Hello people, I came upon this site as I am looking for job and there are a few posted at Dice for HostMySite. I live in Newark and thought I'd check out the forums here. Looks like I may be able to get some assistance as far where to go next in my quest for a full time gig.
I currently work full time in my first career as a Pastry Chef. But do a lot of the tech stuff here as I am the computer guy. We just entered the 21st century and there has been a lot non-pastry call to my desk. I decided a few years ago to get into the computer field, but where do I start? I checked out a couple of schools and liked what I saw at Internetwork Learning Institute in Mt. Laurel NJ.
I took the full set of classes at the time. Which included Net+, CCNA, CCNP and CCSP. I have completed all classes and have taken and passed the CCNA. I liked the security stuff a lot. I am in the process of studying for the A+ exam. I have been told by a few employers that I need that more than anything. True? I am starting to get a little frustrated and starting to second guess my decision. Should I have learned programming first? Should I have gone the MCSE route? Should I have looked into SQL Admin? Should I have looked into Unix Admin? Should I have become a Web Developer? I'm more of a hands on tinkerer and have a small business fixing/repairing/upgrading computers. Part of the reason I went the Cisco route. I also do volunteer work for www.tristatebird.org and assisted with the creation and still maintain the site(Dreamweaver MX and Fireworks MX. I guess I'm looking for a little help in where to go next. I am sending an e-mail to Niki at HostMySite to see about possibly doing an internship on my day/s off during the week. I always have Mondays off and some Tuesdays as well. Obviously most of my knowledge is Cisco and MS. I have a copy of Redhat that I will be playing with soon and have checked out Knoppix as well. Most of my MS knowledge is from just playing around and checking things out. I have a small lab at home mostly Cisco stuff, a few routers, a couple of switches, a PIX and server 2003.

I hope this is appropriate, but any suggestions would help.

Thanks

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The best suggestion I have for you is to get a job in the IT industry - even if it's not doing exactly what you want to do, you'll end up picking up more hands-on knowledge doing that than you would doing anything else.

I've been working at HMS longer than most - close to 4 years now - and I still learn something new every day it seems!

That is partly my problem, I can't seem to find a job. As I mentioned earlier I can't really start at the bottom rung financially. I expect to take a bit of a hit financially but can't work for $15/hr it won't work.

hmm... well, then you may be taking a wrong move. With no professional experience nobody's going to just hire you for $25/hour. And don't think tech support is going to pay you much different...

We do hire part time help. I'm not sure what the lo-down is on open positions. They got boat loads of resumes via email, dice, etc. So you really need to set yourself apart from the mass with either your cover letter or resume.

We are now hiring development jobs solely from within. We find that developers coming up from CS and tech support are easy to train and already now the software and business model.

I was financially in the same boat you are in...

The way I got into the tech industry was kinda by backing in though. I was in the steel business for 10 years and wanted out...BAD...so on the side I started my own tech business...I built PC's, repaired PC's, did odd networking jobs all the time still working my regular 40 hour job as a salesman.

My first love was programming and started doing some web development. That caught on and I got a part time gig with GameSpy which was enough exposure to get me recognized. In the meantime, I used [url]rentacoder.com[/url] to get a lot of small web dev jobs. I took whatever jobs I could get there just to finish them and be able to list them on my resume. Then I got my break. The guys that made the videogame I was following for GameSpy started hiring for a web developer. I had enough ammo on my resume at this point and I knew all the developers through my GameSpy gig - and got hired. Had to move all the way from Atlanta to Seattle for a year but it was dang well worth it. I did that for a year and continued looking for bigger and better things. Lo and behold, one of my many Monster.com resume submissions called me and here I am today.

This all took me about 5 years. 4 years of piddling and doing the side work to get experience I could put on a resume, then I did the GameSpy thing for a full year before I got a fulltime gig as a web developer. Did that for a full year, never anticipating that I'd move from there so soon. Even bought a house out in Seattle, then hadda turn around and sell it a month later. We took about a $13,000 loss on that. But in the last year, my salary has effectively doubled and I am doing what I absolutely love to do for 8-10 hours a day. Sometimes you gotta take two steps back to take 3 steps forward.

It was a he||uva lotta work especially at the beginning, working essential one full time job and then working whenever I could find stuff that needed to be done and taking all the cheap rentacoder.com jobs I could win. It really seemed like I was never going to get out of the industry I was in and then one day it just happened...and the rest, as they say, is history.

lol...

I was young enough and pretty much a loser, so all my steps were forward. When i got out of high school I had no plans on going to college. I worked for Aetna US Healthcare for 2 years... and then they started to close the site I worked at... laying people off left and right. I had worked in construction before that and even have a technical degree in residential building construction as well as being an experienced mason, carpenter, and landscaper.

During this time period I did what Scott was doing - odd jobs for people, alot of playing, building personal and professional experience. I've been doing this since I was 20. I never did anything as far as dice, hotjobs, etc... my lack of experience shyed me away from that. I also didn't understand the simple logic behind programming lol... and even simple things like HTML were impeded because of my aesthetically retarded eye.

However, while I was at Aetna I not only did ALOT of work with the infastructure department, aiding them with new workstation rollouts as well as specialized training and inner-departmental upgrades and beta testing. Alongside that, there were about 550 employees at the site I worked and and after doing odd jobs for 2 people word spread quickly after that and I had some nice side money going on. I wasn't charging alot, as I was still learning and some things took me ahwile to figure out, but it was still extra money and me building a name for myslef. And get this... right after I was laid off, Aetna donated all of their old workstations to a school district, and the person who headed up the HMO division on the site I worked at gave the district my name because they asked if somebody there would be willing to do upgrades on them all. So I had a HEFTY paycheck from that one (just upgrading all workstations with CD-ROM drives).

After the whole Aetna thing i moved back in with my parents ( I was 19 when I moved out, and 21 when I moved back). IU met my wife, we started dating, and ended up getting married. We moved to Annapolis MD (from Delaware) and while we were there I attended Anne Arundel Community College for a Network Administration Certificate. My course outline included some basic programming classes. While in college, Champion Realty, Inc. hired me as a network technician, and before I left I had used my network admin training, as well as picked up SQL Server and ASP.NET. I personally built their whole intranet (which is still in use - I do contract work for them now to add/update/maintain things in the intranet as well as some server administration) and brought two web servers in house. By myself.

When it was time to leave there, I worked for a company called Bidmaster as a VB4/6 programmer. That didn't last too long, and I worked for HizzleMahShizzle. That didn't last long either, and now I'm working for Key Professional Media as their national system administrator. We're currently in the process of upgrading all onsite servers (which run web/email/mysql and also fileservers for this site), and rolling out Active Directory nation wide. The primary servers are and will continue to be housed here.

BTW, I just left Champion in December of Last Year... that;s 13 mos ago. Since then my salary has doubled, and to add to it my personal consulting biz has completely taken off. Right now, I can't do the work as fast as I get it... which is nice. Maybe another year or two at the most and I'll be off completely on my own. I just turned 25 in October.

It can be done, but you're gonna have to start at the bottom of the totem pole. If you're determined and have a good head on your shoulders, it won't take long to get there though.

And now that everybody knows my "life story"... lol...

Well Josh if you need any help with any of the side work you've got piling up, I'd be willing to get some experience that way.
If I didn't have a mortgage and could afford to work for less I would. I have actually considered taking a low paying gig and working at Wawa at night to try to make up. My side jobs are starting to roll in now as well, so who knows. I also have a proposal for my current job as there is a no tech position here. I just need to show them why they need it. Thanks for giving some pointers. I guess I need to find a way to make it work financially and just bite the bullet.

Byron, I did hear back from Niki at HMS, her reply was there are no part-time positions. I was actually offering to work for free on Mondays just to get the experience. I don't think she understood that. Anyway I have also contacted InfoSystems here in DE regarding the same "internship" type setup. Hopefully that can get me some exposure.