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Ask Slashdot: In What Other Occupations Are IT Skills and Background Useful?
An anonymous reader writes "Here on Slashdot we sometimes see questions about how to get IT jobs while having little experience, changing from one specialty to another, or being (gasp) middle aged. And, we see comments that bemoan various aspects of IT work and express a desire to do something entirely different. This is what I'm wondering about, and I thought I'd put my questions to Ask Slashdot. Has anyone successfully applied their years of IT experience to other lines of work? Is the field that you moved on to entirely unrelated, or is there a more substantial link to your new (but clearly not IT) role?"
1. Dealing with a wide array sockets and dongles.
2. Freelancing more remunerative but far more risky.
3. Constantly worrying about viruses and having to conduct frequent screenings.
4. Coping with strange end-user requests.
5. Getting fucked by clients AND bosses.
Not that is a major career switch because I only had two years in IT, but I have been working in Finance for 7 years now after going to school, but not finishing, for electrical engineering.
I actually landed the finance job by selling my technical aptitude. You'd be amazed at the kind of elementary mistakes people make in other fields just because they don't know how to properly operate a computer, and how they can get hung up on the most menial tasks because they are scared of the system in front of them. It took a while to learn the finance side of things, but once I got rolling, I was able to double or triple the productivity of others with lower error rates. Add on to this that someone from IT understands enough to automate menial tasks, and you have a recipe for efficiency and process improvement. A lot of finance is simply getting the data into custom forms or formats for transmittal to the next or from the previous step, with 1 or 2 points where human intervention or review is required. The career change has worked out well for me.
It also helps to be able to liason between departments. I noticed that in meetings between IT and Finance managers, sometimes there's a 'language barrier.' You get rewarded nicely to solve these miscommunication issues before they show up at the end of a development project.
I started with doing stage crew as a hobby, but I've also done it professionally and found that there's a significant overlap with IT, especially in smaller houses where the whole stage system may need to be rebuilt for each production.
If you're old enough to remember the old bus-tobology networks, you already know enough to rig DMX lights. If newer networks are your thing, you can probably set up a cat5e-based audio network easily enough. If you're more comfortable with object-oriented design, passing data between objects apply well-defined functions based on their internal state, then the processing chains in the audio rack will be easy for you to manage.
The most important skill in IT is the ability to keep track of many pathways and failure modes. It turns out that's also a useful skill when you're trying to figure out which parts of your 500-component stage are misbehaving.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Most occupations make use of the computer.
It is incredible how horribly bad everyone is at using computers when they are so ubiquitous and necessary.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
In larger libraries, there's often someone with the title of 'systems librarian. It might be the person who just configures the software packages that the library uses, but it's often someone with a bit of IT skills.
It might be an IT person who slowly picks up the librarian issues (and some will go and get a library degree if at an academic library), or it's a library person with a bit of IT skills.
If you're one of these people, and aren't already on the code4lib mailing list, I highly recommend it. (although be warned, occassionally threads get out of control).
You can also check the code4lib jobs board for what sort of skills libraries are looking for.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I don't know if I completely agree with this assessment. The mechanics that service our fleet of vehicles needs to be fairly familiar with a variety of computer systems. We use a web-based issue ticketing and tracking system and our more tech-savvy technicians provide valuable feedback to make that system better. Our Cummins, International, and other vendors for brake systems, air conditioning systems, and others use software combined with various leads and interfaces to access computer data. Our newest vehicles can report information back to our system wirelessly within our shops. Precious few of our mechanics are familiar with the systems enough to use them to their potential. One of our newest acquisitions is a Snap-On Verus, which is a WinXP based tablet with a variety of modules that interface with vehicle systems for troubleshooting. It is capable of not only gathering the symptoms, but also searches online databases for highest probability resolutions for those problems. Again, I'm not entirely sure I agree with your assessment, because you may be correct that a computer geek might not want to do this type of work, what I see in our shop is a transition from the mechanic work of my father's day (basic ODB-II scanner capable, but more at home with a dwell meter and basic timing light) to the modern mechanic who must know how to effectively search databases and extract data from complex electronic systems.
Rob "Welcome to Lifestyles of the Dull and Nearsighted."