the one where you think your true passion lies!Spicy :cool: Mentor the future! Be a CyberPatriot!