Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Do I Change Tech Careers At 30?
First time accepted submitter possiblybored writes "I'm 30, and I am a technology teacher and the school's technology coordinator. I like my job, but I have been having thoughts about switching careers and focusing more on technology in the private sector. I like Microsoft products and would head in that direction, probably. Is it too late for me to think about this? What is the best way to get started on this path? I'm not so much interested in programming (though I'd like to learn a language some day) as much as I am intrigued by topics like setting up e-mail servers, reading about cloud stuff like Office 365, and looking at information on collaborative technology. I'm a good teacher and excel at explaining things as well. Any advice the community could offer would be greatly appreciated!"
Submission is very clearly a troll. Please don't post this kind of crap.
Whatever you love doing, do more of it. Then just be sensitive, and maybe a little aggressive, about pursuing leads that naturally arise from your avocation.
You're talking about breaking into the IT industry, not politics.
Start applying for help desk jobs. Yes, it really is that simple.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
hadoop, cloudera, etc
email and traditional databases have peaked out long ago. the future is having to search huge amounts of non-relational data. its still in the early stages where the software is immature and you need to do lots of legwork to search the data.
If I was in your situation given your experience and passion, I would focus more on private home and SMB side of things. Consulting, sales, and perhaps some end-user support. I doubt system and network infrastructure administration is your thing. Perhaps later on, but now.
Life is not for the lazy.
Bwha ha ha ha ha!!!
Just how old do you think you *are*, sonny boy? 30 is just barely dry behind the ears! Truth is that there is lots of room for anybody in the tech field who is *competent*. So be competent!
It does help to be somewhat charismatic and hygienic.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Think about the fate of dinosaurs that were replaced by smaller more agile mammals when difficult times came...
Your goal as described would indicate you want to be a teacher!
With your limited skillset without programming or intermediate sysadmin, but given your background in teaching and familiarity with concepts i'd say you'd be a good fit for training and/or documentation within a tech company. Training can include on-boarding new hires and getting them familiar with internal systems, or even training customers on using the software. I've worked with many people in these roles at companies i've been with. Documentation also might be a good route: writing manuals, online specs, and online training stuff. Theres lots of people doing this at the larger software shops.
they changed the name of the mcse to make it harder for joke acronyms to be created.
lose != loose
Don't go it alone, then. Find a consulting firm that already has a client list.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Not bitter in the least, are you?
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
After reading your question this one came to my mind. Those who can do, those who can't teach. But it does makes me wonder what you are teaching these kids if you have to ask us how to get a job in the tech-world. I hope your pupils won't have to ask that same question.
Man, there is no hope for you!
If once you start down the Microsoft path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will...
Seriously, Microsoft is in decline, and already has a bunch of people trained up in it. You should consider learning mobile development for Android, iOS, or both. If you want to learn server-side stuff I would learn the open stack: Linux, MySQL and/or Postgres, maybe Hadoop.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
IMO, at 30, you're right in the "zone" as far as the age group companies like to hire for computer support or network/server administration.
(Honestly, I think there's greater interest in hiring younger for software development, due to the mentality that you can hire talent cheap if you catch them shortly after they're out of school. Plus, they haven't been in the field long enough to be "old dogs that know a bunch of tricks you have to get them to un-learn" for your particular environment.)
It sounds like part of your question relates to which technologies you should focus on learning? One trend I have noticed is that mail servers are becoming more and more centralized. Most growing companies want to eliminate the in-house mail server(s) and sub-contract that out. With the growth of mobile devices that get attached to corporate email, it's nice to offload that bandwidth usage to a 3rd. party, among other things. This has the side-effect of making knowledge of setup/configuration/maintenance of mail servers (like Exchange) a skill-set that gives you a full-time job working only with email. If you really like email and mail servers, great. Go this route and get hired on at one of the cloud-based email services out there! Otherwise, I'd only worry about knowing it from the client side.
Every company I've ever worked at could stand to have more I.T. people on staff with good training skills and an interest in doing it. The "gotcha" there is that usually? It boils down to a situation where you won't really get to do as much of that as you and your co-workers would like because management has other ideas about what's the most valuable use of your time and company resources. (Remember, if you decide to schedule a "training session" for a big group in one of the conference rooms? Now the productivity of ALL of those people attending just dropped to 0 during the time you've got them as a captive audience in there. You're also occupying the room, which may also pose at least some level of inconvenience -- especially if employees regularly book the room to pitch a service or product your company makes to its clients. You'll probably also find that without providing some food and drink, it's tough to get people to show up for such things... so again, another expense for the company.)
I've always found that good communication skills and ability to teach the software is a really valuable skill, but you'll primarily wind up using it randomly, when assisting people by phone or "one on one" at their desks with issues. If you're lucky, a hiring manager will give you more consideration than "the next applicant" because of a background teaching technology. But it will become "just another thing you do that's kind of taken for granted" once you're hired.
Especially if you're getting hired via a recruiting firm, they're overly fixated on industry "buzzwords". Certain items are considered "hot" at any given time. For the last couple years or so, "virtualization" was a big one. If you could say you had experience using VMWare ESXi or any of the other products allowing virtual servers, it was a big plus. "Cloud" knowledge is another one. IMO, this is really a bunch of nonsense, because almost ALL the cloud-based services have easy to use web based control panels. Anyone with good general I.T. skills and knowledge can master any of them in short order. Mastering virtual server products is a little more difficult and useful as a real skill .... but again, many places just treated it like it was a big deal, only because of a one-off desire to reduce the number of servers in a server room. Once somebody moved all 7 or 8 of those outdated physical servers onto one virtual server and got them running well? There wasn't a whole lot more to do or know to maintain that.... so other I.T. skills become more important again.
I haven't had a boss for 15 years and I'm more successful now than I ever was in a corporate job.
I also can't be fired. Know why? Because firing me requires my approval.
I'm also intelligent enough to see reality even in the face of being heckled by those who don't know any better.
You keep punching that clock, Jim.
I hate to be the Curmudgeon..however with a school you are guaranteed a pension. In the private sector, no matter how much you make, you will never make up the difference. At some point, you'll get tired of bits & bytes and just want to play with grand kids or go fishing. Stay with the school, and you'll be doing that by the time your 55. Leave for the private sector and 55 becomes a hard to reach retirement age.
Is it too late for me to think about this?
It is never too late. I have known people that have jumped into unrelated careers, successfully, at 35, 40, 52, and 65.
How much effort are you willing to put forth? Are you willing to temporarily forgo some of the pleasures in your life to which you've become accustomed?
Are you willing to immerse yourself in the new career, both at work and after hours? Ask yourself and answer truthfully: do you truly want to make a change, or are you just thinking... "wouldn't it be nice if"? The answer may be painful, and sometimes you won't know until you're there- Are you willing to take that risk?
Are you willing to risk the possibility of having to start at a lower level on the pay scale in your new field? I have a cousin that graduated from the Air Force Academy, flew F-15's for almost 10 years, and after accepting an engineering job at a defense contractor, quickly realized that he couldn't stand that type of job. With a wife and 3 daughters to support, he left to start a career at an airline.... at the time (mid-80's), he had to start as a flight engineer, at about 20k / year. With his love of flight focusing his resolve, and with the support of his wife (she took a second job), he persevered in a boring, low-paying job, staring at a panel of guages in a jet... but he stuck to it, and over a number of years ended up as a 747 long-haul pilot for Northwest, making just under 200k / year.
You must decide if you're ready to commit, with all that that implies. If you feel drawn to whatever it is you're thinking of doing, and you're ready to commit, there are few legitimate reasons to hold back- I would say that if you have no legs and desire to win a ballroom dancing championship, you may have a legitimate reason not to compete, but you could still find a way to excel, in some role, in this activity if you truly had the desire.
Get into consulting, easiest way to get experience (by fire). Volunteer for every project you can, even if you are just asking to shadow others at the start so you can learn.
Study things like Puppet, OpenStack, VMware vSphere, Hyper-V (along with SCVMM), KVM (part of OpenStack) etc. Be aware of app platforms (e-mail, SQL, etc) but don't make them your career as hosted/cloud based services are a serious threat to onsite stuff (privacy issues aside).
Find all the key blogs for each of these things I've mentioned, and read them often. Follow the authors of these blogs on Twitter if you really want to keep up to date.
Oh, and LEARN TO RECOGNIZE WHEN STUFF IS CHANGING and adjust your skills accordingly.
Remember your users/customers have needs, and your job is to give them what is best for them regardless of your own bias. Despite what vendors tell you, no solution is best for everyone.
Ever feel like you are driving the getaway car?
So you talk about "the only option in 2014 America", but you haven't tried any other options in this century.
You complain about employers who "maximize your hardship", yet by being self-employed, if you screw up, you get absolutely every bit of hardship possible.
You put down those who "don't know any better" and "ignore [your] advice", to the point of stating as a foregone fact that they will be fired, and you say that your opinion is "reality".
Yeah, I'd fire you, too.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Sounds to me like you're looking in the wrong places.
I live in the Washington DC area where virtually every fast food cashier is hispanic and most speak around 10 words of English. During a McDonalds lunch some time ago, I happened to overhear a job interview. The kid was clearly unmotivated but his allowance wasn't cutting it. Towards the end, the manager ask to see paperwork with his social security number or a birth certificate or whatever, the documents on the government list for proof of citizenship. The kid didn't have any. The manager asked what his social security number was. The kid didn't know. So the manager told him to go get those things from his parents and come back.
When the kid left, the manager called over one of the assistant managers and began filling him in on the interview. He explained: "if the kid comes back, we'll probably hire him because he can speak English."
You wanna compete with the day laborers hanging out by the highway, of course you're going to lose. The day bosses in the pickup trucks aren't looking for white guys. Apply to a company that isn't in the 10% of the bottom feeders.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Those who know, do. Those who understand, teach.
- Aristotle
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Rule of 3s. If you've had 3 bosses (or clients or girlfriends etc) with the same or very similar problems, the problem is yours.
Work for yourself is good advice, for someone with a reasonably complete skill set. If you don't, you need to learn from someone.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'd fire you because you're a liability, based on the exchange here. Your qualifications quickly lose their lustre if you're costing the company business, either directly or by reputation.
Firstly, you're professing current knowledge that's 15 years out of date, and claiming its superiority based solely on your own observations from outside. That's the same inclination that leads to developers insisting on using C because it's the One True Language, even though more recent languages may fit the project better. Then you make assumptions about the circumstances of the situation, assuming that what you see on the surface is exactly how things really are, with no mitigating circumstances. When someone does disagree with your opinion, possibly due to knowing those other circumstances, you attack them and call them "immature, childish, [and] irresponsible".
As a prospective client, I wouldn't hire you, because I could expect that I'd be given a solution that has a good chance of being unmaintainable by anyone else. As an employer, I wouldn't hire you because your interpersonal skills suggest that I'd be constantly fighting to keep a team together unless they all simply bowed to your demands.
If I somehow ended up in a position where I could fire you, I'd probably do so, because as a responsible and competent manager, I'd recognize what your arrogance actually costs the business. While I do care about your well-being, I also have the rest of the team to worry about, and they're not the ones spreading discord. It might be tough, but I'd rather find someone else with your qualifications than try to hold together a frustrated team.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Did the same thing when I turned 30; switched from Aerospace Engineering to Structural Engineering (i.e. buildings). I got a masters in the field I wanted to switch to and applied for jobs based on the new degree. Took me 2 years of evenings. And a 50% pay cut. Hey, I didn't say it was easy. (Oh, 15 years out I now gross 3-3.5x what I made when I left Aerospace, run my own consulting firm, and get to post on /. whenever the fuck I want.)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
A lot of people are assuming this is a troll or some sort of joke. That says a lot about how helpful people are! It sounds like you have familiarity with a number of software products, most likely all Microsoft. To strengthen that, you could take some courses at a community college. You could also volunteer some of your services for your local church or other nonprofit to build a resume.
However, you might want to consider that instead of IT support, in the private sector, going the training route. With your teaching background, many corporations would hire you. In addition, with your current computer background, they could hire you to teach software classes to their employees. Even if you are wanting to get out of teaching and into support, such a path would get your foot in the door and allow you to establish connections, gain experience and pick up additional skills before making the switch.
30 you say? Well that's hardly over the hill now is it?
I have to say there are some pretty poor responses in the comments, many are very discouraging. Don't listen to them. Let's look at some factors:
- There's an IT skills shortage, worldwide.
- As a teacher you must have a degree so you've a proven ability to learn.
- As a teacher you've proven that you can train people, and speak to groups confidently.
- As a non-geek originally, people should be able to relate to you better than your average Slashdot troll (sorry, couldn't resist)!
- You don't need to learn to program to be a sysadmin. Scripting skills would be a big advantage though.
- Tech is a wide and varied area, you have lots of options for entry, from going back to school through to starting with a small business and doing helpdesk stuff to work up to sysadmin duties.
- It will take time and effort (be prepared to 'live' IT for several years). But I've seen other teachers do it (I work as an IT Manager at a school).
Finally, like I said, you can do it, you're by no means over the hill. I wonder if a side-step might be a best first move. Buddy up with some companies that do tech in schools at the same time as doing some out of hours study and you might find you can move over as an educational tech. consultant or a techie with a welcome educational background, and then use that as the foot in the door.
Anyway, best of luck. Like I say, I've certainly seen teachers do this, I know a former school teacher who works for Microsoft.
My final words of advice.... prepare to give up the long holidays, forever! ;)
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
There goes your odds of getting much in the way of help from this crowd...
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
After college I worked in retail management for a few years. At age 30 I left that field and took a job working in tech support for a large software firm which shall remain nameless. Using that as a springboard, I launched into a career which has included both support and operations type positions and coding positions. I'm currently a senior level software developer/architect leading distributed teams on major projects, and am tracking toward management as I get older and can see where the bread is buttered. It was a bumpy ride getting it going, but some of that was due to macro-economy events outside my control, and some was due to not having all the right buzzwords and HR search terms on my resume at first.
The one bit of advice I can give for sure is this: work your tail off becoming really freaking good at both what you do, and what you want to do next. If you don't have the depth of resume, you'd better be able to perform in an interview in a way that leaves no doubts that you know your stuff. Then when you land that gig, hit the ground running, and never let up.
WALSTIB!
The problem may be that you are accepting bad jobs. But you have to assume it starts with you if it keeps happening.
There are some clueful people out there, just more idiots.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That's cute. You know nothing about my professional position, yet you assume I'm not an employer... but of course I, young whippersnapper that I am assumed to be, must respect your 40 years of probably-C experience, even though I can hire a senior engineer with only a decade's experience for less, and I won't have to iron out the team problems, either.
Your technical skills might indeed be valuable, but if I have to worry about you mouthing off to a customer or making another engineer take a poorly-timed vacation day, you're not valuable enough to be on my team. Missing a deadline on my current project carries a five-digit price tag per day. I don't have time to cater to your ego.
You will be fired when you can least afford it. American "employers" are not grown-ups. They are not emotionally or mentally capable of employing adults.
So I guess that's your management style, then... Or do you just mean every other employer is like that, and when you fire someone, you have a very good reason for it?
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.