Change of career into IT

smej

I plan on making a move to the IT industry. My background is totally unrelated so I have no previous IT experience or qualifications. For those already in the job (I appreciate its a huge area) is there anything I can do to boost my chances. I'm talking entry level here so probably 1st line support jobs to get me started. Eventually I may go down the route of Devops or something more specialised but I just want to get my feet under the table first. I've been looking at courses on Udemy and Professor Messors videos for the Comptia. The option of going back to university even part time is out of the window - I've been told its not really necessary anyway - and that the best thing to do is get certified.

Is there any courses specifically you can recommend? Anyone else done something similar and made a career out of IT without a degree?

Sandtree

Industry things are a funny thing because there are not many things out there that don't use IT and so if you work for Bank as a System Analyst are you IT or Financial Services?

DevOps is a methodology and whilst it blends roles more than a traditional waterfall approach would there are still those that are analysts, those that are developers etc. Whilst its hard to know as an outsider what roles are like etc (or even what roles exist) having at least an idea of what you want to do will help inform what kind of knowledge to try and gain.

Sideways moves in an organisation is always easier than coming in cold to a new industry to a new company etc etc... does your existing employer not have an IT department or is it all outsourced? If you want to do IT Helpdesk as your first step do you have any contact centre experience at all? What level 1 does can vary a fair lot, some can be purely ticket logging whereas others have slightly more experience for trying to do a one and done fix but there is clearly overlap with contact centre work.

Sorcerer2018

I work in IT and have done for 30 years, and I also started at the bottom and worked my way up. If you are new to IT would, I would say starting out means competing with a lot of other people for those entry level jobs, you need something to make you standout. Also age will be a factor, if you are older you can forget it, IT is a very ageist thing, and they would expect you to be young just out of universities for those types of jobs. 

Sorcerer2018

I remember when i first started out I was going for me first IT Support Job paying £12,000 a year, and I was up against people with years of experience, one guy was a form IT Manager LOL. And also remember if you try to get a job in the council you will need to know somebody who works their already, because they only do external job adverts just for show.

Sorcerer2018

In terms of courses, Windows 10 , Office 2019, and IT troubleshooting, perhaps later Windows Server/Exchange etc.

getmore4less

What sectors do you have experience if you can leverage that you can get in at higher levels and migrate over.

tacpot12

Training, experience and drive is what will make you successful. IT is the ultimate Knowledge industry - it is all about what you know, what skills you have and can prove you have. This is where third-party certification of your skills can be useful. 

To get experience, you might try looking for volunteering opportunities. 

AskAsk

i think nowadays it would be very difficult to get entry without an IT related degree.  i know of people who has IT degrees and they can't even get a job in IT and have to do something else.  extremely competitive to get into.

your best chance maybe to go to college and study.

smej

Thanks for all the replies so far. Certainly food for thought. 

Out of curiosity what are your backgrounds?

Dakta

I started an IT degree but I actually dropped out - I loved the IT side, but my course was (IMO) heavily mismanaged, I was made to do other peoples work (empthasis on group marked assignments) and it really fell apart for me, so despite doing well at College in a programming course I actually turned my back on IT and started life as.... a drainage engineer.

A lot, I mean an awful lot has happened since then,  and it's decades since I decided not to return to Uni but it's only in the last 18 months I've looked back into IT, I studied for the Comptia A+ and Sec+ and currently working towards CySA+ - then I'll probably move to some non comptia quals in the future, I'm also interested in courses that relate to GDPR. I got an opportunity out of the blue to apply for a contract role in a SOC (security operations center), surprised that I got it on the back of very limited experience but I was able to pull a lot of personal examples of programming and understanding through interview so i think the Comptia and my own personal interest helped there.

I held back from getting into IT because of my experience at Uni and the limited experience vs not having a degree. I suppose it's correct to say that a lot of companies are strict on the degree front. Interestingly though, now that I'm permanent and one of my duties recently has been to get involved in training new recruits, I personally don't see the difference, in fact people without or with lesser experience and quals can be a lot easier to mentor as I can build that confidence through guidance and growing competency than what they bring in. It sounds a bit backward that but as long as they do have the brain, knowledge gaps can be filled.

I do think having an IT degree would help, but I wouldn't actually cling to that too much, opportunities might be harder to find, but if you're willing to self invest on some courses and even build a personal portfolio of projects you might do just for fun it all helps. An IT career without a degree is definitely doable.

Coming back to your question though, i do personally rate the Comptia courses, every organisation has their view on courses but Comptia seem well recognised, you don't have to break your back to study for the exams and tbh they aren't drastically expensive route if you happy to self study and buy a few books.

Sandtree

smej said:

Out of curiosity what are your backgrounds?

Uni: Maths
Self taught: (ASP Classic), .Net and SQL for having a side hustle of programming websites
Work: 10 years of call centre (from age of 16), internal applicant to graduate scheme but offered a job in a business change team instead as a secondment with view to go perm
Currently: jack of all trades, do anything from business/system/data analyst up to programme manager... often do hybrid roles so manage a data workstream where I can act as Project Manager/Product Owner but also use SQL skills etc to do some of the analysis too