Starting to regret the career transition to IT

I was recently able to make a career change from criminal justice to IT, even declining jobs in interview as I refused to work in a call center, help desk type job. (Calls back to back to back)

I currently work at a school (IT department of two), where I periodically get calls, roam the school, interact with the students, hands on with WAPs, servers, punching wires, break/fix issues, etc.

In my early 30s, and I declined a job at the sheriff’s department during the transition and I’m starting to regret it. Even though the entry level pay is great. $19.00+ an hour. There is just so much down time at this position and I’m starting to get frustrated. I can’t study in my spare time, as I see so many other people do on the forums. I’m expected to stay/look busy with something work related, even if there is nothing to be fixed.

I know I’ll make more in the long run in IT than criminal justice. It’s just I’m not being pushed mentally, I get frustrated. I don’t know what I want to do in the long run. In school, working on my Net+, while I have my A+, and following that up with Sec+, along with the other certs through WGU.

I don’t know, I just constantly catch myself looking at indeed…..

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_Nicolas_

(Sorry, my post was cut off short, here is the rest)

I will consider it a luxury if you even have time to "really, really" study at work.

IT is problem solving for the most part.........so you have to find a solution, compromise or maybe move on.

English is my 2nd language so bare with me please.

Good luck!!!

GSXR750K2

Daneil3144 wrote: »

Yea, there is no surpassing him. He's at the top.

You need to broaden your view of the situation.

If he's been doing the same thing for 20 years, there's a lot he doesn't know as he's siloed himself into his role. By surpassing his knowledge you'll be in a better position to get into other opportunities, and if you want to stay there, you can show that the student has become the master. Some companies tolerate people who don't expand their learning because they are very good at something. Get just as good and more and you may be viewed as a more useful resource.

As a starting point, try to learn as much as you can from him. There's no such thing as a bad learning experience.

alias454

Since you are required to round with your users, maybe you can listen to podcasts during the day. As far as trying to circumvent the system you are in, I think your energy would be better spent finding another place to work. Since you have a decent paying job now, take your time and be picky about it. Do you get summers off or is this year round full-time work?

soletek

First work is for work. Dont always except to study at work. 2nd if you dont like the job find something else. 3 those CompTIA certs should relate to what your doing at work. It shouldn't take long to to finish up those CompTIA certs since you are in the field now. Prioritize your life and goals.

Daneil3144

One last question instead of starting another thread....

When submitting my resume while currently looking; should I exclude my current job off my resume if I have only been here for 3-4 months and make it seem like I'm still at my previous job?
Like 'inadvertently' give them an old resume.

I've read threads where people say to exclude short time positions.

GSXR750K2

Daneil3144 wrote: »

One last question instead of starting another thread....

When submitting my resume while currently looking; should I exclude my current job off my resume if I have only been here for 3-4 months and make it seem like I'm still at my previous job?
Like 'inadvertently' give them an old resume.

I've read threads where people say to exclude short time positions.

Depends...do you want to potentially get caught lying, making that the first impression the new company makes of you?

Excluding a short gig is one thing, saying you still work somewhere you don't is another. An employment verification can turn that opportunity into a bust.

iBrokeIT

Daneil3144 wrote: »

Like 'inadvertently' give them an old resume.

Would it be okay for an employer do something similar and 'inadvertently' give you a different position and a lower salary after you start?

ande0255

You have to go through help desk / contract position purgatory unless you know someone who has an in for you, that is just the way it goes, IT is not an easy field to just break into.

It took me 6 years from earning my CCNA to getting a Network Role at a company, the rest was spent doing contract jobs, that basically all amounted to help desk.

Best of luck in whatever you choose to do!

Daneil3144

GSXR750K2 wrote: »

Depends...do you want to potentially get caught lying, making that the first impression the new company makes of you?

Excluding a short gig is one thing, saying you still work somewhere you don't is another. An employment verification can turn that opportunity into a bust.

I'm confused.

How is this any different than omitting a current employer? Not to mention it makes you look unemployed.

Daneil3144

GSXR750K2 wrote: »

You need to broaden your view of the situation.

If he's been doing the same thing for 20 years, there's a lot he doesn't know as he's siloed himself into his role. By surpassing his knowledge you'll be in a better position to get into other opportunities, and if you want to stay there, you can show that the student has become the master.

It's funny, some times I will ask him things, in regards to process or procedures that need to happen, per conference calls..

And he'll give a vague/general response, with that he 'normally handles it,'

...any-who time to update the resume

Daneil3144

Come back to this thread...and Think god, has it already been a year at this place?

pirlo21

So where are you now? Still in help desk or you already moved forward?

pirlo21

Daneil3144 wrote: »

Come back to this thread...and Think god, has it already been a year at this place?

So where are you now? Still in help desk or you already moved forward?

cyberguypr

Yeah, update please.

Basic85

I refuse to go back to a call center.

Daneil3144

pirlo21 wrote: »

So where are you now? Still in help desk or you already moved forward?

cyberguypr wrote: »

Yeah, update please.

Still here - recruiters reach out but phone calls end early when I tell them I make $19 an hour with opportunity for overtime on an entry level job....

pirlo21

Daneil3144 wrote: »

Still here - recruiters reach out but phone calls end early when I tell them I make $19 an hour with opportunity for overtime on an entry level job....

Recruiters are not the way to go. Polish and put up a good resume on indeed and look for the position you want to apply for. I get call from recruiters all the time offering me good salary and everything but just for 2 -3 months, they just want their comission, you gotta do the work, not let the recruiters hunt you.
Also I would recommend you to start looking into CCNA, if you want to apply for higher opportunities, start taking CCNA classes in some community college or tech school, so that will bring attention to your potential employer on your resume. Do you have a lab at home? Build your own lab and start practicing with windows server, cisco routers, etc.
Most likely a CCNA will open you the doors to the $20+ or $30+/hr, you just gotta put work. I honestly think you are relying yourself too much on recruiters, if you start looking by yourself you can find some good job offers. Good luck.

Daneil3144

pirlo21 wrote: »

Recruiters are not the way to go. Polish and put up a good resume on indeed and look for the position you want to apply for. I get call from recruiters all the time offering me good salary and everything but just for 2 -3 months, they just want their comission, you gotta do the work, not let the recruiters hunt you.
Also I would recommend you to start looking into CCNA, if you want to apply for higher opportunities, start taking CCNA classes in some community college or tech school, so that will bring attention to your potential employer on your resume. Do you have a lab at home? Build your own lab and start practicing with windows server, cisco routers, etc.
Most likely a CCNA will open you the doors to the $20+ or $30+/hr, you just gotta put work. I honestly think you are relying yourself too much on recruiters, if you start looking by yourself you can find some good job offers. Good luck.

No I've went to a few interviews - but the pay is less or the opportunities are slim in terms of moving up. (They let me know up front)

Not going to lie - I've looked at CCNA certification. I think more doors will open with this.

This is my goal for 2018.

EANx

Daneil3144 wrote: »

No I've went to a few interviews - but the pay is less ...

I'm not suggesting you take a pay cut simply to move but sometimes you have to take a step or two backward in order to move a lot more forward. Back when the dot-com boom went bust, if I had held onto my old salary as the benchmark someone had to meet, I would still be unemployed. Instead, I took a pay cut. It didn't take long to make it up and now I'm in the right spot to move to an extremely highly-compensated role in a year or three. Keep your eye on the prize, whatever that is to you and don't be afraid to say "oops, this is a better path."

pirlo21

EANx wrote: »

I'm not suggesting you take a pay cut simply to move but sometimes you have to take a step or two backward in order to move a lot more forward. Back when the dot-com boom went bust, if I had held onto my old salary as the benchmark someone had to meet, I would still be unemployed. Instead, I took a pay cut. It didn't take long to make it up and now I'm in the right spot to move to an extremely highly-compensated role in a year or three. Keep your eye on the prize, whatever that is to you and don't be afraid to say "oops, this is a better path."

I'm exactly doing that, I went to being the to go guy in a startup company, I was basically the manager, I built their entire network, router, switch, firewall, and a small NAS, ran cables, setup IP phones, help desk, anything related to IT. And now I'm help desk, but in a bigger company, and I'm making more money in a much smaller role, just for the sake of moving forward, now I can work with servers, network, cloud storage, citrix, stuff that I haven't worked with before.

volfkhat

Daneil3144 wrote: »

Still here - recruiters reach out but phone calls end early when I tell them I make $19 an hour with opportunity for overtime on an entry level job....

huh?
Why would you ever tell a recruiter what you currently make?

You should be telling them what you expect to make for the position they are trying to fill.

And good lord Man;
why haven't you gotten any certifications now; 10 months later?

yoba222

Daneil3144 wrote: »

Still here - recruiters reach out but phone calls end early when I tell them I make $19 an hour with opportunity for overtime on an entry level job....

To get my foot in the door I went from a non-IT job at $25/hr to $16/hr in an entry level position. It took about 1 - 1 1/2 years and some job hopping to exceed $25/hr again.

ImThe0ne

Sounds like you're eager to make plans to get out, but not eager enough to follow through?

WGU lets you select what courses you are working on. Hopefully you have put your certification classes to the front of the list and knock them out. If they try and tell you what courses you have to do, then you need to have a discussion with your mentor about it and stop letting them dictate what classes you do when. Unless you are trying to do something dumb like take a level 2 class before the level 1 class, they shouldn't care and you can tell them that. Get those certs knocked out man!

At the start of my career I left an "IT Field Technician" role where i got to work on anything I wanted to go to a helpdesk job and be a good bit more restricted. Not sure what your reasoning is for being against helpdesk and/or call center support is, but I think if you polled everyone here, most of us have all had that job at the start of our careers and I personally wouldn't change that if I could. That was great exposure to a multitude of issues, drastically improves creativity with problem solving and troubleshooting without being able to physically lay hands on the machine, and allowed me to interact with tons of different teams within IT and learn how a structured IT department ran.

If you are one of those people that think Helpdesk is "looked down upon" I think you need to reevaluate your attitude towards it and strongly consider the opportunity if one were to come your way. IT is still very much so a part of "paying your dues" in the crap work before you get to the stuff you enjoy doing. If you learn to play the game and get on top of self-training and certifying, you will literally get calls and emails constantly from recruiters, LinkedIn, Indeed, etc.

Last but not least on job longevity. IT is very fluid and job jumps happen constantly, as long as you aren't seriously abusing it, don't get hung-up on how long you are at any specific company. Unless you are hoping every 3-6 months, most places don't tend to care if they see one or two short term jobs, they get it. You'll know when its time to leave.

eansdad

Having worked in a school district for almost a decade all I can say is RUN!!! They want you to be seen which is counter to working on back end things like automation, updating, Active Directory, GPOs...etc you get the point. What we did was somewhat unorthodox. We did not have spare servers to expand our knowledge so we used older workstations. We created our own WSD, WSUS, VMWare Esxi hosts and NAS using Dell 780s. We had a lazy admin and full domain rights....

Point is take your down time and study but also take time to walk around and been seen. Take what you can and do something with it. Create an ESXI host and put a 2nd DC on it and/or print server. Make a NAS and have backups run to it.

My BEST advise I can give you is to get out of the school....titles get jobs. If you are an IT tech or desktop tech doing server work you may not get a job. Go to an MSP (Managed Service Provider) you will get your hands on everything and it will be a lot newer. Most will pay for certs and schooling as the more you have the more they can charge. You might not get a great job and will start on phones but at an MSP the 1st line people get some hardcore stuff to deal with and in larger MSPs will have people above them to help them.

My 2 cents...take it or leave it. I was you 15 yrs ago and wasted almost a decade in a district. It's a lot harder getting hire up in IT in your mid 40s then your late 20s early 30s.

Daneil3144

volfkhat wrote: »

huh?
Why would you ever tell a recruiter what you currently make?

You should be telling them what you expect to make for the position they are trying to fill.

Probably so as not to waste my time or theirs. If they can't match my pay or exceed - they can stop talking.

volfkhat wrote: »

huh?

And good lord Man;
why haven't you gotten any certifications now; 10 months later?

How did you reach that conclusion? By my bio which isn't filled out same as yours? I just have A+ & Network+ though.

ImThe0ne wrote: »

At the start of my career I left an "IT Field Technician" role where i got to work on anything I wanted to go to a helpdesk job and be a good bit more restricted. Not sure what your reasoning is for being against helpdesk and/or call center support is

Just the monotony of it all - especially since I used to work for a call center in the Warranty Exchange department of a cell phone company.

eansdad wrote: »

Having worked in a school district for almost a decade all I can say is RUN!!! They want you to be seen which is counter to working on back end things like automation, updating, Active Directory, GPOs...etc you get the point.

THIS IS MY JOB! I have to walk the campus majority of the day. Can't be in my office, at my computer, etc. You explained it...like you lived it...lol

TheProf

Daneil3144 wrote: »

I know I’ll make more in the long run in IT than criminal justice. It’s just I’m not being pushed mentally, I get frustrated. I don’t know what I want to do in the long run. In school, working on my Net+, while I have my A+, and following that up with Sec+, along with the other certs through WGU.

I don’t know, I just constantly catch myself looking at indeed…..

I dont know the reason why you wanted to get into IT, but I hope it was not because of the money... In IT, it is hard to make good money if you're not passionate about it. You need to be willing to do things that are not in your job description and that is the main way you're going to move up... Unless you quit and go somewhere else. People say wait this much time at a role and then leave, I dont believe in that, why take a role that would probably not workout? If you took a role that you did not know much about and found out later on that it is not what you wanted, why wait? Why not put out your CV and see what happens? I am sure you're not the only one who's accepted a job and realized it was not a good fit, it happened to me so I am sure it happened to others. I wouldn't recommend to skip from one job to another.. but I would recommend from time to time when you have an opportunity to look at other options.

When I got into IT, I was doing help desk and repairing computers, taking calls, and I loved it! For me, that was great and I wanted more and more as time went on. Passion is important and I hope that you really enjoy something in IT and not just the money.

volfkhat

Daneil3144 wrote: »

Probably so as not to waste my time or theirs. If they can't match my pay or exceed - they can stop talking.

How did you reach that conclusion? By my bio which isn't filled out same as yours? I just have A+ & Network+ though.

Ohhh... sorry;

i didnt actually open your profile. lol
i just glanced at your name (over to the left), and at your signature.
Didnt see anything listed, so figured you never followed through.

But i definitely remembered your original posting from last spring.

Congrats then!!!
You are making it happen :]

A+ & Net+ are good intro certs. I learned a lot from both of them.
Did you do it on your own? Or are you enrolled at WGU?

Have you figured out what you want to learn next?
MCSA, Networking, etc?

Whatever has your interest; Keep at it!
The job may be a drag... but use it to bide your time as you work towards a higher certification.
then you can land a better $$$ gig.

i dont know where you live; or what kind of jobs your are applying for....
but if $19/hr is too much for recruiters to match... i agree it doesnt sound like a great career move.
lol

I work at an MSP; it has been a great place to learn new things. (But i'm Not answering phones all day)
Almost Every day something is On-Fire; and It feels like every Friday is your "last day".

But, all in all, i highly recommend it.
just something to keep in mind...

ImThe0ne

TheProf wrote: »

People say wait this much time at a role and then leave, I dont believe in that, why take a role that would probably not workout? If you took a role that you did not know much about and found out later on that it is not what you wanted, why wait? Why not put out your CV and see what happens? I am sure you're not the only one who's accepted a job and realized it was not a good fit, it happened to me so I am sure it happened to others.

^^^ AGREE 100%
I once took a "Hosted Services Engineer" role at a local MSP, I didn't make it 3 full days before I remembered why I quit the last MSP from years ago. I started on a Monday and quit at lunch time on Wednesday. No since in wasting my time or theirs.

Legacy User

I skimmed the posts so if it was addressed my bad. Considering this is your first IT job and you have been working for 6 months expect to do grunt work. With that said even though you think your job sucks since theres down time but thats how corporate IT jobs are. Sometimes waiting around for something to break.

Don't think jobs allowing you study on the job is the norm. My last job the manager would think reading up on something would equate to me bullshitting versus my current role which knows when we study to learn something it will help us do our job better. It depends on the manager some of them get it while others don't.

I say make the best of the experience. You mentioned working on different things. If theres something from those things youlike work on get a cert for it and study on your own time. For example if you like servers and its windows server get the mcse and propose patches, upgrades whatever. Take time to break it down layer by layer to understand how it works within your job while studying. Seeing it in the real world while studying makes a hug difference. Get the cert and cut out after a year. You need your experience.

I was at a mom/pop cisco used reseller where i just was testing equiping and recertifiing it be resold. I proposed to upgrade different aspects of the infrastructure and I did. got enough experience then got the hell out and got into my current job where i doubled my salary.

echo_time_cat

@ the OP.

I think we all understand what it's like working for a "boss" who doesn't "get it." If your boss thinks you not being infront of your monitor/at your desk, means you aren't working, then you have a challenge.

But consider this. That's his perception. Manage it. How do you communicate with the boss? email? Great, send him emails about the things you're working on improving/fixing. Eventually he would get tired of hearing about it and take your word for it, and not think twice about you being at your desk.

The first one I'd suggest if they still have you running around the facility, is getting an overview/topology set up with access to the systems you'd normally need to walk to. Why? It will give you a chance to map out the network topology, learn how to setup port forwards/tunnels for access, and then you could put in a monitoring solution (Nagios is an easy one to get going for the basics. For SNMP traps I like OpenNMS or PRTG, but there are other options). Once you've done that, you should be able to have an overview/monitoring (with alerts for outages to whomever's email or mobile), and RDP and SSH access to all devices on the network. This way, you'll have at least taught yourself a fair bit about networking, only need to run around to make physical changes, and have a good excuse to be at your desk any time you want to.