If you haven’t read about getting your creds for IT, you should read another blog I've written to give a bit of insight into the credentials you should aim to achieve getting before starting the IT career journey. Why creds are important to your IT career journey is that it gives you credibility to IT job opportunities. Organizations want to hire not only the potential of a candidate but also the abilities a person brings to the role.

For newcomers to IT, I typically recommend Help Desk as the best start to your IT career. Why? Help desk is a very broad IT role where individuals in this role will learn a great deal of infrastructure, networking, and core basic troubleshooting skills. In this role, you get exposed to all types of problems and issues brought to you by your organization’s users, as well as you get exposed to how your organization works with all the systems that they use. This job is the epitome of problem solving. On top of this, there is a lot of IT respect in the IT community for individuals who have help this role.

Ways to prepare for getting a career in IT:

- Map out your goals and make a plan

o Put a date on your goals for when you’d like to achieve them.

- Find a mentor

- Find a coach

- Look at job postings

o Look for entry level or part time positions.

o Look at smaller organizations.

- Help desk

o Think of applying anywhere and everywhere from local organizations to universities/colleges to public sector or private sector.

- PC repair

o Think something like Best Buy’s Geek Squad.

- Still having trouble?

o Get Certification

- Part of getting “Credentials” in past posts. Proving you have enough baseline knowledge in a subject area.

o Get Nonprofit work

- Ask to help assist with any technical work or ask to shadow IT support at the organization.

o Help friends and family IT work you’ve assisted with in a home environment

- Be sure to highlight this in your job search as a way to highlight nontraditional experience.

- Get the IT job?

o After a year on the job, look for growth opportunities to expand out your skillsets in tech.

Breaking into any new career can be a daunting task, but when you put your mind to something, great things can come your way with time & persistence. One of the amazing things about having a career in IT is that there is great trajectory in one’s career path, you can continuously build upon your skillsets and move into jobs that have great compensation, rewards and work life balance. This is demonstrated in the images below. If you were to take a job at a local sandwich shop, you would be more likely making sandwiches for a long time before even a managerial role may pop up, even after that the next type of position that may come your way is to be the store manager or store owner. With a career in IT, there are opportunities in cloud, in networking, infrastructure, in web development, app development, in security, the list goes on with these types of specializations. The more specialized you become or even the more broad you become, the more opportunities will come your way for advancement.