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Positions like IT systems admin are hard to get as there are too many candidates and not enough positions. You might try actual software development roles, as those are more heavily in demand and pretty much anyone with even basic experience and skills can get a job. I've worked with the hiring process of several companies, and it was essentially impossible to find a qualified candidate willing to work even as a junior level software developer for under $20/hr. Even when we raised the rates, most of the good candidates we interviewed would get snatched up by another company before we could hire them.
And many of these infrastructure positions are going to be lost as more businesses go from being on-prem to SaaS models, and taking up various cloud services. We've already seen some of this.
I know several businesses in my area (which is by no means a tech hub) who have gone from having a couple of internal IT staff who basically "did everything," to no direct IT employees at all. There is a local company that provides desktop support, help desk, and other lower level infrastructure stuff to many area small businesses. Applications for many small businesses can be done in the cloud - does a small law office really need an IT department when they can just go to Office 365 and contract the rest of the stuff out? Sure, there are jobs created at these vendors, but they're not enough to replace larger numbers of internal IT infrastructure/ops position losses.
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Originally Posted by SeminoleTom
I'm not sure why there is a lot of posters saying IT is over saturated. In Atlanta it's not-- not even close. Of course you have to have the right skills but isn't that pretty common in any discipline? Anyway, if you have the right skills move to ATL lots of IT jobs here....
Like s1alker said, there are few tech related jobs in small towns or rural areas. I live in a town of about 50,000 that is otherwise in a rural area, an hour and a half away from the nearest metro of more than 100,000. I've had numerous friends in IT, from infrastructure folks to developers to app analysts, who've had to leave - not by choice, but by a lack of employment options.
OP, because, like someone else said, stuff like tech support and help desk are glorified customer service at some places...I started out in those positions without any experience or any certs. It might matter where you live, but I would look for the job ads that are seriously entry level (not entry level but wanting 2 years of experience). There are places that will hire someone with little-to-no experience. You're just probably not going to make much, which I didn't.
It was very stressful, because those 1st two jobs I got threw you into the fire and thought that was the best way to learn...on top of just how difficult it is dealing with some of the customers/clients. I did my time with that and used the experiences to move on to better jobs under the IT umbrella.
Where I live, a lot of IT jobs are filled through staffing agencies, and I got my help desk job that way. I have also had a lot of recruiters contact me for IT jobs. You might want to check some staffing agencies out.
I also want you to understand this (and it's not going to be popular, but here it is anyway)--I have been interested in IT for years, even before I enrolled in grad school in 2005 for something totally different, and I "listened" to a lot of what I read on online forums when I was choosing between my grad program and an IT program. A lot of IT people give bad career advice. Based on my experiences, past and present, I would say be careful about listening to people who try to steer you away from IT in general (not necessarily specific areas of it, but just the entire field) and listening to people who have been in the field a long time. And the reason I say that about the latter is things change, and they don't necessarily have the best sense of what has changed and how when it comes to getting that first job.
When I graduated college, I started out at a help desk. This was in 2010 when the economy remained poor. They did provide training, but it was extremely difficult at first. Call centers/help desks are metric driven. Get under your metrics for a month - you may be on a PIP. If you don't improve the next month, you're out.
For the $15/hr I was making, there are far less stressful ways to make that than being in an IT call center taking 50+ calls a day. I have the same model of phone I did back then and still hate hearing that phone ring. Working help desk also killed my interest in tech and computing as a hobby for years.
This was a Fortune 100 company, but the IT call center was in a rural area of southwest Virginia with nothing else done at the facility. A handful of people, mostly younger employees, were able to attend college with the tuition reimbursement program and transfer to professional track IT jobs in other parts of the state. Some moved up within the call center directorate (quality analyst, lead, whatever), but most of the people I worked with back in 2010 who remained at this employer are still stuck answering the phone when it rings.
Staffing agencies are employers of last resort. Few of these jobs ever go permanent. I thought I was doing a good job at a client company working as a W-2 support person - I found a permanent job, and told the client manager I wanted to stay there for a $4/hr raise. They gave me the raise, but the next month was told not to come back by the agency after leaving one afternoon.
This kind of stuff rarely happens with professional level employment.
And many of these infrastructure positions are going to be lost as more businesses go from being on-prem to SaaS models, and taking up various cloud services. We've already seen some of this.
I know several businesses in my area (which is by no means a tech hub) who have gone from having a couple of internal IT staff who basically "did everything," to no direct IT employees at all. There is a local company that provides desktop support, help desk, and other lower level infrastructure stuff to many area small businesses. Applications for many small businesses can be done in the cloud - does a small law office really need an IT department when they can just go to Office 365 and contract the rest of the stuff out? Sure, there are jobs created at these vendors, but they're not enough to replace larger numbers of internal IT infrastructure/ops position losses.
Like s1alker said, there are few tech related jobs in small towns or rural areas. I live in a town of about 50,000 that is otherwise in a rural area, an hour and a half away from the nearest metro of more than 100,000. I've had numerous friends in IT, from infrastructure folks to developers to app analysts, who've had to leave - not by choice, but by a lack of employment options.
People have been saying this since I got into IT in the 90's, yet IT continues to grow. Cloud, data centers etc do not administer your infrastructure or data, they only reduce the hardware costs for the company until the bill comes (that egress data bill adds up fast depending on the service). And many companies throw money away "contracting" out to Managed Service Provider (MSP) and there response time is much slower than internal IT. My company used to use an MSP, then fired the MSP and hired internal IT. I have heard of employees having to wait more than 24 hours to get their PC's fixed or get a dying network looked at.
People have been saying this since I got into IT in the 90's, yet IT continues to grow. Cloud, data centers etc do not administer your infrastructure or data, they only reduce the hardware costs for the company until the bill comes (that egress data bill adds up fast depending on the service). And many companies throw money away "contracting" out to Managed Service Provider (MSP) and there response time is much slower than internal IT. My company used to use an MSP, then fired the MSP and hired internal IT. I have heard of employees having to wait more than 24 hours to get their PC's fixed or get a dying network looked at.
I don't know what you mean by providers don't administer your infrastructure or data.
I worked for a tech company that provided software to large financial clients. Some older clients had on-prem installs - all our firm did was install and configure the software we sold them on their infrastructure. The client company was responsible for coordinating any patching, data backups, infrastructure, etc. Sure, we didn't do much there as a vendor.
Most of our clients took our SaaS offering, and it was mandatory for new clients after a certain point. We partnered with one of the big name hosting providers. The hosting provider provided all the infrastructure we needed - hardware, OS management, networking, storage, disaster recovery, DBA services, basically everything. Clients didn't see this, but there absolutely was infrastructure administration built into the sales proposals and in day to day functionality. We had technical engineers, but they were basically liaisons between the clients (whom systems analysts worked with directly) and the hosting vendor. Those guys were needed largely because the systems analysts were spread too thin, and were a bit more technical, but with more staff availability, we could have managed without the technical engineers and work with the hosting company's technical staff directly.
We had internal staff that managed the software and configured it to client requirements. Each systems analyst had multiple clients, some of whom were very demanding. If you mean "administering data" from the standpoint of making business decisions off of it, we didn't do that as the clients "owned' the data, but we absolutely had to make sure the data was available, backed up, encrypted, and otherwise "cared for" at a technical level.
I agree a lot of times contracting out to an MSP can result in service delays or less than optimal satisfaction, but many businesses are OK with that if the cost savings are where they want. Software generally just "runs better" now than it did twenty years ago, and many formerly manual processes can easily be automated. You generally need fewer people to maintain the same number of apps.
People have been saying this since I got into IT in the 90's, yet IT continues to grow. Cloud, data centers etc do not administer your infrastructure or data, they only reduce the hardware costs for the company until the bill comes (that egress data bill adds up fast depending on the service). And many companies throw money away "contracting" out to Managed Service Provider (MSP) and there response time is much slower than internal IT. My company used to use an MSP, then fired the MSP and hired internal IT. I have heard of employees having to wait more than 24 hours to get their PC's fixed or get a dying network looked at.
It may be growing but it's becoming so specialized so that the bar to get in is now unobtainable for many and it's hard to stay in, even with years of experience (or so I've heard). And the H1B, L1, OPT stuff doesn't help any either.
There is nothing wrong with making a career out of help desk of course. But it can be a dead end for those seeking higher technical roles with high pay. Keep in mind many companies have an "up or out" mentality. I would be weary to stay in an entry level position for a long time.
It really depends on the company.
But some people actually wouldn't mind help desk or desktop support as a career
Think about it, getting paid 50k a year just to answer phones and talk to silly end users.
Not to mention Help desk is one of the few IT jobs you can truly leave at the office.
The exception to this is a 24/7 help desk.
With that said thou
Anyone who wants to move out of support in IT need certifications or a Bachelors Degree.
We have openings for a system administrator, and server admins but you need certifications even be consider.
A pure help desk position can be a completely soul crushing experience and a dead end if you let it be that.
I have worked in IT in various forms for over thirty years. After owning my own business for too many years I had to re-enter the ranks of the wage slave.
The key is finding a position with a company that lets you do more than just the end user support crap.
Get your MCSA/E and a CCNA as fast as you can. Learn to script in powershell and automate repetitive tasks like creating/deleting users and anything else you see someone doing more than twice a week.
You also need to job hop every 18 months to a more demanding position with greater pay. No matter how much you learn and grow in a position, your current employer will never pay you enough for what you know.
One of the best strategies I have seen is to jump back and forth between working for a company and working for a consulting/integration company. You learn more at a consulting position and you become that much more valuable in the eyes of your next regular company position.
Too many people I have known in IT just want to keep their head down and do what they know. They don't usually have the personality to network on the job and push their own agenda.
Remember, either you work your own plan or you become part of someone elses plan.
It really depends on the company.
But some people actually wouldn't mind help desk or desktop support as a career
Think about it, getting paid 50k a year just to answer phones and talk to silly end users.
Not to mention Help desk is one of the few IT jobs you can truly leave at the office.
The exception to this is a 24/7 help desk.
With that said thou
Anyone who wants to move out of support in IT need certifications or a Bachelors Degree.
We have openings for a system administrator, and server admins but you need certifications even be consider.
You live in LA. Most places do not pay anywhere near $50k for basic help desk support. My dad works in the same call center I did. 24x7x365, supporting over 100,000 employees, vendors, and external business partners. They were at least thirty minutes "in queue" all day long yesterday. With hold times that long, the callers are irate by the time they even get to speak to someone. He makes well under $50k.
This isn't a job "speaking to silly end users." It is generally dealing with irate callers and being completely tracked by some metric every step of the way.
You live in LA. Most places do not pay anywhere near $50k for basic help desk support. My dad works in the same call center I did. 24x7x365, supporting over 100,000 employees, vendors, and external business partners. They were at least thirty minutes "in queue" all day long yesterday. With hold times that long, the callers are irate by the time they even get to speak to someone. He makes well under $50k.
This isn't a job "speaking to silly end users." It is generally dealing with irate callers and being completely tracked by some metric every step of the way.
To me you have described a call center CSR, not so much an IT help desk. Everywhere I have worked our IT help desk only took calls from other employees to help with business applications/equipment.
We did have call centers that handled calls from vendors, external partners etc.
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(that egress data bill adds up fast depending on the service). And many companies throw money away "contracting" out to Managed Service Provider (MSP) and there response time is much slower than internal IT. My company used to use an MSP, then fired the MSP and hired internal IT. I have heard of employees having to wait more than 24 hours to get their PC's fixed or get a dying network looked at.
