I am 22, and I have about 2 years of experience in a professional IT field. I am currently working on a 2 year IT Systems degree, though the going is slow. I am attempting to pay for it out of pocket, and that makes it a bit harder than it should be to get it done in any reasonable amount of time.
I have had two jobs in this field.
- I first broke into the field by landing a job at a Mom and Pop shop. I basically offered myself for nothing, and ended up working at minimum wage as a Field Technician. I would go to businesses and homes and fix whatever they needed fixed, as well as working on PC's brought into the shop. This was minor network installation and repair, virus removal, data recovery, etc.
- After about eight months of this, I landed a job as a Help Desk Technician at a local bank. This is a state bank, and the Help Desk actually only handles bank issues. We do not deal with the outside customers. I eventually got "promoted" to an assistant Field Tech due to my experience in that already. I do normal Help Desk stuff, as well as a lot of hardware work, imaging work, and general XP troubleshooting. I also work with AS400's. I have learned a lot in this role, and it is a company that pays well and seems to have a lot of room for expansion. They currently are running on Server 2003, and Windows XP, and looking to upgrade soon.
I want to advance in my career, and in this company. I am at a bit of a loss how to do it. I feel like I have almost mastered the Help Desk role, as a lot of it is similar to what I was doing before. I have downtime, and I want to spend this downtime doing something productive (working on a cert, on my schooling, etc). I also want to know
more. I just don't know what I want to know.
There are so many fields in IT. I am currently a tech, and don't feel that being a "tech" is the best path I could take. There seems to be a "roof" to being a tech. At first I considered getting a cert for Windows 7, to brace myself for that move and to expand my knowledge as a hardware/software/OS tech... but that seems to be limiting myself. At the bank, we have techs... then we have "officers", who handle servers, Exchange/Outlook, security, the AS400, and so on. The officers are the ones who end up making the money.
With this in mind, how do I find out what I want to do? I know I don't want to do Networking. What does that leave me? I am interested in Security, but only because I love viruses, removing them, preventing them, and so on. This isn't at all what Security is about, from what I understand. I am worried about diving in, because college is so expensive, and time feels limited.
Has anyone encountered this, or does anyone have advice? At 22, I don't feel as if I should still be confused about where I want to go. I am in the field I love, and now I am at a loss.
I have a friend who has a job at NetApp, and he has been pushing me to try and work for that. It looks like Large Area Storage Systems? I am confused what field that would even be in.
