I.T. Career advice pls - 10+ years of troubleshooting MS OP sys

areyou right there now · 30-12-2012 12:08pm #1

Goal – to return back to full time employment from self employment.

Currently – self employed 10+ years

Im self employed and dont want to be a solo operator any more with no “human” back up. I havnt had a holiday in years where someone didn’t need help by remote/phone. No way to live. I never had any employees and dont want any. Ive decided to return to working for the man (If he will have me back)

Personality / Traits.
Since I was a kid Ive been a fixer of things electrical or mechanical. Ive
always had an aptitude for troubleshooting problems. I have worked well solo and learn to task as I have done for years. Im hoping being self employed so long wont seem like a negative to employers.

Current experience:

Software:

Microsoft Op sys: 2000 / XP / Vista / Win 7

MS Office 2000 / 2003 / 2007/2010

Networks – All workgroups for small offices – No SBS.

Hardware:
Routers, IP cameras etc.

Certs – None. All self taught.

Where to from here?

I can go for organic growth building on what I know or divert into something else in I.T. Concerned about going for MCSE and Cisco if the world and his mother is doing the same.

What new skills to learn? What will be relatively future proof?

I can learn almost anything and looking for guidance.

Any advice appreciated.

Thanks.

Laneyh · 30-12-2012 12:20pm

There seem to be a lot of hosting firms setting up in Ireland and cloud computing is pretty big. I know a lot of places look for the certifications but many employers would use a technical test too- so if you know your stuff it will be evident from the test. I'd search the job sites for cloud computing jobs and see what kind of qualifications and experience they're looking for. I don't work in that area of IT so am not really best placed to give you any detailed advice- sorry. It just seems like an area with a bit of investment so hopefully there's a future in it.

Best of luck

amallon · 30-12-2012 1:13pm

'areyou right there now' your words could almost have been my own. I'm 4 years self employed with a similar skill set and am thinking of going back to being an employee. I'll be interested to see what response your thread gets.

krankykitty · 30-12-2012 1:29pm

Just wanted to add - remember working for yourself (motivation, self starting etc) will bring you other non-IT skills that employers will also be keen on...

UDP · 30-12-2012 3:03pm

You are suited for helpdesk or at best desktop support roles at present. They won't pay a huge amount but it will be your best bet to try and build a career in IT inside the enterprise world since it is a completely different game in there for which you have no experience in.

This is coming from a person who was self-employed like yourself for about 5-6 years doing similar work then self-studied a CCNA and some MS server/client certificates. Luckily managed to get some server/networking experience for a client just before leaving self-employment. I then was fortunate to get a junior IT support role in a small company but on absolute crap pay but which gave me somewhat enterprise experience I figured. Then the person above me who was sys/net admin got promoted and I took his place which gave me full exposure to server OS and network OS and responsibility experience too. After a few years there in total I landed a job as a network engineer in a large company where I am not getting excellent experience and fairly good money.

You will definitely need to get some certs - networking and server OS (MS or Linux) and probably be prepared to do helpdesk/desktop support for a few years in the hope of an opening or something to move you further. One thing to remember is you will need to keep aiming for more certs constantly to get anywhere in the enterprise IT world. Experience is great and very important to get places. Self-learning bits and pieces is good but certs consolidates/quantifies/structures that self-learning and is what employers want to see. Experience and certs is where you want to be at.

Good luck.

areyou right there now · 31-12-2012 6:34pm

New year with some new goals.

Have a good one.

Thanks all.

Feelgood · 02-01-2013 5:37am

Certs are definitely no harm, but instead of going for the usual CCNA / MCSE training route do something different.

There are thousands of Linux/Unix jobs out there and plenty of junior entry level Linux positions to be had. Failing that I would go with some Oracle or database certifications. At Enterprise level, Linux is the future.

areyou right there now · 04-01-2013 12:37am

Feelgood wrote: »

Certs are definitely no harm, but instead of going for the usual CCNA / MCSE training route do something different.

There are thousands of Linux/Unix jobs out there and plenty of junior entry level Linux positions to be had. Failing that I would go with some Oracle or database certifications. At Enterprise level, Linux is the future.

Something different > I might just do that.

Ive installed Fedora before and set up a Samba server with different people having different permissions on shares. That was my Linux Baptism of fire.
Over the years Ive been working at so many different things for so many different people I havnt had time to concentrate on any one thing for very long. So applying myself for a time to a smaller scope of knowledge would be a change.

Task to be completed for $ > Learn / test / apply > invoice > paid (eventually) .......... next. No more of that.

jimmycrackcorm · 04-01-2013 12:41am

Op, as you appear to have the ability, then go for something niche such as VMWare certification. There's a demand out there so it should be easy to leverage your experience and combine with a good certification.

Of course it will help if you can get some experience in working in the area.

areyou right there now · 04-01-2013 12:51am

jimmycrackcorm wrote: »

Op, as you appear to have the ability, then go for something niche such as VMWare certification. There's a demand out there so it should be easy to leverage your experience and combine with a good certification.

Of course it will help if you can get some experience in working in the area.

Thanks. Ive a mate working in specialised SANs I think he said for Banks etc and he mentioned VMware. Ive yet to look at it as no one has offered me money to !

Ive a feeling my back account will be lighter soon but hopefully I will have a cert or two under my belt to show for it.

MrECameraman · 09-01-2013 11:45am

Also consider Citrix certification. A big player in many markets, and there's a SEVERE lack of expertise in the country. You seem to be more comfortable on the windows side, so that might assist with that.

Best of luck!

heroics · 09-01-2013 12:27pm

MrECameraman wrote: »

Also consider Citrix certification. A big player in many markets, and there's a SEVERE lack of expertise in the country. You seem to be more comfortable on the windows side, so that might assist with that.

Best of luck!

I would agree with this. As said earlier in this thread cloud and virtualization technology is growing every day and there is a lack of skills in that area in Ireland. Look at Vmware http://mylearn.vmware.com/portals/certification/, Citrix http://training.citrix.com/cms/education/certification/ or Microsoft Hyper-v http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/virtualization-certification.aspx

Best of luck

areyou right there now · 10-01-2013 12:04am

Thanks everyone for the ideas.

micosoft · 19-01-2013 7:49pm

I work in IT Management and I also have a side company providing services to SME's. I'm responding to the OP'S post but there are a couple of others here too. I suppose what I would say is that we need to be realistic here based on what the OP outlined.

1. Going from SME support => IT Operations Engineer in big organisations is not realistic. You can get your certs etc (which really you should have done by now) but you still won't be able to point to where you got actual experience. These roles are becoming ever more specialist and quite frankly will be either super hard to get or you will be going in at a very junior level. There are a lot of very bright grads at the moment who will learn this stuff quickly and easily and they are the ones we are hiring. I don't want to sound harsh but you look like a "amateur fixer" in the context of what we do. Fine if you are sorting out a very small company but not sufficient for a larger organisation.

2. IT is going through a fundamental change. In mid -> large organisations we are shifting our budgets from operations (supporting IT systems which most of the posters here aspire to) to business systems/applications that actually deliver to the bottom line. That means fewer and fewer IT Engineer roles out there as we use tools such as cobbler,scom, etc to drive huge increases in productivity. We have fewer but better qualified IT Engineers. My personal belief is that there will be a significant level of blood letting in OP's over the next decade. Long term, unless I was super bright and young and understood development I would not go down that route. The future of inhouse ops is certainly not "secure". When I started in IT the rule of thumb was roughly 1 Ops Eng : 12 Servers. Amazon are now at 1:10,000. Think about that from a staffing point of view and the future. One Op's engineer running a cobbler script can deploy 50 servers in an hour or so.

I'd think really hard about thinking you can weather the storm inside a company. It's really hard to get Op's jobs and if you sent your CV in to me I'd struggle to see what you would contribute or fit. Junior Skills but ten years experience. I'd forget about getting a role in a medium/large company and suggest two possibilities.

a. Join up with some other dude/dudette who is doing similar (see thread) to avoid the holiday thing. Start looking at deploying cloud systems such as Google Apps and Office365 to reduce the number of issues they call you about (since the cloud provider fixes the machine). The very small business will always need someone to help them - just change your attitude from being a fixer to "managing" their IT. That mindset change will allow you scale what you do and get more money as they see more value then just "fixing" their PC's when they break.
b. Look at becoming a general IT Manager for a small company (<200 staff). Know a little about everything. Get more knowledgable about the sort of applications they run e.g. Sage line series, CRM (get a free salesforce account).

kakshah · 23-01-2013 1:04am

UDP wrote: »

You are suited for helpdesk or at best desktop support roles at present. They won't pay a huge amount but it will be your best bet to try and build a career in IT inside the enterprise world since it is a completely different game in there for which you have no experience in.

This is coming from a person who was self-employed like yourself for about 5-6 years doing similar work then self-studied a CCNA and some MS server/client certificates. Luckily managed to get some server/networking experience for a client just before leaving self-employment. I then was fortunate to get a junior IT support role in a small company but on absolute crap pay but which gave me somewhat enterprise experience I figured. Then the person above me who was sys/net admin got promoted and I took his place which gave me full exposure to server OS and network OS and responsibility experience too. After a few years there in total I landed a job as a network engineer in a large company where I am not getting excellent experience and fairly good money.

You will definitely need to get some certs - networking and server OS (MS or Linux) and probably be prepared to do helpdesk/desktop support for a few years in the hope of an opening or something to move you further. One thing to remember is you will need to keep aiming for more certs constantly to get anywhere in the enterprise IT world. Experience is great and very important to get places. Self-learning bits and pieces is good but certs consolidates/quantifies/structures that self-learning and is what employers want to see. Experience and certs is where you want to be at.

Good luck.

Thanks very much for your advice. Recently I passed CCNA and now I'm studying towards Window Server 2012 and win 7. I have no IT experience sent my CV and for INTERN help desk technicians but refused because INTERNS are offer only through job bridge and I'm not eligible for that as I'm employed.

I.T. Career advice pls - 10+ years of troubleshooting MS OP sys

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