Magic formula for getting high paying IT job
rob7278
Member Posts: 57 ■■□□□□□□□□
When I first found this site I had been laid-off for for over 1 year from a Project Manager job with a General Contractor in the construction industry and was in the process of trying to change career fields and get into IT. Initially all I wanted to know was - what certifications are going to help me the most in getting hired for my first IT job. In reading countless posts this is probably the most asked question.
If you look at my Joined Date, you will see that I am by no means a seasoned IT veteran - I have been in IT for just under 1 year. I just wanted to share what worked for me and my observations of what it takes to get into IT - or really almost any other industry for that matter.
I studied for and earned the A+, Security+, MCSA and the MCTS:upgrade MCSA 2003 to 2008. I received 0 calls for any open positions until I earned the MCSA, then within 2 weeks I accepted a 6 month contract job doing Help Desk and paying $18 hr for a large global IT company. After 4 months they bought out my contract and bumped me up to $22 hr. After I had been there 4 more months I quit and accepted an Incident Management position with a fortune 500 company paying $25 hr, which is where I am currently.
I am taking the ITIL V3 Foundations exam tomorrow and assuming I pass - the cert along with the experience I am currently building will pretty much guarantee I will be able to get bumped up to $30 hr in 6-8 months; why do I think that? Ask around how much industry average pay is for an Incident Manager.
I am only sharing my experience so that anyone just trying to get into IT will realize that - you don't have to get a 4 yr degree, you don't have to start out making $13 hr and put in 4-5 years on a Help Desk.
The magic formula I have found is to focus on quality, over quantity. While everyone will tell you experience is the most important thing in getting hired in IT - all experience isn't created equal. Help Desk Support at some small 25 person local unknown company is not even remotely as valuable as working Help Desk Support for a 10,000 employee global IT enterprise that everyone has heard of. I was willing to work 3rd shift, which meant I help support Europe and Asia. Because 3rd shift had far lower call volume and a much smaller team, we were actually empowered to deal with 2nd and in some cases 3rd level support. The day shift, due to their high call volume, didn't have time to actually troubleshoot issues and were basically just glorified switchboard operators. Additionally on 3rd shift we were very active in the incident resolution process - and engaged the support teams/oncalls, set up the conference bridge, documented the restoration efforts in the tickets, etc - which provided me with hands-on incident management experience. Additionally during any downtime at night I would reach out to the manager's of various department's - Systems Admins, Security Engineers, Network Engineers, etc and volunteer to assist with projects - I would say "Give me the boring, mundane tasks that your team hates doing". This not only gave me extremely valuable hands on experience working on projects that were well beyond my pay grade, but it also helped me make a lot of new friends - Systems Admins, Security Engineers, Management - because I was volunteering to do all their crap work and in return all this experience went right on my resume.
To be fair - I am not just out of high school and my previous job experience (although not in IT) still helped me get hired, especially for the Incident Manager position. But one of the guys I worked with on 3rd shift was 23 yrs old, had just got out of the Army and was only 1 yr into working on a computer science degree when he was hired.
You just have to look for the positions that are going to do the most to help you get to the next level, you have to be aggressive in trying to learn everything you can in your current position and while your peers are busy wasting any downtime on Facebook or sending emails to all their friends - figure out what department you want to advance to and then contact that manager and volunteer to do their assigned "busy work". They would rather have someone making $20 hr babysit their security monitoring apps or generating reports from security logs - than their Security Engineers making $35+ hour.
If you look at my Joined Date, you will see that I am by no means a seasoned IT veteran - I have been in IT for just under 1 year. I just wanted to share what worked for me and my observations of what it takes to get into IT - or really almost any other industry for that matter.
I studied for and earned the A+, Security+, MCSA and the MCTS:upgrade MCSA 2003 to 2008. I received 0 calls for any open positions until I earned the MCSA, then within 2 weeks I accepted a 6 month contract job doing Help Desk and paying $18 hr for a large global IT company. After 4 months they bought out my contract and bumped me up to $22 hr. After I had been there 4 more months I quit and accepted an Incident Management position with a fortune 500 company paying $25 hr, which is where I am currently.
I am taking the ITIL V3 Foundations exam tomorrow and assuming I pass - the cert along with the experience I am currently building will pretty much guarantee I will be able to get bumped up to $30 hr in 6-8 months; why do I think that? Ask around how much industry average pay is for an Incident Manager.
I am only sharing my experience so that anyone just trying to get into IT will realize that - you don't have to get a 4 yr degree, you don't have to start out making $13 hr and put in 4-5 years on a Help Desk.
The magic formula I have found is to focus on quality, over quantity. While everyone will tell you experience is the most important thing in getting hired in IT - all experience isn't created equal. Help Desk Support at some small 25 person local unknown company is not even remotely as valuable as working Help Desk Support for a 10,000 employee global IT enterprise that everyone has heard of. I was willing to work 3rd shift, which meant I help support Europe and Asia. Because 3rd shift had far lower call volume and a much smaller team, we were actually empowered to deal with 2nd and in some cases 3rd level support. The day shift, due to their high call volume, didn't have time to actually troubleshoot issues and were basically just glorified switchboard operators. Additionally on 3rd shift we were very active in the incident resolution process - and engaged the support teams/oncalls, set up the conference bridge, documented the restoration efforts in the tickets, etc - which provided me with hands-on incident management experience. Additionally during any downtime at night I would reach out to the manager's of various department's - Systems Admins, Security Engineers, Network Engineers, etc and volunteer to assist with projects - I would say "Give me the boring, mundane tasks that your team hates doing". This not only gave me extremely valuable hands on experience working on projects that were well beyond my pay grade, but it also helped me make a lot of new friends - Systems Admins, Security Engineers, Management - because I was volunteering to do all their crap work and in return all this experience went right on my resume.
To be fair - I am not just out of high school and my previous job experience (although not in IT) still helped me get hired, especially for the Incident Manager position. But one of the guys I worked with on 3rd shift was 23 yrs old, had just got out of the Army and was only 1 yr into working on a computer science degree when he was hired.
You just have to look for the positions that are going to do the most to help you get to the next level, you have to be aggressive in trying to learn everything you can in your current position and while your peers are busy wasting any downtime on Facebook or sending emails to all their friends - figure out what department you want to advance to and then contact that manager and volunteer to do their assigned "busy work". They would rather have someone making $20 hr babysit their security monitoring apps or generating reports from security logs - than their Security Engineers making $35+ hour.
Comments
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Mike-Mike
Member Posts: 1,860
sounds like we're in a similar boat, up to the $22 an hour part, hoping my CCNA (when completed) will take me to that next level... good idea about asking for more work in other departments, I will have to give that a shotCurrently Working On
CWTS, then WireShark
