IT grunt work for early level experience?

I want to make the career switch to IT, but I'm in my late 20s and I will have some industry certifications but no experience when I apply to my first job. Is there some sort of "undesirable" location or position that would be glad to take anyone where I could develop my skill base? Other fields have things of this sort, like working for the district attorney in Law, or police officers who work in dangerous neighborhoods as rookies. I guess the military would typically supply this since as far as I know there isn't a Teach For America type program for IT. Is there something else like working in specific parts of the country or certain employers where you can develop your work experience?

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Comments

TheFORCE

Yes of course there is, its called a Helpdesk position. You would qualify for any IT Helpdesk position really or an entry junior support position.

NetworkingStudent

I agree with "The Force"
Help Desk is very GREEN/ VERY entry level.

The site listed below is Comptia's non profit site that helps job seekers find a job.
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ITSpectre

There are plenty of things you can do

- Help Desk
- Field Tech
- Bench Tech
- Geek Squad
- PC Repair at a small shop

Put yourself out there.

tbgree00

Something I wish I had done in the early days is maintain a blog. You're starting on a long, hard, and interesting journey. I'm doing my best to document my current position but wish I had commentary on those early days. I use mine as part Knowledge base and part sounding board to express what is on my mind. I'm sure you'll find it interesting in 5 or 10 years to go back and see what you were concerned with today.

ITSpectre

tbgree00 wrote: »

Something I wish I had done in the early days is maintain a blog. You're starting on a long, hard, and interesting journey. I'm doing my best to document my current position but wish I had commentary on those early days. I use mine as part Knowledge base and part sounding board to express what is on my mind. I'm sure you'll find it interesting in 5 or 10 years to go back and see what you were concerned with today.

Im going to start a blog today after work. I may do two blogs, one on video games and one on IT. That is something we all can do.

tbgree00

Awesome Spectre. Even if you just start out running a wordpress VM in vmware player and maintain it privately it's a start. Squarespace isn't too expensive and is really nice but a domain name and an AWS free Tier wordpress ami would probably handle your traffic and get you started publicly. Plus you could write about getting an AWS free tier wordpress ami set up!

kiki162

There's plenty of places that will gladly take your money and training you for a week or two for a bootcamp. Help desk would be a great start. Yes you could join the military too, but I'd probably go with reserves or something along those lines because of your age. Honestly, if I were you, I'd work on getting some Windows certifications (MCSA, MCSE), that why help desk managers will see that you have "some" experience using Windows.

thomas_

Pretty much what everyone else has said. I would also add desktop support and temporary PC refresh projects. Temporary jobs might be easier to get since they are temporary and not a lot of people look for temp jobs(at least that's what I assume.) However, you have to weigh the temp job against the possibilty of not having a job when the assignment is over.

bettsy584

Get a couple of good qualifications before you approach companies, I would suggest either CCNA or MCSA. Or maybe even the lower level certs like Server+ etc depending on where you feel your skill level it.

When you have a decent qualification it shows dedication to a company that may give you the opportunity for work experience. Personally what I did was to bang on the doors of multiple IT managed services companies in my area, basically asking for part time work to build experience. One place gave me the chance and I've not looked back, I am now a Cloud Solution Architect and have worked all over the world. This was only 7 years ago I was looking for experience.

I agreed to work part time, and remotely (fixing backups etc) for similar wages to a retail and within 18 months I had studied my way up (gaining certs) to the point I could move jobs and demand more money than the guys that were mentoring me in the first place.

Another good way to build some exposure up is to build labs and understand how things like DNS, DHCP, ARP, Active Directory, Group Policy etc etc all works, in my very first IT interview I got asked some question about what I did in my spare time. My answer was that I had built a Server 2003 domain in my bedroom and broke/fixed it.

ITSpectre

bettsy584 wrote: »

in my very first IT interview I got asked some question about what I did in my spare time. My answer was that I had built a Server 2003 domain in my bedroom and broke/fixed it.

Im not the only one then. I find a lot of employers ask that question to see if you are dedicated to learning and growing with a company. Most people don't know that an employer asking you "what do you do in your spare time" means "are you going to pursue knowledge off the clock or while you are only at work"