How to Become an IT Professional

oh my God man last night man last night you missed it I was hanging you know with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who were you know chomping Cuban cigars drinking drinking fine fine ass whiskey let me tell you Bill Gates knows how to pick whiskey but uh you know we're sitting there we've got a little supermodels beside us and uh well well Steve Jobs let's point that way I mean he doesn't know how to match his supermodel to his clothes I mean like uh like uh you know you got Armani on you need to have a good Halle Berry with you you know Armani requires to go to Halle Berry super model on your arm now if you're doing I don't know Gucci Prada ah now that that there is a Heidi clue so you know you get a little prod on you got a clue you got Armani you know you got Halle Berry I mean that that that's that that's how you dress that's how you style but you know Steve you want me to ISD because it doesn't understand any of that stuff but uh this is better than Wozniak you ever seen Wozniak oh but you know what I wish he could have been there but you know of course of course you know you can't be there yet you've got this training program to go through and just as soon as you're done with your training program man you're gonna be hanging with us so I know it's a little expensive but I mean you threw down what 10 20 maybe 30 000 for this training program and uh you know I know it's gonna take you a little time I mean five six months but let me tell you when you're done with that program you're hanging with us I mean you're driving cars you're driving wait a minute I mean it's it's it's good you got money I mean I know you have faith in these training programs and I have faith in these training programs and with the faith that we have in all these computer training programs out there oh we can do amazing things in your life let me tell you in six months your life is gonna be amazing I tell you what though you know you know something that we can do with this Faith you know you got you got faith that you know for you know 10 20 30 000 in a few months in school you can you could be making money and people will care about you you know with that Faith with that Faith there's there's another way you can make money make even more money you see in Florida I have this wireless bridge to sell you lots of Lots so did you notice a little bit of sarcasm there in that uh that opening bit well um I don't know this this class should we call it a class maybe a seminar I don't know maybe uh maybe a sit down and shut up and let me talk for uh for half an hour to tell you about this wonderful wonderful I.T industry that you're thinking about getting into um I'm doing this little whenever we're gonna call it because of a simple little blog post that I that I posted a few months ago and the blog post said Beware computer training.com and their ilk and it was just I don't know a few paragraphs about my thought of all this modern computer training where people spend twenty or thirty thousand dollars for some stupid little certificate and then think they're gonna take over the world that blog post alone could be its own website I mean I've gotten thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of hits off of this uh stupid little one blog post that's there I probably gotten more more hits to that single post than I darn near have to my entire web the rest of my website So today we're we're going to talk about what it is to be an I.T professional and if you're thinking about going into this field what you should expect um let's start let's start back in the beginning for a moment I want to talk about something called a.com boom let me tell you the.com boom it was amazing and it really was everything that you're trying to be sold into now in the.com boom you could start from being a high school nothing to uh to making seventy five thousand dollars in a single year when I went through my training program back in 99 you came out of an mcse a Microsoft certified systems Engineer program that cost you ten thousand dollars you came out of that making forty to fifty thousand dollars a year if you did one little additional course called a CCNA it's about a 40-hour course and another test you were up to 75 000 in one year and I swear to you that was the real world and that is what it was like uh in my my hometown here Baltimore if you opened up the Baltimore Sun our newspaper classified ads for computer services or computer technicians alone were bigger than every other employment section so I mean the the the classified section for computer for computer help wanted was was thick I mean it was it was as thick as some small town newspapers just for how many computer technicians they needed once you've finished any program if you didn't get a job immediately uh you you know you talked to the recruiters and I talked to a lot of them I mean they were you would go to Convention centers convention centers were full of recruiters for I.T people and it wasn't it wasn't once a year I mean this was once a month and you go there and even if you didn't have the right experience they would look you square in the eye and everyone would say it and everybody knew it it would say you know you don't have the experience but get six months experience and you'll be golden and from that point on you'll make a good salary and everything will be great and it was true it was true let me tell you those were wonderful times I mean my uh my first job in computers at 23. I had a telephone line to the travel Department if I needed a place to stay or needed a plane ticket I just called them up and said hey I need to be in Boston in five hours and uh can we put me on a four-star hotel tonight I was 23 years old oh it was great and then the boss cap happened so that was the boom that was wonderful that was where uh you know I knew a buddy of mine who at 21 was making a quarter million dollars a year he was a geek you know how he got girls you know how he got girls to go out with him he'd buy them Versace dresses like literally if you went out on a date with this guy he'd make sure you're looking good so uh so even though he was a bit geeky yeah still he's still got the dates I can't blame him hell Versace dress I might go out with him so uh so that's with the.com boom was like and then came the.com bust and then came after the.com bust and we are in a wonderful career field I I'm still a computer guy right now I'm going back for my Master's Degree in it I love this field it's a great field there's endless possibilities but if you're walking in to some little training program you drop twenty thousand dollars on the table and you think anybody is gonna care in six months when you walk out you're fooling yourself nobody's gonna care you're you're gonna be very lucky if you get a job so uh so the rest of this uh this little conversation I'm gonna go over what what the current I.T landscape is like and uh if you're not too depressed at the end of it you're going to understand what you really need to do to be successful in this field and what you really need to do to to make that money and uh to earn that Prestige that most people think that you're gonna get simply by earning some piece of paper from Microsoft so so stick around and we'll have a little talk now the first thing we need to do is differentiate between two types of people that work in the technology and computer fields we have geeks on the one side and we have Tech workers on the other so what's what's the difference you might be asking now these people fundamentally it might look like they're doing the same thing Geeks work on computers Tech workers work on computers build websites Tech workers build websites Geeks install telephone systems workers and install telephone systems what's the difference between these two types of people well gigs I mean if we should really call them Geeks well we'll just call them Geeks to make it easy Geeks are innovators Geeks are the people that use technology to try to find better ways of doing things so if a geek builds a website as soon as he's done building the website then he might start playing with the server code to see if the website will run faster or if he installs a server system as soon as he's finished installing that server system and maybe while he's installing that server system he's going to find better ways for that system to function and to operate you look at a Geeks kind of like like with Google is uh you know they were trying to find a better way to search the web way back on the day I mean we had search engines like lycos and Yahoo but the guys over at Google said hey we want to we want to find a better way of searching the web and so they developed they created Google so that's what a geek is what a tech worker is the tech workers kind of the person that just keeps everything on running I mean it's the difference between a geek think of Henry Ford or a tech worker your local uh car mechanic Tech workers are fine wonderful people but Tech workers are the people that just go through and slog day in and day out to keep the systems that have already been created kind of just up and running I mean they make might make things a little better during the course of their work but they're really not trying to innovate they're not trying to change anything so a lot of unfortunately Tech workers you'll find in the government you know they came up with some email system 50 years ago uh you know 10 or 20 years ago and instead of trying to find a better email system they're just chugging along making sure the same one works this little conversation we're having is going to be more more targeted for the Geeks you know how do you innovate how do you change because that's where I think the fun is you know if I wanted a normal dead-end job I wanted to have taken all those tests to get it um and it's where the money is the success The Prestige because when you develop things people are impressed you know you go to job you know you go your nine to five job nobody's gonna Pat you on the back at the end of the day that's what your job is you know if you go into your company and you totally revolutionize how they do Communications well that's when you get the patterns back so um so this this conversation is more for the Geeks if you're a tech worker Tech workers are like any other uh career Fields really is uh if you kind of like computers but you want just a normal steady job that you're going to go to day in Day Out pick up some book or go to your little academic counselor or college and they'll tell you how to get one of these boring jobs they'll say you know get a little bachelor's degree do an internship here and then you know when you get a hired by some major Fortune 500 company you just go there for the rest of your life until you die from a heart attack behind your computer terminal yay so uh so that that's that's the way Tech workers should go so I just I just told you everything you needed to know if you're a tech worker get a bachelor's degree get an internship go and work in a company until you die the rest of this class will be for those Geeks out there that really want to really want to to see what technology can do uh push the edges and and and earn the benefits that come from from people who who push and succeed okay so now that you're ready to become a geek the first thing that we need to talk about is the age-old argument between training versus education for training training is vocational training you go to places like computer training.com you go to test college or something uh you go to hot h-o-t-t you go to any one of these training companies and what they do is they teach you how to use a particular type of technology so if you want to use administer servers you go and you take the server class and you'll learn how to install and maintain a Microsoft Windows Server if you need to understand how a telephone system works we'll go over to an Avaya Technical Training Program and they would teach you how a telephone PBX works that's what training is training is very specific training on a particular product and it has its place I have been to what do I have I have 1600 hours of vocational training so I'm not arguing against vocational training it has its place education on the other hand education comes from colleges or universities education is a more rounded approach to teaching you about your profession and that is a difference vocational programs teach you about the technology education teaches you about your profession when you're starting out I would argue you need more information about your profession than you need about any particular product so when you go to college you're going to learn about more than one particular product so if you go to a class on client server architectures at a university you're going to learn about Linux you're going to learn about Unix if they're really a avant-garde you might learn about Microsoft or uh Mac or Apple OS 10 probably not but you might and you're going to learn about Microsoft so when they teach you about client server architectures they're going to teach you about all client server architectures now at the end of this you may not really understand how to build or maintain a Windows server but you will understand how all these different types of operating systems work and you'll understand the pros and cons of any particular one you may not be able to install any particular one but you understand the pros and cons of it whereas if you go to a training program you will come out and you will understand how to install that Microsoft server but you won't learn anything about Linux and you won't learn anything about Unix and you won't learn anything about web or Cloud architecture because you were there to learn about a server so as a new person like I say I would argue for education I would say that you should go to a college and at the minimum get a two-year degree and preferably get a four-year degree when you're starting because you will get an overall idea of all the technologies that are out there and on top of that you'll learn things like project management you'll learn how to how to pick between two different types of product so not simply oh this one's faster but it'll look at things like return on investment so if you buy a Linux computer that's free but then all of the technical support is incredibly expensive that may and at the end of the day be more expensive than a Windows server that you would purchase for a thousand dollars but all of the knowledge to maintain that Windows server is in-house and you've already paid for it see those are the types of things that education will give you the final thought on education versus training is one thing that you have to understand and I try to stress this to everybody is you cannot do i t or technology as a job for the money I mean I suppose you can but you'll be miserable you really will be miserable this career path this profession requires a certain mindset it requires a certain ability from the individual that not everybody has and not everybody can learn um I am very good at this I mean it comes it's It comes naturally it's people see me do my work and they're amazed at it because their minds don't function that way now here's the problem if you go for training to get into this career field versus education if you drop twenty or thirty thousand dollars on a training program you're not going to realize whether or not you can do this profession Franklin maybe until you're in it but you're definitely not going to know until you're two or three months into your training program so if you have a six month training program that you pay thirty thousand dollars for three months into it you may find out this is not for you and I had an employee that was like this he started working for me and after two weeks I looked at him I said what what are you doing here you don't you don't you don't understand you don't have the capabilities to do this job you have the intelligence you can memorize all this stuff but you can't look at the problem in the way that you need to look at the problem to be successful you know it's not just about Road memorization so imagine if you take this training program you spend thirty thousand dollars you get three months into it and then you find out this career field name for you and that's what's going to happen to a lot of people this career field is not for most people not for 98 of the population just isn't that's fine but you're going to find that out three months into the program after you've already told them you're going to spend pay thirty thousand dollars after you've already taken out the student loan for thirty thousand dollars you're gonna find out this field isn't for you and so even if you finish to the end of the six months you're not going to continue in this profession therefore you're not going to make enough money to pay back the loans to make it worthwhile thirty thousand dollars for the loans is a lot of money and then what do you do then you try to find another profession or it's it's just horrible now think of this if you go to a college one twenty thousand dollars will get you more than associates degree in most places that's almost a bachelor's degree for twenty thousand dollars we're in state tuition not saying if you go off the Harvard if you go in-state tuition 28 to 30 000 is about a bachelor's degree now here's the thing you start your bachelor's degree you go you're learning things you're doing the program a year two years into it you go ah computers how was I thinking what do you do then you go hey no problem you switch to another major you go to chemistry psychology philosophy who knows you continue on your way you get your degree and hey no harm no foul you spent you know you were in a couple of computer classes that ended up being a waste of time but but at the end of the day you have a bachelor's degree and if you decide to get a normal job you know not in the I.T field if you decide to go be a manager they'll go hey look he has a bachelor's degree or she has a bachelor's degree they're a worthwhile person or if you you know try to get into you decide another profession that you need a graduate degree for well you already had your bachelor's degree so you can go on and get that uh that graduate degree as a nurse or whatever you want so with a bachelor's degree as you're going through it one you can change your mind before you're done and get a degree in something else and two even if you get all the way to the end uh you know you still have a bachelor's degree our society respects bachelor's degrees our society does not respect stupid little pieces of paper if you get done with your six-month program and you go to get a job as a manager and you go hey look I finished a six-month program I mean well that's better than the high school dropout but uh you know they're not going to be that impressed if you say hey I have a bachelor's degree well now you you're off and running the other thing with this field is that you need experience so in six months you're not gonna get that much experience because all you're going to do is go into your classes and Hammer through your classes if you go through a bachelor's degree program during that four-year process you can truck along and gain experience as you go so the first year you can help at the the little I.T help desk that your college has you can go out and help add non-profit organizations that may want free help and you need experience all these programs come up with a bachelor's degree even unpaid internships paid internships all of these things are available to you when you go through a bachelor's degree program so not only at the end of a bachelor's degree will you come out and you will have a bachelor's degree but if you're smart if you don't party entire time you you come out with real experience like I say as you've worked at a help desk you've done these internships with these companies you come out and you're you are a viable employee you have a bachelor's degree you have experience and honest and obviously you love the field compare that to about the same amount of money you come out of a certificate program you have a certificate so that's the difference you come out for the bachelor's degree you are a well-rounded professional you come out with a certificate and great you know how to install a few different Technologies so I would argue for you that you need to get education now we need to talk about getting your your first job that uh you know that pays the bills this is going to be probably a horrible nasty evil experience and if you go to one of these training programs what I'll tell you is it's still a horrible nasty nasty horrible experience here's something to keep in mind you know all of these training programs they towel their whole uh in Employment Office you know they they have professional recruiters they have professional employment staff to get you a job yeah I don't know what these professional staff do day to day and 40 hours a week because I don't think they really get very many people with jobs back of the day back of the.com Boom remember that back when sky's the limit it's wonderful lots of money okay my IT training company had one of these uh recruiting offices and they were completely and utterly worthless okay this was back in the day when they would have convention centers full of uh companies that needed employees this is when the the help wanted ad and the ads and the uh The Baltimore Sun were so thick they were thicker than a Small Town Newspaper this is when the the field was at its Zenith when you barely needed to know anything other than what a computer was and you can make a lot of money and I'm telling you my recruiting uh group from the training center that I went to was absolutely and utterly worthless they didn't give me a single interview so I'm not saying they didn't give me a single job I'm saying they didn't get me a single interview everything about them was worthless it was it was great marketing stuff but uh but like I say they were completely worthless I've talked to a lot of the people that go through the the current uh training programs that have you know job placement agencies or centers and from what I've I've heard they're they're completely worthless too so I mean imagine how worthless my recruiting people were and then the job market is a tenth of what it was and so these people are are that much worse yeah they're they're just bad so if you go to the one these training places they're going to talk about you know their their help with employment and yada yada and unless you know multiple people that have used their employment services and gotten work yes think of it as a marketing gimmick it's it's probably worthless it's probably not worth a damn so how do you need to go out and get a job if you want to get a job what you need to do is you basically you just go and you apply to every possible job you can find one of the tips that my old instructor said is don't look at the job requirements I know this sounds a little funny but you have no idea who's actually applying to any job in the help wanted section or monster.com so you may be either random gamble um where only one or two people apply to a job and they need somebody to fill it so they're going to say we need five years experience well you look at it and you go crap I don't have five years experience I can't get a job well if only three or four people apply and the other two are neon and Earth dolls that can barely spell their name you may end up getting the job simply because um because you can spell your name I mean you know what a computer is and so you may not have five years experience but you're the best uh they're gonna get my first job uh that one where I was flying all over the country and was living the life at 23. well although I had really good benefits and really good pay I shouldn't have gotten that job the reason I got that job is some weird uh thing through human resources where I was the cheapest applicant so Paulo is making good money I was making a lot less than somebody with five or ten years experience and so they went with me you know hey who would have known so when you go out apply to every single job that you can find and then if that's not working for you what you should do is start knocking on doors start cold calling companies that you know have i t departments and asking if they have any openings I I know this is not the Glorious way that you were expecting to find a job in the I.T field because everybody is supposed to love you but like I say right now the I.T field we don't need that many more new people one thing you have to realize is when you hear about the.com boom what made it so special for young people like me is that the field of what we were doing really hadn't been around that long so you know five years experience was really impressive or two years experience was really impressive so when I was working on Windows NT servers when I was a Microsoft certified systems engineer for Windows NT I could get away with having two or three years experience because the technology had only existed for four or five years so you know Windows NT came out with Windows 95 so when I got into doing all of this or the overall technology hadn't been around that long so I was competing with other people with two three four and five years experience you know nowadays all those people that started back in the.com boom and survived are the ones that you're now competing with so now instead of competing with somebody with two or three years experience you're now competing with people with 10 12 20 years experience and you know guess who the employer is going to go with so what you have to realize is when you're going out to get hired you need to do everything possible so like I say submit resumes to every help wanted ad that you you think you could possibly do to every monster ad that you think you could possibly do start cold calling companies call them up and and see if they're hiring one of my employees how he got into the field was he finished a training program couldn't find a job and so down in Florida he literally ripped the page out of the phone book with computer shops on a computer repair shops and then he went to every single computer repair shop and said hi are you hiring hello are you hiring hey I don't suppose you're hiring and he said like he went down to like the 15th one and they said well hey that's impressive maybe you can help us out so uh so that's what you should remember when you're trying to try to find a job it's it's not as easy as as they say you're gonna have to do a lot of work and remember if you do go through one of these training programs expect the recruitment office not to be worth anything if you get done with it and they get you a job immediately hey wonderful great grand yay but don't expect them to like I say even my my recruiting department back in the.com boom it wasn't wasn't worth anything they were they were pretty little paperweights okay now that you've figured out whether you're doing training or education and now you have some idea of how you might possibly get a job hopefully the next thing to talk about are seminars and conferences uh cheap or free ones of course preferably the more expensive ones are if you've got the money what most people don't realize is there are a lot of free or very inexpensive technology conferences that you can go to many times and they're in your area Microsoft so you'll have to do a Google I don't know the exact web address but Microsoft holds monthly free seminars about their technology usually at least today and sometimes they give away free pieces so when they're coming out with a new SQL Server they're coming out with a new server they're coming out with Windows 7 or any of this stuff they prayed this stuff all around the country and as long as it you're in a city that it probably has more than 100 000 people they should come by your area uh pretty close so here in Baltimore like I say once a month about they have these free classes and you go there you learn about the new technologies that are coming out and you get some tips some tricks and usually a lot of like free trial where to play with so these are great opportunities for you it's also a good place to network my first job way back when as a subcontractor before I you know it's 22 or whatever the way I got the job was one of the people in my training program had his own company he was a consultant we met at one of these free things we just randomly met and he said wow so you really are that interested in this field you know what I have some extra work why don't I pay you since you obviously do care this much about technology you're just not just going through the program you're doing these extra steps and so that's how I got my first foray really into the computer industry simply because I showed up and I did a little networking and he liked what he he saw the next thing is the inexpensive conferences this gets a little complicated because you really do have to be in near a larger City uh San Francisco Las Vegas is good New York is very good if you're anywhere within New York is there are conferences uh there's something called ISC East this is a security conference on security technology there's something called interop East this is a technology on I.T so computers and servers and all of that they meet in New York once a year now if you get the full package with them all the training options yada yada it cost two or three thousand dollars and it's very expensive and I know you're like I'm not spending two or three thousand dollars that's off the board but here's a cool part for fifty dollars and sometimes free you can get into these events and you can get into the training sessions or seminars that will matter to you as a newbie So for 50 bucks you can go you can spend a day or two looking at all the brand new technology and this is a trade show so it really is brand new technology this is not the stuff you'll find at Best Buy this is the stuff that you'll find at Best Buy a year from now so you get to learn about all this new technology see where the field is going at least a year out get a feeling for it and then all of the vendors that are there or the very prominent vendors will then have seminars about their products so you can sit down for an hour or two and learn about their products more in depth this is a great opportunity for you like I say is if you're near New York if you're near Las Vegas San Francisco some of the major cities they have these for fifty dollars and uh you know a hotel room you get to learn about all the new technology out there and this is good because when you when you do go for that interview that hopefully you'll get you can sound even more impressive because you're talking about the new technology so these uh these conferences and seminars like I say there are a lot of free ones around you'll have to do Google searches I as long as you're around in you know around a city of any size there are a lot of free conferences and seminars go to those and then if you're a lot around any of the the really major cities like I say New York San Francisco Seattle yada yada uh there are a lot of these uh conventions that you can get into for anywhere between three to fifty dollars like I go to CES every year the big computer electronics show and guess how much it costs me well cost me zero to get in uh you get in for free if you sign up before a certain time so absolutely no money for admission and it's three days of just wandering around and seeing all the technology you know if you decide to stay at Treasure Island for a thousand dollars a night that's your business but uh you can go to Motel 8 and spend 40 bucks a night but uh so there's a lot of free or very inexpensive conferences and seminars out there and you really should take advantage of them okay now you know about the education you're trying to get a job you've gone to the Seminars the next thing is gaining experience in this field let me say this again it doesn't really matter what diplomas or degrees you have or what certifications you have it comes down to experience people want to see experience and experience will carry you through the day it's all about what you have done with what problems you have fixed what projects you have completed what what you've sold it's all about experience so you're saying how do you get experience well the first way of course the optimal way is that you get a job well okay well if you don't get a job what do you do the next thing is hopefully you're going to that college so you go to whatever Student Activities or advisement office they have and try to get internships like I say a lot of these colleges have internships or can get you internships with major companies for sometimes free but you know sometimes you can get paid something it might not be a lot but it might be eight or ten bucks an hour you know is better than free the reason is is because a lot of major corporations or large companies have ties to universities so you may not see it but the university that you're going to may be doing research for certain companies or may have developed a product for a certain company or maybe conducting training sessions for those uh those companies so since they're already doing that kind of as a gesture of Goodwill the company goes well you're doing these things for us so we'll take some of you some of your students as interns so we'll take them in and show them how the corporate world works so sometimes they'll take interns for purely you know be nice reasons you know they're just trying to do a nice thing for the University and sometimes they're really looking for people to hire after college so it really depends on on the company itself but you can get a lot of internships and find out about a lot of internships going to college and when you're there you ask about it and you can get into major companies and even if you're not doing anything much more than fetching people's coffee well you're fetching people's coffee and data centers or you're getting to see technology you're getting to see how the real world Works which is a good thing so if you can't get internships then the next thing to do is fix your mother brother's father's sisters loved ones computer just start trying to fix things you know if you have your roommate needs a modem not a modem but maybe a sound card installed or needs something installed on their computer then do it for them and learn how to do it and just do that for everybody you know you may even put up a little a little sign if you know enough and say you know if you're going to college again you should be going to college put up a little sign and say for twenty dollars I'll fix any problem again it's not a lot of money you're not going to pay the rent with it but it's better than nothing so you know people at College you know call you up and say hey I got a virus or hey I need to learn how to download the latest movie you go you show them how to do it you fix the problem you get 20 bucks everybody's happy you gain experience little bits of experience like this really help because this field is only about 25 uh Hands-On working with technology so only about 25 of your time is used actually fixing or installing or doing something that you would equate to being in the I.T field so you know running cable this kind of stuff is only about 25 of your time another 25 of your time is the Annoying tedious planning Logistics writing tickets you know all the all the paperwork so if you're going to do a 100 computer migration then jotting out and planning how you're gonna do that migration that takes up about 25 of your time but 50 of your time what people don't realize is interpersonal interactions it's learning how to sell things and when I say sell things most people will take it as uh you know learning to to sell to customers but no it's learning how to sell things to your boss learning how to sell things to your director one of the ways I got a lot of the training that I did was at that first company where I was flying all over the place I sold to my boss why I needed to go to more training and I got a lot of training I mean I've got 300 hours of training the year that I work for them because every time I found any training that I thought was worth anything I was able to sell it to my boss and to to tell him why it was better for the company you know if if I got to this training well you when you go to each one of those individual people to to fix their computer and do whatever you're learning how to sell things so if you know you go to the computer and you realize they need to buy a new computer entirely it's not worth fixing you learn how to sell them on buying a new computer or if the the sound car that they purchased wasn't the right one you learn how to tell somebody that I mean that is a skill telling somebody tactfully that they screwed up and what the solution is that is a skill unto itself and the better you understand how to do that the better you'll do so try to fix your mother brother father sister's computer and you're going to get experience the other way you can get experience is there are a lot of non-profit organizations out there in the world and the thing that I learned with them is they never ever ever ever want to spend any money and they're willing to deal with low quality work as long as they don't have to spend any money so again if you're in a town of any decent size even if you're in a town it's really pretty small call up the non-profit organizations and say hey I'm trying to get more experience with computers I will not charge you or I'll charge you 10 or 15 bucks an hour or something small if I can fix your computers and I bet you a lot of them will say hey that's great because although you really don't know what you're doing yet and although you're probably going to do a little bit of damage to their systems you're free and therefore they will want to use you so go to these non-profits call them up like I said call all of them up if you can get up to the the director most of these non-profits are pretty small so just say hey who who runs everything talk to them and say hey I'm I'm in college because you should be in college if you're a new person I'm in college or I'm in training I want to get better at it and I am willing to volunteer and tell them that I'm willing to volunteer to fix your systems and I'll do it for free and I guarantee you within a month you will have more work than you know what to do with and within a year you'll have as much experience as you need and you can really hopefully get a paying job by then so to get experience the first hopefully the way you'll do it is get a real job that's the best way that gets you a real paycheck if you can't do that then you go and you try to get a paid internship less money but it gets you into real large companies where you get to meet people and see how things work and you get a little bit of money under that becomes uh non-paid internships well at least you're getting experience and you know if you ever want to get paid any money you need experience under that fix your moms your brothers your sisters your neighbors whoever's computer you can get a hold of and then under that like I say call up non-profit organizations and I swear to you if you say that you're free and that you're volunteering to fix their systems they will be so happy to just let you loose whether that's a good idea I'm not gonna say but I will tell you if you call up a non-profit organization and say you're willing to volunteer to fix their computers for free they will accept it and at the end of the day remember this career field needs experience so the more experience you get the better however you get it you just get it now with the job market as bad as it is something else you may consider is simply becoming a consultant so how do you become a consultant well the best way I heard for how basically how to become a consultant was from uh from this guy who said what you do is you go and you learn a topic or you you learn something that somebody is willing to pay for and you learn it well enough that somebody would pay you to do it and then as soon as you've learned that much then you put up a little shingle and start selling your services and that's all you have to do so if you can't get a job kind of like what I was telling you before about you fix your mom your brothers your sisters computers well right now think about just putting up little signs saying that you'll fix people's computers so if you already know how to fix a computer instead of trying to get that Help Desk position or some position at a company or university it may be better just to put up your little signs and and take a go at being a consultant that's how I started my company originally Eli the computer guy um after the.com boom you know during the.com boom I was golden like I say I can do this job very well everybody was very impressed with how I could do this job and so the sky was the limit and so I decided I was going to go for a little while and travel around the world and I saw Europe and I saw India and I saw Seattle and I was just living the life and everything was great because I was going to come back and I was going to get a decent job and then I came back and then I was renting a room in some scuzzy little house and then my entertainment was Pabst beer because I no longer had any money because nobody was no longer hiring for anything it's the it Market I mean if the it market now is bad after the.com boom during the.com bust the it Market was was foul horrible there just wasn't anything most a lot of people got out of the I.T field at that point so what was I going to do I had some crappy little job uh making ten dollars an hour some file clerk because that's all I could get at that point and so I put up these little pull tab signs well within one month of putting up those pull tab signs I was making enough money to pay all my bills within three months of putting up those poll tab signs that had a nice little apartment and was eating organic food from Whole Foods and well we go from there if there are not jobs then you need to create your own opportunities um like I say as you go out you put up little signs or we'll have a whole class on how to start your own business this is not that class but something to think about is especially if you're a geek because remember you're trying to create you're trying to innovate you know the founders of Google did not make billions of dollars because they were employees they made billions of dollars because they were founders of Google they created it so if you really want to make the money if you really want to to innovate you know try to make something impressive then you have to create your own thing like I say if you're just starting out you're just beginning if you know how to fix computers put up flyers for fixing computers if you just know how to build websites you don't have to know a lot to get paid to build websites a little bit you get paid the websites so start building websites for people start knocking on doors business doors and saying hey do you need a website built I'll build one for 50 bucks and when you have 10 people that have that you've built websites for for 50 bucks then say I'll build you want for 100 bucks and then when you have a line of people that are willing to pay you 100 bucks say 200 500s thousands uh people now I've seen with what websites that I could build within two days they get paid seven thousand dollars to build them and you don't need any education or training to build these websites you just needed uh to muck around with uh certain pieces of software long enough so you're gonna think about going out on your own if you can't get a job like I said we'll have our own little little class on how to start your own business but this is an option that you should think about because if you if you are good in technology and if you're good at something that people need and people are willing to pay for you may end up doing a lot better on your own than you would going to a uh a company to work um like I say I mean when I was at the height of doing all my Eli the computer guy stuff I mean there were some days I was making a thousand dollars a day that would wouldn't have done that being an employee anywhere so something to think about on that if you can't get a job think about doing it on your own and even if you do have a job just keep it in the back of your mind that maybe going Going Your Own Way is it would be a better thing okay one topic I need to to go over with you um if you get the job you finally get the job is being a good employee having been an employee having been a consultant and having been an employer of my own small business I can say what it takes to be a good employee is not necessarily what employees think so I know you're coming to this field and hopefully you love this field this is a great wonderful field and you're energetic and you want to change everything what you have to understand is when you walk in the door you are a newbie you are you are a cog in the machine so although you may be a very uh very educated Cog I'm a very trained Cog a very intelligent Cog you're still a cog and so your boss the owner of the company or your boss hired you to perform a certain job function so you're coming in to administer servers or you're coming in to fix computers or or whatever else you're there to do something well what I've seen and this has been the death of many employees or the death of their career at least their companies is they come in and they see what's going on and then they start talking about how everything needs to be better how everything needs to be changed and what they would do and yada yada what you have to understand is that your boss has a lot on their mind your boss has a boss to worry about your boss doesn't just have you as an employee to worry about but they may have 5 10 20 50 employees to worry about your boss you know you're looking at these systems and you're looking at the desktop computers that you're fixing or the one server that you're responsible for or the few switchers or routers they're looking at the entire system so when they tell you to do something in order to fix a certain thing in a certain way there's probably a reason for it and as I used to tell us my employees sometimes the reason was I knew that there were better ways to do things but those better ways would take research time and effort that I did not have my time needed to be spent on other things the things that got us all paid so although this may be I was telling them to solve a problem and possibly an inferior way I was telling them to do it in that way because I knew that way it worked I knew it may take a little longer it might be a little more expensive but that way it worked if my employees did something in the way I told them I knew it would be successful and too many times they would then try to tweak the system and then it would all go to hell so when you get hired if if you want to get promoted I think we all want to get promoted I mean if you start as a help desk person you want to be a senior engineer someone someday here's what you need to do first you need to remember that you're a Coggin machine you don't like that sucks to be you you're a cog in the machine and I'll just be along with you as an employer get over it the sooner you get over it the sooner you can get on to being a senior engineer so censor that what you need to do what you should do is you should do the job that is presented to you the best that you can so even if they give you a crappy system to do even if they they tell you to do things and in ways that seem as backwards well do them to your best ass backwardness seriously because they're telling you to do these things do them to your best ability in the way that they're telling you to do it this does two things one they may have reasons for telling you to do something that you don't understand so although it seems as backward in your mind remember you're a newbie you're pretty new to the field there may be things higher up in the structure or the infrastructure that requires uh for things to be done as fast backward way the second is remember that everybody no matter what position you are in the company has to take orders from somebody you know they used to tell this to us in the military you know the private takes orders from the sergeant the sergeant takes orders from the the lieutenant Lieutenant takes orders from the general the general takes orders from the president and so you go hey the president's in charge well the president takes orders from the populace it's the man so everybody has a boss and so if you show that you can follow orders it sounds dorky I know a lot of people out there are going to bristle when I say this but if you show that you can follow instructions and you can follow orders you'll get much more respect from your bosses and so when you do bring a brow an idea or an improved solution don't be more receptive to listening to it if all you do is why moan and complain and say things need to be done better but you don't get the job that you've been hired for done properly they're not going to care you're probably going to get fired at some point so that's a thing so so do even if it's asked backwards do it is as ass backward best as you possibly can I swear to God that's really what your boss wants now once you've done that as best as you possibly can then I want you to look around and find things that need to be fixed that aren't really that technological in nature so you look around the server room and you see that the cables are a mess for some reason people have taken all these network cables and they just I had to deal with this at one point and they just threw them into a pile and you have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of network cables well you know would be really helpful now that you've finished doing what they've told you go and clean up those network cables get some little zip ties make them all nice and neat and while you're doing it make sure people know that you're doing it don't be too don't be too out there don't self self-promoting but you'll say oh yeah I'm just uh you know I'm done with my work so I'm cleaning this up and so once you've done your job then go through and start cleaning up things that but there's no argument about you know you don't have to ask your boss for permission to clean up the network cables you don't have to ask your boss for permission to vacuum something or to uh to dispose of stuff or or to write documentation you know a lot of a lot of companies a lot of it people talk about that where somebody really needs to sit down and document this well sit down and start documenting it start once you're done with your normal job start doing the work that there is no argument about this simply needs to be done you know our software is scattered all over the network when I go to reload office I never know where the the installation software is come up with a repository tell everybody you're doing it come up with a repository put it in one place show everybody again you're not arguing you're not you're not creating any animosity You're simply doing the work that everybody knows needs to be done and then after you've done your job no matter how ass backwards it is after you've spent a lot of time just cleaning up all the mess and there's no matter what no matter what company you go to there's always mess that needs to be cleaned up so after you're done cleaning up the mess that nobody can argue about it's there it needs to be cleaned up somebody should do it hey you're the one doing it after you've done that for a while then start looking around and start picking small things that could be fixed and then research how they can be fixed as best as you possibly can I mean spend it's been a week learning how to fix some small problem write up a little report you know come up with really good Arguments for why it needs to be fixed how you can fix it what you would do what the ramifications are about and then present that to your boss and then just leave it for a week so say he may say yes he may say no just leave it for a week and see what he says after two weeks if he hasn't said anything to you a week or two find another little small problem while you're doing your normal work no matter how as backwards it is while you're cleaning up things like network cables but after you're doing that kind of stuff we're going to find another little problem and then submit it to your boss and then another little problem a little another little problem if your boss isn't very slowly try to figure out who makes the decisions if your boss isn't making the decisions and that's how you can be seen as a very valuable member of the team everybody wants to be an individual everybody thinks they know everything and most bosses want to fire everybody if you do what they're asking you to do if you clean up the problems that everybody knows are there and do it quietly don't like I say don't don't ask for a pat on the back just go through and just start cleaning up and making sure make sure everybody sees you doing it but just do it and then you start presenting Solutions again to to real problems but that might need more more decision that is how you can get ahead and that's the quickest way to become a senior engineer because remember it's all about promotion in this field getting ahead in this field is all about experience the more you do the more responsibility you're given you're only going to be given opportunities based on how comfortable your boss is with giving you those opportunities and at the end of the day you know like I say I don't I don't care if we're working on computers or surveillance systems circuit boards whatever at the end of the day this this this profession has a very human egg to it so the happier your boss is with you the more opportunities they'll give you the more experience you get the higher you get in the the company a self you know a self what is a fulfilling cycle or whatever so treat your boss well and do what he asks you to do fix the problems that you know about once you've done these things start targeting the real things that you want to start working on so we're coming to about the end of this little conversation that we've been having um I want to take a minute to really talk about what this profession is like in the real world uh like I said I mean the benefits if you're good in this field man I mean the benefits are amazing and seriously I mean thousand two thousand ten thousand dollars a day you can make uh I've known people to literally make eighty thousand dollars in two weeks good work two three four weeks a year but there's a reason for it a lot of people cannot do this job most people uh simply don't have the ability to to do the things that that are required in this job you have to understand that most of the systems that you'll be working on are what are called Mission critical Mission critical systems are the systems that are required for the business that you're working for to operate so whatever they do whether they sell dog food or they're a nursing home or there's some kind of call center or whatever their business runs through those computer systems so what you have to realize is whenever you work on them like and I'm not talking about help desk people and you're like you might be like ah it helped us people I don't want to be that stressed I mean we're not talking about your first job going up in the field when you're a senior engineer you have to make sure that when you work on those systems you don't do something stupid and crash the systems because it's not simply about crashing a computer it's not about a computer that has to get rebooted or rebuilt it is about an entire business that stops functioning and that's a lot of stress to put on you I mean I've been doing this for a while and it's still stressful when you walk into a 20 or 30 person business and everything is down nobody is working and so not only are they not making money but you also have 30 people eyeball menu in the back saying when are you going to fix it um one of the clients that you know I used to talk about uh when uh when I was doing my sales pitch for new businesses I mean literally literally their systems were down if they did not send out the proposal at the end of the day they would lose a 5 million dollar contract so I got this new client new client I didn't know what the hell was going on walked in it was a colossal mess where nothing functioned properly and I was told this hadn't it had to be working by 4 30 so that this proposal could go out or they would lose a five million dollar sale that's that that's a hell of a thing so if you get in this profession you're gonna have to deal with with the stress that comes with it because no other profession in existence really has that amount of stress I mean how many other people work on things where if they make a mistake everybody's down I mean everybody anywhere from a uh uh from a 10 person office to 100 person office I mean I remember remember I was talking about being 23 at that company we had a T1 line that got cut it wasn't even my responsibility I couldn't do a damn thing about it um whoever was responsible for a T1 line they did something stupid we were down now imagine this as a 23 year old I was looking at this this massive guy he was it was just Irish guy I was like six and a half feet tall like 250 pounds of muscle and he looked at me and he said Eli I've got a hundred people here and I'm paying their hourly salaries yeah yeah I'm like okay so it says you know I'm paying X whatever it was however many thousands of dollars per hour to have these people sitting at their desks okay the T1 line is down so they can't do any work okay so he looks at me 250 pound big ass Irish guy Eli do I tell them to go home or do I tell them to sit at their desks and those are the questions that you're going to be asked I was sitting there going what the hell are you asking me for I mean what it wasn't my system it wasn't that my server had crashed and I was trying to fix it it was that somebody had messed up a T1 line at some point they were trying to fix it basically it was totally out of my hands and I'm being asked do I do does this person send a hundred people home for the day those are the kind of questions you're going to be asked to answer and sometimes you don't know what the answer is you just gotta wing it but you got to be willing to wing it because you will be asked and an answer will need to be given one of the things I always told my employees and I tell everybody is make sure that whenever you talk to people about the work that you're going to do you always under promise and over deliver it's one of the biggest problems in this field is people are going to look at you like you're some kind of magician that you can you can fix at everything that it's has nothing to do with the real world what it has to do with magic and so if you wish to pull a rabbit out of your hat you will pull a rabbit out of your hat if you wish to pull a server out of your underwear you're gonna pull a server out of here anywhere and they're going to look at you so hopefully and ask you to do things so innocently that you are immediately going to want to say yes if you can do it and you have to stop yourself from doing that because if you say yes you can do it then when you find out that you can't do it you're going to be in for a whole world of hurt because they're going to yell scream moan and maybe fire you because you said that you could do it and you can so always make sure under promise over deliver uh my little Mentor for for how to deal with uh with um clients or customers and CEOs and all that was uh to look at the uh the original was it uh Scott Scotty from from Star Trek how he dealt with Captain Kirk is how you need to think about uh dealing with your clients you always you always say it's gonna take you know it's it's gonna take a day to fix this problem and then somehow miraculously you fix it in two hours and they think it's gonna be a day and they go oh it can't take a day and you say I'm not a I'm not a miracle worker and they say but it needs to be fixed quicker and you say I'll fix it as quick as I can gotten and they and moan but then they think okay it'll take a day to fix and then when it takes two hours to fix you're the hero hero they go oh and they pat you on the back and they go wow you said it was going to take a day to fix and you fixed it in two hours you are amazing you are a God I'm gonna buy you a beer when we get out of here today and it's gonna be great now if you tell them it's going to take two hours to get fixed and it takes a day to get fixed kind of flip that all around they're just gonna hate you they're going to think you're incompetent they're going to think you're stupid and what I'll tell you is this is the exact same problem so think about it this way if you tell somebody it'll take a day to fix a problem and it takes you two hours then you're a hero then you're amazing if you tell them it'll take half an hour and it takes two hours then you're a complete flipping and this is how it works out in the real world so always like I say under promise over deliver if you think it's going to take two hours tell them four column six column eight because if it only takes two they'll be happy with you in the beginning in the beginning it's more painful it's kind of like a shot when you're first dealing with them and you say it's gonna take six hours oh they're gonna you're gonna lie and they're gonna moan but you look at them in the eyeball and say I can either stay here arguing with you or I can go and fix the problem and then they go okay it's painful I know it's hard to do but then when you fix it in two hours they pat you on the back and everybody's happy if on the other hand you tell them the six hours they bake your wine and more and they oh and then you go well maybe I can fix it in an hour well you're not gonna fix it in an hour and when it turns out to be two hours well I mean it's nice that it's fixed but but you said it was gonna be an hour so I mean really what if you screw up I mean do we really need to fire you now I mean this this is what they're gonna think so under promise over deliver your life will be a lot better and then remember when you're getting into this field you're going to get calls at nine o'clock at night 10 o'clock at night you're gonna call us on Sunday sometimes that's just how it goes there's a lot of stress if you if you can step up to the plate there's a lot of benefits but you need to know about the stress before you get into those well this brings us to the end of our our little conversation here about you becoming in a a computer geek and entering this wonderful field of I.T uh hope I haven't scared you too much unless you should be scared and you should go off and find another career field what I really want to get across to you is this is a special field that has special benefits for those that can succeed but there's a reason why you get those benefits you know it's not because you go to some little six-month training program and you get some certificate it's because you can do what other people either can't or on or are unwilling to do you know a lot of people don't want to get a call at midnight a lot of people don't want the stress of dealing with a mission critical system a lot of people can't deal with being asked the hard questions I mean you know when I told you about that that little story about the T1 line you know I had there was no reason to expect me to answer that question but I was damn well gonna have to answer that question um and that's what you have to look at this career field has normalized this isn't the field that it was like I say during the.com boom you know 10 11 12 years ago you're not going to walk into it and then start you know making a hundred thousand dollars within two years it's it's really not not going to happen or or it's no more likely to happen in this career field than it is any other career field and that's that's something that you really should think about because I know a lot of people get into this uh this career because of the money as a small business person not only do I support small businesses but the small business owners are are the people that I hang out with now let me tell you I know personally that a lot of people doing these small businesses and things a hell of a lot less sexy than computers and I.T make money a hell of a lot more easily than people in these fields that everybody assumes people are throwing money at I mean when you get into it everybody expects you to be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or be making six figure salaries and it's not the case there are a lot of twenty five thousand dollar help desk technicians out there there's a lot of low level you know server attacks making 40 maybe 50 000 a year who have a lot of experience in the field I mean nowadays if you have 10 years experience you may be making 50 000 a year 60 000 a year if you equate that to what other other career fields are making I mean that that's about the same I mean if you go into Construction in 10 years you'd be making 50 60 70 000 a year if you go into yeah go to be a cook you know a chef I mean in that time you can be making the same amount of money so the normal career field for us you'll be making about the same amount of money that everybody else is where you can where you break out where you can make insane amount of money it's just like every other career field if you're willing to invent if you're willing to create if you're willing to risk like I say the guy's over at Google they created something amazing and they're making lots and lots of money off of it but you look at uh somebody it wasn't Mark Zuckerman at Facebook you know he's making all this money and he's making it for a website so everybody goes oh look at the computer person making all this money but is he really a computer person I mean you know he was going to Harvard he spent a couple years there and he built a website a single website and then he's managed its growth but is that really a computer person is that a technician or is that simply a business person that happened to stumble upon a gold mine and then knew what the hell to do with it you know that's that's something to think about you know I have a buddy of mine in landscaping who uh you know Landscaping is incredible money if you if you want to make money maybe you should look at Landscaping because I mean you can make a lot of money on that construction and some of my clients do construction I mean right right now I mean you know September 2009 construction might not be the best thing to be in be into but you know they were they were making a lot of money but that was a funny thing they were making all this money I was working on their systems so I basically I had a good understanding of how much money they were making and then they looked at me and assumed I was making much more and the reality was that that I wasn't I was doing okay but you know all I'm trying to say is that if you're trying to get in this field for money and success and Prestige yes you can find it here but this isn't necessarily the way to go there's a lot of businesses in the world where you can make a lot of money uh you know I've heard dog poop cleanup services for people's uh yards for you can make a lot of money at that surprisingly enough so uh well I hope I hope you've learned a little bit about this conversation and hope I haven't turned off too many people to go be a dog poop scooper uppers but uh but if this isn't for you you should realize it like I say at the end of the day seriously um I I do believe in training once you know what the hell you're doing like I say once once you get into a company and you go I'm in this company I want to be here for a while and I want to work on our servers at this company and we use Windows whatever 2003 2008 servers then when you're in the company and you you already have a job then go to training not education then go to training and learn how to manage those servers or if you go on your own you're like me you're uh you're a consultant or a small business person and you go wow those uh those switchvox telephone systems I think I can make a lot of money off those so I'm going to go to training so that I can install those particular types of telephone systems and make a lot of money that's what's training is good for like I say I've been in the training I've done mcsc for NT mcse for Windows 2000 way back then I stopped because I kept coming up with too many operating systems you know PHP MySQL Linux CIO boot camp I mean telephone systems all these trainings but I went to those trainings because I was either in a job where I would be promoted or get more money for understanding those systems because they needed those systems to be administered or I was on my own as a consultant and knew if I understood that new system it was another system I could sell and again I make more money you know you know stuff I can sell to my clients so those are the reasons that I went to training if you're getting in this field like I say go get your education because all of these Technologies come and go those telephone certifications I talked about are complete garbage now nobody uses that technology I mean that was that was a hundred hours of training I got that particular type of telephone system and it's obsolete and completely obsolete Windows NT I bet half of you have never even seen Windows NT you know I mean and that was that was the first training program that I went into and now it's completely obsolete I mean I saw one NT server in the past five years so if you're getting in this field get an education these training programs like I say computer training.com whatever it's it's it's not gonna get you into the door the way that they may Market it to get you into the door so um yeah I mean that's all there is to it don't waste your money on those programs please uh you know if if you if you get into the I.T field if you get a job and you're a help desk technician and then you get a little bit higher up and then you get laid off now now that that's where computer training.com might do you good let's say you're in the field already so you get one or two years experience you're going up everything's going well and then you get laid off and you're looking for another job that's when I might do something like that because you already have experience you already know the career field you say hey I need to get this block of training uh to improve the the systems that I can work on to improve my knowledge base of systems that I can work on and I'm not going to go to college I'm already in the working field I already need to make an income so I will take six months while I still have my resumes out um you know to get this training and then hopefully at the end of this this will get me my next job but again that's somebody that's already in the field that already has experience that knows why they're getting training maybe that's that's the biggest thing that you should take from this is training like I say computer training.com or any of these other ones you have to really understand why you're getting the training and you have to have a pretty definite end goal for when you have training not simply I will get the training and then the recruiters here will get me a job that's worthless if you say I've been doing this field for two years I want to start working on servers I'll go to this training for six months and then I will get a job on servers maybe that maybe that would work out but yeah probably not so I would say probably leave like I said the six month programs on their own um and good to go for education education is what will get you ahead like I say right now I've been doing this stuff for for 12 years 1600 hours of Education I am getting a master of Zuri in it because what is very valuable in this field now is project management skills business technology integration that type of thing is what it's worth a lot of money who cares about fifty sixty thousand dollars a year if you can manage large projects that that that's where the money comes in so well those are some thoughts of the conversation I uh hope you learned a little bit and uh take this into account when uh you decide what you're going to be doing

Channel: Eli the Computer Guy

Views: 410,790

Keywords: How, to, Become, an, IT, Professional

Id: yT26Vpptl-8

Length: 77min 47sec (4667 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 14 2010