Stagnant IT "Career" - change paths or make the best of IT?

Gary1885

Hi,

I've been a long time reader of these forums but this is my first post. I have a bit of a conundrum in terms of career choices. I'll give a brief background, but please accept my apologies if it turns into a rant! However, if I give the true picture of everything, it could influence any advice that may follow!

I started out working in Dixons and then PC World where I was a Customer Advisor. I consistently achieved top sales figures but the job was ultimately part time as I was at uni. I eventually went full time after dropping out of uni, but never became a store manager or pursued a career in sales, as I had always intended to go into IT. Bad move!

My IT "career" started out at a local authority, which I joined in 2008, aged 23. I was taken on as an "ICT Support Technician" and was basically just unboxing PCs, installing them and throwing away the old ones, in with the occasional support call.

I was "promoted" rather quickly and after 10 weeks became a "Communications Analyst". This was more involved and I had responsibility for several sites. Any problem that occurred, it was possible to learn on the job and resolve it, as more senior colleagues would be able to help.

Sadly, that didn't last and they had a restructure, splitting us into three teams; desktop, server and network. I remember my line manager sitting down with a colleague and I, who had both become analysts at the same time.

"Because of where you are in your careers, we're going to put you on desktop support."

I should have run a mile. Basically, my old job under a different title and a negligibly higher salary. Two years in, and I was being downgraded. However, we were both given the responsibility of - albeit unofficially - leading the team of technicians. I thought naively that this may look good on my CV, that I may be able to prove myself for some kind of management role and that it could be a positive. I was wrong.

The team was comprised of young lads, a few years younger than I was, who were basically working for beer vouchers and going round the offices trying to pull young girls. They were loud in the office and people noticed their behaviour. Sadly, some of this bad reputation rubbed off on the entire team, which included me.

A year later, another restructure arrived. This time, there were only two teams, but one of the senior analysts arrived in our team. I was told in confidence that the senior analyst in question could not justify his salary; he had moved to the top automatically and did not know enough, so they were giving him team leadership responsibility. Essentially, this meant that he was delegating every job to the rest of us, and everyone complained about it.

Eventually, I progressed to the team I should have joined originally, in 2016. Eight years and two pay rises later, I had only progressed from my initial £15,153 to £27,600 or so. Some may see this as a big pay rise, but I certainly do not. The problem I was left with was that my salary was paying me more than my skill set; I could still only say I had 1st/2nd line desktop support roles under my belt. I only started to get exposure to things that would have got me a better job in my final year in that role, 2016-17.

So, I did the sensible thing and left to join a band. I am still in the band and earn a fair amount of money simply doing that at the weekend. I have been working part time for a Managed Service Provider doing a very entry-level IT role, supporting primary schools. The pay for that was terrible; £21,000 FTE (I worked 4 days so was on £16,800). I have now left that role to relocate to a part of the country where hopefully I will be able to undertake another full time role, due to reduced travelling.

So, here's my question for those of you who haven't already switched off!

Do I give a career in IT one more chance? I'm realistically looking at £25k jobs, maybe £30k at an absolute push. How likely am I to be able to progress to, say £40k in the next couple of years if I do so? Or am I going to fall back into the trap of no training, no career development, no scope for career progression in roles? I must admit, I have doubts and feel that I'll be frustrated and angry at learning things that should have been happening years ago.

Maybe I need a change. Do I pursue the career in sales that may have earned me more money in the first place? At least in sales you can be in a relatively junior role but earn commission/OTE and actually prove yourself with hard evidence, something that was very hard to do in IT!

Sorry about the rant, but this has been bothering me for years and believe me, even escaping the industry and taking a year out doing music, you still feel like you have unfinished business! Any advice would be much appreciated!

Cheers

Gary

Lomast

The immediate thing that jumps out at me is you don't mention qualifications, experience is important but generally qualifications are needed to get the better roles unless you are willing to commit to a company for a long time to work up the ladder.

And a 10k pay rise in two years no chance I would of thought. 40k is a lot of money outside of London

Gavin83

Where in the country do you live?

BookmobileBadGirl

Your pay went up by £1.5k every year for eight years and you don't think that a good pay rise?

What Lomast said about qualifications, you do not have a degree but did you do qualifications whilst working for the LA?

ndf9876

As someone with 20+ years in the industry, my comments are thus :

- Most IT professionals do indeed start out on desktop \ end user support (unless you are a developer, but you are clearly not).

- As others have said, qualifications and certifications are very important. The Microsoft certifications cost £120 to sit (depends on the test centre) and are a great thing for a potential employer to see on your CV.

- You would need to choose a specialism to start earning the higher salaries, be that network engineer, DBA, DevOps etc etc.

- To be fair to you, the more I read your post the more I think you have had a rough time with your previous employer. If your employer will not invest in you and your career, I would suggest investing in yourself and moving on (and self-paced study and training is no bad thing).

- Your £25k I would say is very realistic for a desktop support role, provided there is scope to progress; I don't know about earning £40k p.a. after 2 years (personally I would look for more experience for that salary and it would depend on your specialism).

I don't think it is an easy industry to get a break in - most of my hires have been graduates or more experienced professionals or specialists, but based on what you've posted, I think what you are aiming for is broadly achievable.

getmore4less

One thing with any IT job, from basic tech to highly technical positions is to follow the money.

Some industries pay others don't and never will.


Places where IT services are just that and secondary to the business there is never enough money.

Go to places where tech is at the core of the business being successful or is the business or the business is just awash with money.

A potential sideways move if interested it product development is to get into QA, good places pay well but it still has a bit of a stigma as being less desirable which helps because good people are in demand.

Dakta

As someone who's followed a different path with some similarities (I was getting into IT, got fed up of the 'youth attitude' and abandoned it for ten years then just last month got back into it) I would listen carefully to the above. IT is a bit weird and you have to position yourself carefully.

That said I would try to avoid getting wrapped up too much about salary too, higher salary can lead to higher instability

When I decided to get back into it Idecided to supplement myself with some certs so I did a few shifts in less glamorous roles to earn a bit of money. ended up going for some comptia certs and whilst they wont win jobs it'l show initiative and a bit of technical knowhow, but perhaps more importantly a good attitude

theoretica

If you want to, you could look on your career as a project -

What skills, qualifications and experience do you have?
What skills, qualifications and experience do the jobs you want require?

How can you fill any gaps?


In eight years you went from £15 to £28k - getting up to £40k in a couple of years is a big push compared to this. To have a chance you will need to be very proactive about your career and job.

Ja7188

As someone who's spent most of their working life in IT sales & relationship management, I'd suggest it's worth giving it a go - however, depending on where you live, you can probably expect a starting salary of £18-20k with an OTE of £25-30k. It's not unusual for people to try sales, decide it's not for them and then move back into other areas - so I wouldn't be too concerned about going back to the techie side if sales isn't for you...

If you're going to give it a go and can live on the sort of basic salary you can expect (don't rely on commission) then I'd suggest you get things moving quickly - at 34, you'll be a lot older than most of the people coming into the area.

Gary1885

Thanks very much for your responses! It's certainly good to hear that progression is possible and that it's not entirely through a lack of trying that my career never took off.

It's a little upsetting to hear that achieving a reasonable "adult" salary within a couple of years - after all of those years working in this industry - is still not likely to be possible and I'll be starting at the bottom again. I know a lot of people who achieved much more than this in their twenties. At 34, I'm starting to feel embarrassed and frustrated at my salary and in particular the lack of progression. £25,000 isn't much more than £12 an hour. I could go and get a cleaning job on that rate, so why put up with all the stress of an IT role?

Just to clarify, in my role of 9 years at the council I did gain certain experience above the remit of a desktop support role, albeit nowhere near to the extended I would like. A few items I should probably mention are:

ITIL v3 Foundation training and exam

PRINCE2 Training course - no exam and frustratingly I couldn't afford the £200 (iirc) exam at the time.
Carried out ISO20000 and ISO 27001 training. No exam, but I was part of the ISO20000 audit team and carried out internal audits with senior members of staff. I did 27001 training but left the audit team as I intended to leave by that point.

I did complete some courses in SQL in my own time, as I had considered going down that route and had seen jobs requiring it. I'm by no means a wizard in SQL though.

I do have plenty of Windows Server experience in terms of Active Directory, print servers and some experience with web filtering systems too. I have built servers, both physical and virtual and have used both VMWare and HyperV. I wouldn't consider myself an expert in it though; if anything beyond a reboot stops a virtual server from starting, I'm pretty much guessing my way around virtual disks, but that's generally because I didn't set it up I'm the first place and I suspect if I'd had more "end to end" exposure to things, I'd have a greater understanding.

I have also lead small projects in which I have had a team of technicians assisting me, which has largely been the linked of deploying images at public libraries, involvement in the opening of a new local history and archives library, including creating scanning kiosk machines etc. Some of this goes slightly beyond the scope of the standard "technician" role, but again still largely desktop. I did however enjoy the responsibility I had over the entire public libraries' IT network. I had assistance from the person who used to do that, but largely it was my network, my domain and I configured almost everything from the ground up from a server point of view. Firewalls were something I was never allowed access to until a few months before I left.

I suppose what I'm asking for in IT may not be possible, but in sick of being told I'm not ready for something when I've been ready for years!

I would have liked to have gone into some kind of team leader/management role, as I feel I have a lot to offer in that way, but in IT you have to prove yourself technically before you can do that.

To be honest, the thought of having to be on circa £25,000 for years on end until I can somehow prove myself depresses me. With regard to the training side of things, I did consider it but I just don't have the money to pay out on courses that will only get me another £25,000 job. I've been burned by a lack of progression and I really do not have any more time to waste.

In terms of sales, yes, I would be able to smash it, but again it's proving myself and starting at the bottom again. How long would it take to progress through a role? Am I really looking at another 10 years?

Ja7188

In terms of sales, yes, I would be able to smash it, but again it's proving myself and starting at the bottom again. How long would it take to progress through a role? Am I really looking at another 10 years?

Without wanting to sound discouraging, you won't know whether you can smash before you really get into it - so bear in mind my previous comment on a realistic starting salary. To get to a reasonably senior role, I'd say between 5 and 10 years depending on how the first few years go.

Where in the country do you live...?