Getting Started in IT, College? Certifications? My thoughts based on my IT career path.

I started my career and I see career because it was a hobby before career first job and IT back in 1995 so I've been doing this for a little while which brings people to a lot of questions they asked me of how do I get started in IT or what certification should I get or should I go to college and I want to qualify those statements right up front with this is a story of how I got to where I'm at and I didn't maybe choose the same path as someone else but that doesn't make it right or wrong the other problem is there's not a way to do a B testing I can't roll back in a time machine to my high school days which I graduated in 1994 and say what if I what I went to college instead of jumping right into IT or following an opportunity I have because there's not a way to replay those two scenarios for me to give you a strong opinion on it I'm gonna give you the opinion of my path but I don't automatically and I don't understand some people who do they found success about going to college and they go wow this college is stupid you shouldn't go it's a waste of your time and money bla bla bla I I don't pooh-pooh on that idea of going to college or getting certified even though I both lack certifications or a college education in a formal sense and I say formal sense because I've done a ton of training and reading because one common denominator that I will absolutely agree with is whatever your path to get educated is you need to get educated on this it would need to be very in-depth with IT it's a very complicated field you need to stay current with it you need to keep trying new technologies you don't want to be one of those people stuck going but I still love that old version of Windows and I still love that old version of the software and I don't like using new ones because we've run into a lot of IT guys like that IT guys girls IT people who are just stuck in the age-old ages they only like the old days when they have this thing so it to be good at it you do need constant forward education that doesn't necessarily mean but it could mean certifications it doesn't have to mean college it could mean college so my path started as a child I was hugely into electronics anything I could get my hands on that meant a lot of times literally garbage picking for all the luck Sonic's equipment I was probably nine or ten years old when I started doing this I garbage picked some of the old computers that I had that was in the 80s when I was a kid that just was an absolute fascination to me I did not have a family that had a lot of money that could afford to buy fancy things like Commodore 64 which would have been fancy back then so it wasn't easily affordable for my family just to give me technology but I was driven and passionate and garbage day was exciting to me I won't lie if I could find someone who threw out some piece of electronics so I could build something out of it so my trips were not to Toys R Us I was much more of a RadioShack kid I spent a lot of time here getting electronics so I've always been into this so a career night T and some of the electronics repair background that I have was kind of easy for me it was what I've always had a passion to do a lot of people say well I don't know where to get started on a show but I'm passionate about that becomes a bigger existential question I don't know why someone becomes so driven towards it and other people are not that's I don't know where you should start nighti some people should I be networking should I be computers I kind of suggest trying it if you don't know I've always been passionate about all of it and just kind of jumped around through paths so my first job was in 1985 that job was because I went around and just asked places are you hiring are you hiring just knocking on doors that was what you did back then there was no Google back in 1995 I I was online with a you mostly using a BBS and I use gateway online so I communicate with a lot of people online things like that like I've always been involved in the tech communities as well mostly online back in the dial-up days and then you know we had all the different search engines but it wasn't really how you found jobs it was more of a physical thing and I with two places now there's a lot of people that's interning is not a bad thing at all and it's I offered myself less as an intern more as I'll work for really cheap because I didn't have experience but I wanted to do it and I ended up working at a couple different places they didn't all work out and part of it was I didn't care for the management there and things like that but then I finally did land at a small mom-and-pop shop now it was great working for some of the other places because one of them sent me to room was very little to do because they opened a new store the owner had money but had no idea how computers worked and I sat and read books that was actually what I got paid to do which is pretty awesome it was a you know minimum wage of the time job I was a sales guy but they opened up in an area where there wasn't anybody coming in in a kind of a rural area so I spent all day nine hours a day at a store reading books all the time so I didn't get a ton of hands-on experience we'd only get maybe one customer a day granted this is in 1985 so it was kind of like I spent just poured through books and I've always been a bookworm that back in my electron I expect even in high school I used to skip classes just to read more engineering books electronics books programming books any books I could get my hands on that was just an absolute you know huge part of my career Ness comes back to the education I mentioned you have to get educated on this whatever your passion is my passion was as much as I could possibly absorb I guess I'd always been kind of a bookworm and not I don't mind dedicating 12 hours of my time to reading a technical manual you know subscribing to things like even a 2600 magazine that self collection of all those I was into kind of the hacking want to know how everything worked in-depth not just the you know surface area of it I want to know the real technical details of how things function how they worked now I still have that today I'm now 45 45 44 and I still have that same drive passion to constantly know what you know what how everything works in depth and take it apart it led me a lot to the open source and things like that so when it comes to certifications they weren't really that many available I mean if I would have gotten certified back in the 90s when I started getting into tech you you would have seen I think it was net not net where yeah was network Novell NetWare so you you know everyone had their Novell certifications back then then it became the Cisco certifications and things like that so certifications when you're running a business much less important matter of fact I have not been asked but maybe twice in my 15 years of owning this companies 2003 about certifications I don't I remember someone asking and I just said no and they didn't they kind of glazed over it they don't really care the one client that cared was actually very amusing we met with them it was kind of an awkward meeting because we were taking over from a complete disaster where they had lost data they had lost the company been down for seven days due to failures from the other IT company and it was a calamity of errors with them and I mean I don't I don't necessarily like to dog on the other IT company but the rack mount that on the wall where the you know MDF he may call it where all the racks and switches are fell off the wall landed on the server and they didn't have backups to the server that it crashed onto so that's couldn't be described more as the IT guys fault that's not like maybe the client didn't spend the money right or something like that no they the thing fell off the wall and crashed into the server the most physical literal way you can crash into the server and so which then they found out the backups weren't right so then they went through data recovery to recover data this is the IT company had sold them the rack installed the racks sold them a server and configured the server and their network so there's no way to blame previous companies they have been their IT people for four years they weren't anymore and I laughed because apparently the warning signs were there because this IT company had a series of failures and this leads up to the conversation about certifications so the owner looks at me and he says so what kind of certification she have and I'm like well none is there something specific that we need to you know working equipment I'm just being honest he goes no he goes every time I yelled at the other IT company they told me they were certified I want someone who's not certified because I was gonna certify your ass right out the door he goes I'm sick of it and I just gotta laughed and I think that becomes a bragging point to many people and honestly when someone brags to me about oh I'm certified in US I look at them as you could bring your gestated information and write in a paper great that's that's fine it's not a requirement I have people with certifications I don't require it it's not where I where I go when it comes to hiring but if you work in a corporate environment this is where we're gonna have a big difference here if you're applying for a job you know I really want to be a network engineer XYZ company and they have a requirement that I have this cert well companies use it for a slightly different reason isn't necessarily because they want to know that you know the thing and they require certifications but it becomes an HR thing HR goes how do we know if someone knows Cisco we want someone who's Cisco certified so we put that on there as a requirement on the resume also creates a filter for them if you have at least gone through the certifications they will have an idea that you must know an understanding to some extent of it there's further testing they need to do but at least they can qualify that off the checkbox because it's really hard to quantify what we know is IT people it's very fuzzy because the the market shifts and changes so fast that certifications college all those things they are good filters when you're getting a job to talk from an HR perspective to try and say I just need to weed some of these people up because if I just put nothing on there I would just have everybody applying and that would be very problematic so they sometimes just use them as a methodology there was a while here and I work at a training automotive they actually put a two-year college degree as a requirement just to beat a line worker putting parts on there which they didn't even care what your degree was in but it was a filtering method so when they were hiring people that the line workers in the automotive they wanted degrees because that we have less applications because so many people are applying so sometimes they're used as that so you may need to get certified so even though I don't have certifications and I found success in the IT market you may need to get certified because your career path is going to require you to or your desire is to work at a place that requires certifications you're gonna have to get certified so which one should you get depends like I said comes back to the existential question of what do you want to do and once you decide that look at the careers that you want this is you can go to the any of the job boards look a place is hiring and go you know what I want to be a network engineer I want to be a field engineer doing this I want to be an infrastructure wiring engineer whatever this is you know whatever you want to do look at the search that those jobs are asking for and maybe those search even if you just take the study exams and play around so you get an idea what that job entails that wouldn't be bad now you can also look at doing some of the internships at places a lot of places do offer a limited amounts of internship you're trading your time but you get some learning experience and it also may help you decide what you want to do but the certification thing are they required which one should you give it's hard to say now a good place to start to bring it all together might be in helpdesk help desk is the lowest on the totem pole of doing IT answering the phone and telling people did you reboot it that's no unfortunately a lot of times what you end up doing but that also will kind of give you perspective so if you get a job in corporate help desk a lot of them require just really basic easy to get certifications or programs even right here in Michigan we actually a few programs are some free training that people can get to get them a help desk job it gets you in the market you may be really smart you may be good at it and you may progress really fast you may not and you may decide that this is not the career path for me so it helped us because if it's starting point where you're going to do the most basic of functions hopefully not get too burned out dealing with that so when it comes to these certifications in the italic so there's not an easy answer but what you can do and probably why you're here now because you're looking this up is there's a lot of good YouTube videos out there you can watch some of mine I've done stuff on technology there's a lot of YouTube videos when it comes to all kinds of different things you want to learn there's plenty of information on the web that is still free that you can go and learn there's the tons of people who maintain a lot of their you break now in 20 team reddit is so great resource to interact with a lot of the sysadmin community and even if you don't even post on reddit I learn a lot just by going and reading there a lot so all these different online forums between Spiceworks reddit Stack Exchange which you know good or bad you're always going to get someone who's going to tell you to RTFM but just read through all the problems and solutions you can kind of get an idea of a lot of things and then start tinkering that is the biggest thing grab something like I said when I was a kid I would I would go around grab anything I can and start building with it and just figuring out how it all works going through manuals going through you know any book I could get my hands on it and try to tinker writing basic programming and things like that that is a huge part of it it's just constantly doing that now I do this as a career but I still as a hobby so to speak come in here and just tinker with things how does this work how can I make this work let's come up with a project idea you know there's so and it's actually less expensive than ever to buy things like raspberry pies and put them together I mean the kits are really reasonably priced and you can start tinkering the biggest thing is just constantly pushing forward constantly learning and keeping curious and this kind of goes back to the college so I didn't go to college either College is as I understand it from my friends who did go to college a strong structured learning that you may learn how to learn this is what a lot of people that I that seem to be successful get out of it not that they just learned on the things that they were taught through college they learned how to learn and I think that's an important thing on there and it it does work I mean there's there's various as those people went through college like it's not the career path I chose but it's not one that I say you shouldn't choose maybe you need that structure I find a lot of people it's just over the years I've realized some people require very structured environments to work in I don't know why they do I have a very hard time with structured environments applied to me versus I build structured environments the way I see fit which is what led me to being a business owner and that's a lot of what I'm what I do here if you want to take a bigger perspective of not just running an IT company but I build structure for in process that my employees file that's a lot of what it comes down to in your business so if you're thinking about coming into the IT business and I've talked about this before where sales is one of your hardest parts but something really important as an IT business is creating processes and structure and it's really probably for any business who if you want expand it out from there you create processes and structure and purpose for people to do to make the Machine run that machine just happens to be a business with a bunch of people as the moving parts of that business so process is people bring computers in for repair or people call for networking repair and there's a whole structure by which we handle that in a process that I've given to people now if you want to start an IT company and you're the one that runs the entire process without documentation without that and you're the center it by the legal definition you have a business you probably file taxes but by the bigger definition of business you just have a job because you haven't created processes that need that can operate without you in those processes may involve people may not depending on you know what your systems are but that's just something to think about a perspective there but one thing you will get from college one thing really important that you were going to get out of college is a good base of people that you know and you see this a lot and this is something that I know I'm missing I'm not going to college is your network of friends that you have that are also successful because when all these people come to college a lot of them come together for the purpose of learning for the purpose of expanding their knowledge so they're very driven especially if you get into let's say an MBA program a business program you have a bunch of people who with a common goal starting a business so a lot of them will achieve that goal at some level of success they also at the same time business owners such as myself and lots of us we we help other business owners that's kind of how it is we find people with Drive and passion I'm never afraid to say hey you know I volunteer time I share information here on YouTube and other platforms I volunteer time at some of these startups there's a startup incubator that I volunteer about a day a month I help and consult with just helping companies get started and they message me a lot and I you know hey this is how we do this so you know I'm willing to give back to the community you know you'll find a lot of other people are and you'll find a lot of them Bill Gates in some of these other ultra successful people my feelings are mixed on Bill Gates it's a different discussion but you'll find that oh his college buddy Steve Ballmer became their other college buddy became another position you'll find a lot of these people got together under a common goal so that's one thing I did miss in college by finally following a career path that didn't have that group of driven people with a common goal I missed out on that and it's funny talking to some of the business owners and just having unrelated IT having conversations with what there are best things from college and I think some of the most honest answers I got from some of them Sochi one was flat-out he says I met all the contacts that built my multi-million dollar company when I was in college you know the son of this guy he sent his son to college the son was a very good at business dad was great at business I started a company that was complementary to them they used my services they were my first big contract landed and his friends use me at my company and there's this inner relationship that helps a lot because who you know as much as you may not like it who you know does have a giant influence on there and it's not necessarily like there's some political you know underpinnings and manipulation of the world like someone likes to play know people buy from people they like it's kind of simple they know you and they don't how do they know one company from another it's really hard to subjectively like we've brought up how it's hard to qualify an IT person it's hard to subjectively decide whether companies could are bad knees these qualifications just scale up to business so they go well I like Tom I met him at an event he seems pretty sharp I will hire his company to do it the thing so this is why he would go to all these networking events and stuff like that back on to the heat getting started in IT career for a diverse too much into other topics so if you want to go to college for it it's not necessarily bad one downside right now here in the US as I understand from looking at it and the fact that I have kids coming up on college age there is a lot of money on couch so please carefully think this out before you go into debt trying to decide what you want to do this is a really you know important thing so don't take your decision lightly research as much as possible like I said don't take my opinion for it just because I didn't go to college don't just check off the college time didn't go to college and he's successful or you know this person is a dropout and they're successful because there's a ton of examples like that but they're often going to be edge cases College is not necessarily a bad thing I'm not just saying absolutely not go I'm saying carefully think about before you put yourself in debt second you know really decide what you want to do NIT because I know some people that went to college for IT hated it and now I have a career in some other place and they're still paying off the loans on a college degree they're not using so that's just a lot to think about if you have free college awesome if you're in someplace outside the US that just has some type of free system and nothing I know is free someone's going to go ranting on this I know it's paid for by taxes or whatever the method by witches paid something think about now I do like in kind of a third topic might be vocational classes they seem pretty good we had a vocational class back when I was in high school and this is 1993 I took a COBOL programming class so I don't know what value provides it was probably relevant back when COBOL was relevant in the 90s and that's right well in eighties COBOL was relevant and starting to become irrelevant but I had a class on it and then I've mostly got in trouble in class for hacking the computers they never proved it was me but it was they had a pretty good idea I was just having fun with it and changing the names and the teacher kept his password on the desk so literally that post-it note password problem a computer teacher in the 1990s had that problem and I all I did was change all the names to be on my friend's name so they had a strong suspicion it was me but you know they just yeah so before I get too over our topic on that it's back to my passion and curiosity for these things so vocation don't rule that out the biggest underlying thing I want for this entire videos you think is you have to constantly be learning you have to constantly educating you don't be afraid to tinker with this build your own virtual lab get a Raspberry Pi stir making likes blink on it start with the most simplest of the product and keep going up from there you can find in right now I believe they're offering a like an azure you can spin up all kinds of basic instances they offer you some of the hours for free I think Google has the same thing in our cloud stuff so you can just start playing with their cloud and doing that there's a ton of online training places if you decide programming is the thing you want to do now I got into coding a little bit when I was younger I did basic programming in QBasic for those of you that remember that I wrote programs on the counter I wrote programs on a trs-80 that I took apart had to fix a chip in it that was in the garbage I did get a T SATA the garbage picking that was one of my best finds ever and so that you know there is ways you can start learning way easier than when I was a kid so it was hard I did get my parents to drop me off at the library to fry and find these now you can go there and there's just tons of free courses you just google free programming courses and they'll start you through a lot of basics which language you start with I don't know try all of them once you have a concept of structured programming you'll learn which languages you love and hate and you'll find that maybe you really have a passion for doing it this way or doing it that way but there's so much you can do to learn and start with hello world that's why we all start as programmers echo hello world oh it prints something on there awesome you know these are different things you can do to start and Linux big passion there of course being open source I've always liked that because I think that's one of the underlyings of Linux is the fact that they've had this community of open-source Ness and being able to get it for free so you can start tinkering with it and it kind of brings you easier to hear wow I can learn how to set up a server I can run my own web server in my house without licensing Microsoft later and even Microsoft if you want to get into some of that you can get 180-day evaluations of their server software download it find something loaded on and do it it does not I have my tour of a virtual lab it does not cost a lot to get a virtual lab stuff it's not insurmountable a matter of fact it's substantially less than college you can find old servers that are being decommissioned from companies on you can find them on Craigslist you can find cheap old servers sometimes that you can take home and just start building it check out reddit our home lab there's all kinds of people in there to have guides and tutorials how to build your home lab and start you know playing with this stuff and this is what leads you to that career in IT is that passion to figure it all out you build your home lab you figure out how to build virtual machines you figure out how to do networking my friend who does Cisco he's absolutely amazing him as a wonderful career he is flown around to do some of the really high-end routing work if you've ever been in his garage and seen how he built all this he has a garage full of every Cisco thing he came up with every lab scenario and built his own giant wall of Cisco stuff man and he had to put extra electrical lines just while he's all the stuff here but that's what he does he learned all of this his passion was he just kept taking the old Cisco stuff learning it you can find these old routers for cheap puts them all together plays and tinker's with them and learned how to do all the networking so these are all the things you can do to kind of get in i T like I said I I know your maybe came here looking for a solid single answer of do I go to college you know yes or no right now because I gotta make a decision do I you know do I take this course or do I not that I can't choose you know my path was not going to college I don't have certifications it was just raw passion for this and that's what's worked for me I do well without structured environments I'd have no problem just grabbing books and reading it and just heading right into the project I still do that here you know I'm 45 44 years old I'm still taking things apart because I want to know how they work you know even some my reviews I'm like I got the screws out of things all the time I want to know what's inside I want to look at the chips inside that still fascinates me so that maybe is how you are maybe that's why you're here at this video because you're like I'm my playlist is nothing but how-to videos it has just been some amazing YouTube has been an amazing platform for all the people and all the problems that it may have the big perspective I still have on it is there's no better way at scale for me to share my knowledge with people share knowledge with people in general YouTube has really raised the bar and it's a great platform for knowledge sharing when it comes to electronics and things like that when it comes to controversial topics that's a whole other issue I'm not debating right now but obviously that's where people get their problem if you turn it into a news site I don't think that's the best platform I all the time find some of the best knowledge on here how to take apart things well I have a phone that I'm gonna fix my wife's phone is messed up and I'm going to I watched three YouTube videos on it I think I know how to fix it and I'm you know you look at youtubers like jerry-rigged everything the guy does some of the great testing that you don't want to do yourself you don't want to crack your screen this is what this platforms for and I think this is absolutely can help slingshot your career into IT and there are companies that offer paid services so once you kind of go okay I've gotten as far as I can as many videos as I can but I still need more in-depth knowledge on a specific subject that I can't find it you may have to pay for some of it but honestly some of the online training probably a whole lot cheaper than college and will give you the knowledge you need because to me the most important this goes for my staff this goes for people I work in the industry the most important is that you're knowledgeable on the subject not that you can pass a test and regurgitate the answers and know the answer if I give it to you but can you actually do it do you understand what you're doing or you just typing keystrokes you just go I don't know why it does it but if I type this sequence of commands that's it and maybe you're not curious more than that and that's that's where your are that's that's fine I guess but it's probably not where you're probably for me if you're like that but if you're truly passionate truly curious this is an amazing career I really enjoy IT it's challenging it's diverse it changes quickly but how do you get here start with passion I'm gonna I will leave with that and you know I'm gonna quit rambling on about everything else make your own decision on college really think about that because I said if you're going to go into debt over it it's definitely a life decision you should not take easily certifications if you want certifications go for it if that's the career path and you go I want this job at this place they require this cert I guess you're gonna have to get it that's that's probably we're going to go other net stay curious and keep reading alright hopefully this was helpful with some of that I know I kind of babbled on a bit but hopefully this was helpful I'm gonna send this as a reply to people who want a definitive decision that sorry I can't give that definitive decision thanks for watching if you like this video go ahead and click the thumbs up leave us some feedback below to let us know any details what you liked and didn't like as well because we love hearing the feedback or if you just want to say thanks leave a comment if you wanted to be notified of new videos as they come out go ahead and subscribe and the bell icon that lets YouTube know that you're interested in notifications hopefully they send them as we've learned with YouTube anyways if you want to contract us for consulting services you go ahead and hit orange systems comm and you can reach out to us for all the projects that we can do and help you we work with a lot of small businesses IT companies even some large companies and you can farm different work out to us or just hire us as a consultant to help design your network also if you want to help the channel other ways we have a patreon we have affiliate links you'll find them in a description you'll also find recommendations to other affiliate links and things you can sign up for on lawrence systems comm once again thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 10,000

Keywords: it training, tech certifications, it jobs, i.t. career questions, network engineer, what i.t. certification should i get, information technology certifications, it certifications, computer certifications, higher education, professional certification, information technology, i.t. certifications, a+ certification, a+ certification training videos 2017, professional certifications

Id: NMnVvbWSj2s

Length: 28min 38sec (1718 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 18 2018