HELP!! In need of guidance...

mykie413

I'm posting this because I'm having trouble switching my career path into the IT field. When I was younger I did a lot of cabling for enterprise networks but after college I went into the restaurant management field. After a few years, I came to realize it was not what I wanted to be doing for the rest of my working life. Computers and networking had always been a hobby of mine, I guess one could consider me somewhat of a nerd. So for now I am unemployed, and trying to find an entry level IT position somewhere in NY metro area. In the past few months I've studied on my own for and passed the A+ and Net+ exams. I also have a plethora of CCNA, and MCITP training materials, a cisco home lab, and gns3 simulator. I also have been tooling around with some virtualization, using both VMware player and Oracle's VirtualBox. I don't know if I want to pursue databases, programming, or networking. More importantly than what I should be studying for next, what type of positions should I be applying for? I've applied to literally hundreds of jobs on dice, simplyhired, and craigslist over the past couple of months. I've only received a handful of phone calls and one interview.

So all that being said, any advice would be greatly appreciated. Further, I was wondering if anyone who happens to read this in the industry would be interested in being a mentor.

SteveLord

Make a spreadsheet of everything you are applying for. Name of company, name of position, salary if available, date you applied, location, and what the status is on it.

Don't limit yourself to just job sites. Not everyone uses them. You should be looking at websites for large businesses in the area. I always recommend looking at hospitals and colleges first, since they are generally well known.

You also may have to expand your searches beyond NYC.