Certifications\CE\Master's Degree to further a career

I am new to the IT field as I've spent the last 10 years as a musician. I recently received my BA in music as well. In order to get my foot in the door, I started studying for the Comptia exams and have attained 6 IT certifications. I landed my first IT job as a customer support rep. I'm interested to know from a successful IT professional (by that I mean 6 figure salary) about continuing to pursue more certs as well as a Masters from Western Governors. I keep getting the negative statement about how Certifications are worthless without the experience and how "no Master IT degree program will be of any use to me". While this may be true, I know having a Masters degree will at least let me apply for jobs that require a masters. I understand how the nature of IT shuns anything but experience, but I still don't think studying, learning, and obtaining certs is a waste of time. Any thoughts? Thank you Much!!

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mikej412

RockmanJL9981 wrote: »

I landed my first IT job as a customer support rep.

What's your plan for your next job and the one after that -- besides a 6 figure salary? What are you good at doing? What do you like doing? Are you good at any of the things you like doing?

Do you have any room for advancement at your current job? Is there any possibility of working with any other groups or teams -- and making some contacts (and friends) who might let you know about future openings in their group?

Does your family own a company you can work for?

Certifications and education will open some doors and may get you some interviews, but your experience (and your people skills during the interview) is what will most likely get you the job offers (and big bucks) later in your career.

RockmanJL9981

my manager told me that my military experience and the fact that i had a personality unlike a typical IT professional helped me get the job. I also agreed to work for half of what they were offering haha. I dont have a lot of contacts from my family concerning IT, I've mainly just been asking around at work. I'm currently associated with a SaaS data center and am currently taking the cisco exploration classes to prepare for the CCNA. I am very interested in the hardware side of things in particular, but I know the hot trend are the virtualized environments right now.

mikedisd2

RockmanJL9981 wrote: »

my manager told me that my military experience and the fact that i had a personality unlike a typical IT professional helped me get the job.

So what is the typical IT pro personality?

And it has to be asked, what instrument(s) do you play?

RockmanJL9981

I play the french horn and am a runner; IT pro: likes to eat fritos and drink mountain dew? haha I like to do that too

eansdad

RockmanJL9981 wrote: »

I play the french horn and am a runner; IT pro: likes to eat fritos and drink mountain dew? haha I like to do that too

You'll actually run into a lot of retired/prior service military in the IT field. Myself I am prior service army (02L) back in the late 90's. BTW I hate fritos' and can't drink Mt. Dew.

As with anything else you need a direction to go. Look at what you want to do next, past the entry level stuff, and where you would like to be ie .. programmer, database, network/systems admin, network engineer, security, forensics, web design, management etc. Once you have that you can plan a certification and degree path that will get youu to where you want to go.

jtoast

RockmanJL9981 wrote: »

I'm interested to know from a successful IT professional (by that I mean 6 figure salary) about continuing to pursue more certs as well as a Masters from Western Governors.

I'm the new guy (been here 3 years) on a 7 man level III support team for a fortune 500 company. We basically handle everything to do with the desktop environment. This includes everything from reverse engineering virus outbreaks, the ZTI build, and data encryption. All of us make high 5/low 6 figure salaries and the highest degree on the team until I got my BS:IT yesterday was an Associates in computer science which trumped my Associates in general education.

The purpose of certification is to get you past HR, not to get you a job. Once you get in front of the hiring manager, you are either going to show some experience or be offered an entry level help desk position.

A degree may start you a little higher but not in the six figure range if you don't have several years of experience to back it up...especially in an area such as IT security. Very few companies are willing to trust their companies safety on a recent college graduate.

earweed

A lot of good advice here so far. You've already got A degree which counts for something. You've got your start now it's up to you to take it to the next level. It'll take you a few years to reach that 6 figure salary though. A masters will primarily help you to get into management and that also requires a LOT of experience.