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Actually, the guy who made it in IT early probably has a target on his back every day. There is no doubt a line of kids who will do his job for half the price. They might not have experience, but when has a thing like experience or quality stopped a US company from making a business decision.
IT is an extremely specialized field today. Fresh students out of college will most likely not be qualified for the job market unless they went to a top school AND got internship experience while going to school AND have 4-5 certs under their belt. Only the people who have been in it since the '90s have the skills needed for most of the job postings you see out there today.
IT is an extremely specialized field today. Fresh students out of college will most likely not be qualified for the job market unless they went to a top school AND got internship experience while going to school AND have 4-5 certs under their belt. Only the people who have been in it since the '90s have the skills needed for most of the job postings you see out there today.
IT changes so fast that most of the "skills" they picked up in the 90's are useless (unless they work in an office still operating on Windows 95). In fact, most all of the major certifications before 2005 have been retired already. Most IT guys from yesteryear are getting paid big bucks sitting on past achievements, when really, they are probably no more qualified to work on modern systems then a kid who possesses the same current certifications. Since almost all important IT certs have no experience or education requirements, its very easy for a kid to quickly be on the same modern level as a seasoned veteran.
When you are requiring 15 years of experience out of an IT guy, about 10 of those are almost completely useless and not applicable in most businesses.
While randomdude is correct about the true 'shelf life' or certificates and specialized technical knowledge, I have to say that as some one that has been fortunate to move back and forth between technical roles and other kinds of business oriented positions it is completely incorrect to say that a highly experienced veteran of pretty much any position in Info Technology will not allow a skilled practitioner to be every bit as valuable as their salary would suggest.
Case in point: Recently was involved in adding staff to my organization. Saw many resumes from folks at different stages in their careers, scheduled interviews, made evaluations. Positions open were in Info Sec, generally somewhat hard to fill, as the very reason you need such skills is due to sensitive nature of what they'll be doing. Some candidates right out of school looked good on paper, but very few seemed to understand that all the interesting theoretical things they did in school are less important than their ability to boil things down, communicate threats to appropriate people and work with other professionals to remedy the situation in an appropriate manner. Solo super stars have to quell their desire to "fix it all myself" and the deep knowledge they may gain from dealing with individual incidents will be lost if they cannot catalog their experiences and be prepared to allow the rest of the organization to understand its importance. We did choose one recent college grad who was also enrolled in a masters program, but the additional education was not the tipping factor, his grasp of "how things are" was -- he literally said that will he is not sure that he will gain all that much practical depth with the masters he understands that long term he will have to keep re-learning the new threats and such so he might as well get used to being in school a lot. Very true. We also interviewed several more experienced folks, some were again quite impressive on paper, but in the interviews it seemed too many had basically just re-done a year or two of experience over and over, not gaining insights into other areas or processes that are needed to be successful in any large enterprise. The person we did select ultimately was far older than most of us thought would be the ideal candidate, but he was able to articulate a clear path from the beginning of his career as an old school mainframe programmer through various roles that led him to eventually be some one with a great breadth of experience as well as tremendous technical depth in the areas that would be his primary responsibility. His greatest strength was he proven ability to tie together the common functions that he utilized in he numerous roles in IT and communicate this knowledge without arrogance or jaded pessimism that we saw from others. It was abundantly clear that he knew what "industry practices" are, how to bring this knowledge into parts of the organization that were either lacking in knowledge or motivation of implementation, and will certainly be worth his high salary.
I also have experience working in places were the IT functions are NOT handled by a specialized team, or even a person who is dedicated to this. In such instances it is FLAT OUT impossible to have the kind of knowledge or time to get maximum value out of the money spent on hw, sw, and services. I personally know several smart small business owners that often try to "do it themselves" and if they read up and have a somewhat technical mindset they often can get things to mostly work. What they do not do is BUILD on their experience, so if they invest in new HW or OS they basically repeat the same mistakes they made with previous IT efforts, except where the vendor has made it 'impossible to break things the same old way'. This means that, yes, they can get a bit more value out of WindowsServer2008 than out of of 2003, because MSFT has made it impossible to set-up things that are just wrong, but they very likely will still under utilize the HW badly because they really do not know what sorts of options exist for VM and non-MSFT OS. Heck even if they are Mac person and like the differences provided by that OS / HW as a desktop / laptop there is an even smaller 'universe' of expert knowledge to help these "DIYers" to extract maximum value out of OS X Server, so that even if they did invest in a Mac Mini for their office they would almost certainly have an impossible task of getting their staff the kind of experience that many not-so-technical office staff need to unlearn the old habits. Further if they have any kind of 'legacy' of custom-ish "applications" (many many business people rely on makeshift spreadsheets for not just financial calculations but as a crude way to share information in a structured way) they will often rely on a virtualization solution that is inappropriate to accomplish the true nature of their work. It is then even less likely that such a "one man band" that has a "hammer" of Excel or something like Access will have the desire / knowledge / motivation to do the wise thing and port over their solution to something like Filemaker which almost certainly would be far more efficient and scalable. If this small business were to grow / be acquired the progression needed to allow the information sharing throughout a larger organization with a large client base might make sense for some kind of custom application. The decision to utilize a technology that is supplied by MSFT vs another vendor or an open source project is something that must be made by an individual with appropriate depth of knowledge in the pluses and minuses of each path. There is simply no way that sort of knowledge will exist inside the head of even the brightest regular recent college grad, it can only be built through experience. Consulting firms that throttle the access to their truly skilled subject matter experts and architects may get higher billing rates for a while, but eventually clients realize they if there is a frequent need for this level of expertise they can get better value by having internal staff that can add unique business value to the overall organization while leading these efforts.
It is like the difference between an efficient and successful custom remodeling company that a full time staff of master trim carpenters and foremen vs a marketing driven remodeling contractor that relies only on subcontractors -- what one firm may lose in initial price competitiveness it gains in uniformly high quality work, lack of 'call backs', guaranteed on-time delivery, and consistent value. These are the things that give the true top-to-bottom professional firm the long term lead in referral business and profitability... If you want you be a highly successful master carpenter you can do that inside the context of a firm that values your contribution OR you can do so as a specialty sub-contractor that is the "go to guy" for every firm that needs those skills short term. Pretty much the same for highly valuable experienced IT pros -- those really and truly good enough, in organizations that value their contribution, will always have a place that wants to have their logo associated with top quality IT, and if the highly skilled valuable experienced IT pro wants to be a "hired gun" that is always on option too...
While randomdude is correct about the true 'shelf life' or certificates and specialized technical knowledge, I have to say that as some one that has been fortunate to move back and forth between technical roles and other kinds of business oriented positions it is completely incorrect to say that a highly experienced veteran of pretty much any position in Info Technology will not allow a skilled practitioner to be every bit as valuable as their salary would suggest.
Im not saying they dont have value, however, intangibles are rarely something businesses ever consider when making decisions. If a kid will work for half the money, and basically can do the same job on their modern equipment, from a technical stand point, most businesses will take the kid.
Its widely circulated amongst industry insiders that a good deal of work coming from India is lower end, however, businesses tolerate it because its coming out at a tenth of the cost. Same with call centers. Yeah, Americans largely do not like talking to Frank in India, and some might stop being customers because of it, but the businesses there have made the decision that the cheap price of an India call center is worth the cost of any customers they lose.
Again, I am not making this up. I am talking about firms that have names that are literally know to all Americans.
When we made some recent decisions to add staff we did look at all available candidates and the two we selected are BOTH ones that our whole organization feels will provide more value than we could get with a lower paid combination of folks or outsourcing or off shoring.
Heck even when it comes to call centers we have only domestic IVRs with only US citizens as CSRs. I am talking an organization that, as the memo on my desk says, fielded over 5 millions customer inquires in 2009. We are not alone in this bias. Our direct competitors largely are of the same mindset. Our surveys show that we would lose major ground in both our direct-to-consumer sales as well as other channels if the folks picking up the phones do not sound like the people they are helping. We have standards of customer confidentiality that no off shore call center can guarantee.
This is not just about losing customers, it is about having a secure and sustainable business and believe me everyone from our CEO on down to building maintenance staff knows that should a major breach of customer information / trust occur we could not recover.
Our surveys show that we would lose major ground in both our direct-to-consumer sales as well as other channels if the folks picking up the phones do not sound like the people they are helping. We have standards of customer confidentiality that no off shore call center can guarantee.
This is not just about losing customers, it is about having a secure and sustainable business and believe me everyone from our CEO on down to building maintenance staff knows that should a major breach of customer information / trust occur we could not recover.
Ok, you guys might have those standards but check the list of companies that dont. I know Linsys (made by Cisco) has an India call center, so does Microsoft, Citibank, Dell, Google, HP, AOL had one until they didnt do enough business to justify it, IBM, it goes on and on.
The message from those firms is pretty clear: We don't really want to provide highly skilled support to you over the phone...
You are right, they do send that message, but they largely dont give a crap because the shot callers have determined that any customers lost as a result are an acceptable cost of doing business to lower salary costs.
Is it right? Hell no. However, that is how most of American big business thinks.
I just graduated in December with B.S. degrees Computer Science and Computer Engineering. I've been looking for jobs the last two month. I'm at the point of quitting and returning for a M.S. in Computer Science, although I'm still waiting for replies from defense contractors.
Volunteer for some IT jobs out there even if it is non-paid. Work for a few months and continue to look. Use them as part of your work experience. Also, see if you have relatives or friends who own a business. Ask them if they need to setup a network, database, etc. , so you can learn while helping them. Read up on topics and do the hands on stuff. Once you feel good, put on your resume that you worked for some consulting company using their business. Also, use them as reference. Embellish your resume a bit since this is a tough economy and employers are not going to give you a chance with no experience. You have to find ways to get your foot in the door! Getting that degree was only half the battle! Good luck!
I might want to add that if you have multiple computers at home, you can setup your own network and learn from there. Also, if you're interested in routers/switches, you can always get a cheap lower end one from Ebay and implement that into your home network. As far as programming, i think this is much tougher. Either you really know it or you don't. I guess some people can pick it up quick, but i was always a bad programmer. Cobol was fine, but C++ always kicked my ass, so i went the networking route and now into databases.
however, intangibles are rarely something businesses ever consider when making decisions.
This is just gibberish, almost every management method puts stress on getting the right people in the right positions. These sorts of "intangibles" are things businesses think about all the time.
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