Asklemmy

I studied hard for a few months, got my A+ and network+ certs from CompTIA.

Got my first helpdesk job making about 47K. 3 years later I was making 85K as a sysadmin. Stay in Helpdesk for 12-24 months, keep studying, start to learn a major infrastructure brand, Azure, AWS, Red Hat Linux, Xen Server, Cisco, etc.

Stay aggro on salary, don't be afraid to jump from job to job as long as you're there for at least a year and you leave on decent terms.

And for the love of Tux, don't settle for piss pay. I can't tell you how many IT folks I've met already in the industry who are Sys admins/engineers/network admins, making 20%,30%,40% under the average pay in their area. Money isn't everything, but it sure as hell ain't nothing either.

And never forget: The company doesn't care about you.

Entry level networking technician. You can get a bunch of useful Cisco certifications for free on their website. Try to get yourself an old switch from ebay to practice setting up a small network, vlans etc., and you've got a solid start.

So I went to university on a general computer science course, so this might already discount this answer. However, during my final year, a friend who was already in the industry convinced me to push towards a cloud engineering role (systems engineering specifically with cloud services like Amazon and Azure). This was not something my course covered at all, so we went through containers, AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes etc. during our free time before he got me an interview for a junior role when I graduated. I was very lucky with my circumstances but I don't think I would've gotten the role without that extra study.

These roles are in demand and will be for the foreseeable future. If you have general Linux knowledge then you should be able to pick it up fairly quickly.

I'm a self-taught sysadmin. It took me ~3 years to get comfortable, and I'm srill learning stuff that feels like if not 100-level then at most 200-level course knowledge...

I started making a pivot to self-taught pentesting in hopes of breaking into red-teaming, but I'm stuck at finding time to practice and learn and still invest some time in the parts of life that aren't my job and/or future job. I enjoy doing it just for fun outside of the career potentials, but I've been burnt out for years from turning my current career into my hobby as well, I won't make that mistake again

I guess the only answer I have is: depends on how much time you plan on investing in self-teaching. I wouldn't say anything's necessarily out of reach, but I would say that learning the skills is only half the battle of getting employed.

I do have a little advice with my perspective: don't think of it in large timeframes, e.g. "I wan't to get to this goal within a year," do it in hours or less. Force yourself to sit down and do something that furthers that goal for X amount of hours each day; that way, you have a very clear metric and can start measuring progress by how much time you actually spent studying and applying for jobs and networking (as in building relationships with your peers and future employers... but also the other kind too).

Oh, another piece of advice: don't just read, watch videos and listen to lectures—learn by doing. Set up a home lab for whatever it is. At least a solid 80% of what you'll encounter in the field can be emulated with a good enough PC and the right software (yes, even cabling). And for everything else... Well, that's just good fun to own all those tools and gadgets and gizmos galore and so, so, SO much cable of every kind.

Last bit: are you having fun? If it's not fun to learn, it'll be soul-crushingly, mind-numbingly dull when it's your job. You don't get to do the cool new stuff most days, most days it's just replying to emails and forcing the users to restart while you observe because most of the time "Yeah, I already did that" means "I may not understand computers in the least, but I'm inexplicably dead certain that the thing the expert is telling me to do won't work." So make sure you're enjoying even those bits now

Otherwise, get out now while you still can and the Sunk Cost Fallacy hasn't kicked in.

It's a really bad time to get into it as a noob, especially self taught. There are jobs, but there's also alot of downsizing and layoffs in an already fairly saturated industry. Even lower end stuff right now you'll probably be up against people with certs, degrees, job experience.

If you're legitimately interested in IT and want to learn more on your own, you should! Find what interests you the most, and there will be a million resources available free and cheap. I don't think it's a good time to put all your career eggs in that basket though like it sounds you're thinking.

Honestly, if you're trying for zero to money, AFAIK trades are still hurting. Maybe look into trade programs at your local community College. It's not a cushy lazy white collar job but you'd potentially make similar or better money because everyone for 20 years has been clamoring for cushy lazy white collar jobs.

A foot-in-the-door job is colo datacenter tech. I know a major national company that pays about $20/hr and will take what they can get at that price point. Not interesting, not promote-able, bad schedules. But a resume item. Exposure to enterprise-grade equipment. While there, get the advanced certs you realy want and work on networking with the customers and vendors.

Pretty much anything if you're willing to crush out some certs. 365 is in-demand and you can learn everything on Microsoft's training modules. Alternatively, programming pays well if you're willing to learn the languages.

Once you get your foot in the door, focus on upward mobility by job hopping. Always take a better job title over higher pay if you want the big bucks later on.

Also bear in mind that most IT jobs favor personality over skill set, even if they deny it on paper.

A few years ago, I'd say web dev. I'd hire a junior web dev fresh out of a boot camp with only 6 months of experience at 60-80k.

Today, my company won't allow it, and I'm fighting to get new devs. We won't even take a junior without a bunch of core competencies, things that will take at least a year to pick up. But even if we did, there's a huge pool of applicants who want in.

I'll answer this from my perspective, which is that of someone who started out in a tech support role 30-odd years ago, and now run engineering operations teams in data centres.

One of the best teachers is experience, but it's hard to get that experience until someone gives you a chance. Support desk/helpdesk are great entry-level jobs that'll get you started. To help with your self-study for something like this (and if you have the means) consider starting a small homelab and growing from there.

Perhaps you can find a cheap managed network switch - either new or second-hand - that lets you start playing with VLANs. Maybe an SBC or two (Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, etc) so you can start to experiment with Linux, and hosting servers. That'll open the door to playing with other things down the track - Docker, nginx, etc.

The point is, when interviewing for entry level roles, I (and many hiring managers I know) will usually ask if a candidate runs a home network. By no means does that mean a candidate without one doesn't get due consideration but, when I see someone's eyes (and passion) light up when talking about their homelab, I know I'm onto someone who will grow and develop well in the role I'm hiring for.

If this sounds like a path you want to go down, a couple of useful communities where you can get info and advice on homelabbing are !selfhosted@lemmy.world and !homelab@lemmy.ml.

To add to all the other good advice in this thread. I just wanted to point out that the hardest part is going to be getting that first job. So pay attention to any advice about any positions that are currently actively hiring with little to no experience. An alternative is some networking/nepotism and leverage some connections to get you in your first job.

After getting some reasonable level of experience things get a lot easier. You still need to know what you're doing and be able to prove it, but you'll face less of an initial barrier and be more likely to get an interview.

Self study here, but I've been in IT for almost 30 years now.

For someone that is determined most of the certifications out there can be attained through self study. That's how I got my MCSE, CCNA, Red Hat Linux, and CLP (Certified Lotus Professional, yeah I know, no one has ever heard of it). I studied while working a helpdesk job and was hired by the sysadmin department of the same company. I attained the CLP, because at the time 2002 or so, there were not many Lotus/ Domino admins and there were a lot of companies, particularly insurance companies and Coca Cola, used it extensively. Being a Lotus/Domino admin got me a lot of attention at the time, but today it is worthless.

Knocking door to door with a cert and no actual experience will be a much tougher route to take, but it is definitely possible.

If it is what you want to do, there is no reason for you to crack a book today and start learning.

Vue.js, it's the simplest of the popular frontend frameworks

You can learn a hellton about sysadmin and DevOps by running a home lab and aiding that with some courses and maybe one cert or two but I wouldn't splurge on certs that readily.

Golang, Express.js, Nest, Flask, SQL (a must), maybe Spark if you dare. Any popular and expressive framework/language for full stack/backend, except for Rails and PHP, those are dying technologies despite their still relatively high popularity in some countries.

Maybe Flutter, Swift or React Native if you want to get into mobile dev.

Just go to a job board, then to learnxinyminutes.com, pick something and start with building small, then medium sized, then maybe more complex projects or contributing to FLOSS written using your tech of interest (but please, PLEASE don''t treat OSS contributions primarily as a way to get a job. Pick something you use instead. Try to figure out how you would implement something, do that and don't let the impostor syndrome win if it uses a tech you're familiar with whenever you want to open an issue on a git forge.

The term IT is extremely broad now, and it will depend on your interests, but it’s not all that difficult to get into.

There is quite a large demand now for certain skill sets where large companies that traditionally only hired people with specific degrees for IT roles are now opening those up to people without degrees at all.

Some general roles companies are in demand for now are web developers, data analysts, and cloud services.

Cloud services is also a broad category, but a lot of companies are looking for, and will be in demand in the near future, is a cloud storage engineer/ data engineer (however the company decides to spin it), where you essentially try to optimize the usage of storage the company is utilizing. You can easily learn the basics through AWS and really honing in on their s3 capability.

Anything related to data analyst/science is in high demand due to companies collecting so much data on their customers they have no clue what to do with it all. Data science teams basically figure that out for the company.

Easiest role to get your foot in the door would probably be IT technician/help desk, but in my opinion that’s also a harder one to break out of into other roles. It really depends on the company and how closely those help desk roles are aligned with other departments.

[off topic]

A while back I was off work for six months after injuring my hand at work. I'd never liked any of my jobs, but knew I had to earn a living.

Someone suggested this book. It lead me to taking a course and finding a career I really enjoyed. The career was something I'd never considered for myself, but it turned out to be a great fit for me.

"Discover What You Are Best At," by Linda Gail. Should be available in most libraries.

The first thing to answer is, where do you want to end up?

If your goal is development you probably want to start learning the basics of programming. You can get some of the academic side of things, for free, from sites like MIT's Open CourseWare site. Their Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in Python is going to be a solid start in that direction.

For systems administration, it can be good to start with the classic CompTIA Trifecta:

• A+
• Net+
• Security+

The study process for these should, at least, get you understanding the language of systems. I'd also suggest spending time learning Linux and maybe even consider the Linux+ cert, even if your plan is to be a Windows admin. Learning Linux often means learning a lot about how Operating Systems work in general and you can carry that learning into the Windows world where so much is abstracted away and hidden. It's also worth spending time learning about Kerberos, DNS (because it's always DNS) and Active Directory. Even if you work with Linux, you're very likely to have to interact with Active Directory (AD). Having basic knowledge of AD will be helpful for those touchpoints.
Also, if you plan to work in SysAdmin, expect to spend some time working a help desk. It's possible to skip this, but businesses don't like putting untested people in charge of servers. You're going to fuck up as you learn, this is usually less damaging when done on endpoints than servers. Suck it up butttercup and get the experience.

For network admin, I'm not as helpful. As others have suggested, getting an old switch and seeking Cisco certs is likely to be a solid start.

For "Cloud" based engineering, the major vendors all have certification paths. Azure, AWS and GCP all have pages you can research their certs. I'd go with AWS or Azure, as I hear more about them. But, that may just be the bubble I work in.

If you want to go into cybersecurity, go work in either systems or network administration for a few years then come back and look at transitioning. While Cybersecurity is the new hotness, you'll really benefit from a solid understanding of how the systems and network admin folks work. Sure, I have met some folks who went straight into security and did well. I've met far more who had zero clue about basic things like, "why is this sysadmin running psexec against this server?" I'm sure I'm pissing a lot of people off with this paragraph, but cybersecurity is not an entry level IT field.

Mostly, what you need is a natural curiosity and a willingness to try things and break stuff. Succeeding in IT is pretty easy, if you are willing to constantly be learning and trying stuff. The minute you get tired of learning or trying new things, it's time to move into management.

Operations.

I think everyone believe that their job is easy though. Because they've done it for so long. So take everyone's advice with s grain of salt

Like many others already said. Being self taught is ok, but employers need at least some kind of confirmation about your skills. So getting some kind of officisl certificate will make your job search a lot easier.

Microsoft offers a bunch of .NET certificates if you do their C# courses for example. You can also become a certified Linux professional.

Find something that interests you and then start learning by doing some tutorials. The most important thing is that you have fun and won't burn yourself out working in a field you don't enjoy.

Where I'm from there's demand for Web Devs, Java devs, .NET devs, It Support, Network Engineers, Embedded systems, whatever.

I think mobile development is best for this. Very technical, but still a lot of products and companies and not quite so spammed with bootcamps.

It took me 6months of playing around my organizations M365 tenant to become very proficient in the Power Platform (Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps) to the point where my last 2 jobs have all been related to solutions and training with M365.

All I do is use these tools and show other people how to do their work in it and all of a sudden I’m employable and in demand.

It’s not even really IT.

Another criterion might be to be self employed. I have little experience with that and it probably has it's pro's and con's but depending on what corporate culture you'll face as an employee. But it might be worth keep it in mind when choosing your profession.