Get A+ cert

>live in rural area
>about to get AAS
>been looking for an entry level job for about a year
>100+ applications, less than 10% response rate, maybe 6 interviews
>finally get a job as a tier 1 help desk for an MSP
>starting Monday
Bros is this the light? Will this experience make it better for the next job?

good luck bro, baby steps and you will get wherever you want

what is AAS?

You look like an incel

Thanks user. AAS = Associate of Applied Science, its like a trade degree.

Hell yeah dude. Be greedy with the work on the table, be willing to tackle anything. I was making $11/hr at my entry level msp job. In two years I was pretty much the contact for all things exchange, voip and FIM/MIM. I got a lot of experience in directory syncing and troubleshooting some really goofy shit. I wasn’t doing all of our WSUS engineering (building out/configuring downstream servers) and writing basic automations in powershell. My coworkers would always say “dude they don’t pay you enough for that shit” but you know what... I’m five years in and I’ve been able to hop around for 15-20% pay bumps almost annually.

Stay hungry, humble and learn everything you can get your sweaty hands on. The path from entry level to 100k+ is easy if you put in the work and understand that the experience your getting is worth more than the pay.

This sounds most accurate. Who you know can get you pretty fuckin far.

Thanks user this is great, I'm just excited to finally work doing something I'm passionate about - fixing shit and helping people. It sure beats delivering pizza or checking tourists into hotel rooms.

What is with you people, why do you chase these "certs" and work in fucking call centers? What is your end goal? Why do you do this?

Why not just pick up a programming language and do dev ops or web dev? It's fucking easy. College dropouts with 4 months bootcamp """experience""" will have a better career than you, and they're absolutely fucking clueless.

I don't understand. Why would you WANT to be tech support?

Not everyone can/wants to go into programing as a career. Let's be real, enterprise software DEVELOPMENT (creating new code, not maintaining old code) is not easy. It takes a higher level of logical problem solving that most people can't do.
I'll be honest I doubt that I could do software development as a job. for instance in Java I understand data types, loops, conditionals, recursion. However I don't know much more than that and don't know what else I need to learn for a job.

You can probably pick up powershell quickly and make 70+.

As you get more advanced with it you’ll ease your way into .net and C# which become even more valuable. If you’re willing to professionally depend on Microsoft tech, powershell is a great entry point to getting your toes in some enterprise grade automation.

You can take that experience and learn enough basic groovy to get your shit running in Jenkins and learn just enough Ruby to navigate how cookbooks in chef run and you have a 95-110k skill set on your hands

>You can probably pick up powershell quickly and make 70+.
I've used Powershell in a Windows Server admin class I took in uni and dicked around with it. Besides automating things like backups and AD administration what else can Powershell do that is worthwhile to employers?

>
As you get more advanced with it you’ll ease your way into .net and C# which become even more valuable. If you’re willing to professionally depend on Microsoft tech, powershell is a great entry point to getting your toes in some enterprise grade automation
I've read about .net and C#, the latter has relatively similar syntax to Java and seems like it wouldn't be hard to pick up with some practice. Again though what sort of things would employers look for with these tools?

>You can take that experience and learn enough basic groovy to get your shit running in Jenkins and learn just enough Ruby to navigate how cookbooks in chef run and you have a 95-110k skill set on your hands
Big if true, I'll look into what you said. Thanks user

It's really not as hard as you think, most junior programmers are brainlets and only as smart as the first page of googling the error message, they just know (more or less) where to put the stack overflow code snippets to make it work.

Especially when you're doing abstractions upon abstractions with things like web dev or devops, you're just working within a very small subset of programming, with very high level languages and frameworks, it's all very easy compared to what I imagined before I learned how it all works.
Not even mentioning how you just use libraries for everything, and most projects are just gluing together methods from various other people's code, it's still easy. While including that, you can get far by just copy/pasting from the docs.

Things like kubernetes and docker literally put the power of running swarms of machines into a few config files, it's absurd. Sure you have to know a bunch of commands and things to run, and obviously how to integrate them with deployment like AWS, but it's still piss easy compared to what I imagined it would be.

Geek squad wants sales reps and home theater guys, not IT.
You can't fix problems, you sell things.

this but unironically

Are you me? I have all of those things and I had to call in a favor to get the job I have. Only making just above 50k but its better then nothing.

I caught this for a manager who only needed to view EPS files. The assfuck at adobe refused to require us only Photoshop so I let that expire and used a corporate card. 800$ a year saved because I just asked the user what they actually need.

If not getting interviews, work on making resume look more presentable and check for mistakes that make you look dumb out the gate. Also put experience for stupid applications like office and acrobat and experience doing the most common things you'd likely need to do on the job. 9/10 your certs aren't even know by whomever is doing the filtering, and if you only have 1, that makes non-technical people think you have little drive.

If you are getting interviewed, it's something with YOU, be it your appearance, hygiene, or personality.

Make sure you are 5 min early to the interview. Don't come too early or you are making the interviewer need to rush (even if you don't intend for them to), and DON'T come late (gives worst first impression). Sit in the parking lot for a while if you have to.

Dress to impress (dress shirt, tucked, slacks).

Showered, brushed teeth, smell neutral (don't go heavy on cologne or body spray, just get deodorant on your pits.)

Express passion for field. As others have said, let them know that you like tinkering with computers/servers in your free time and have a home lab of your own). Stay in comfort zone of IT field if you don't have small talk game. As long as you make a good impression, even if they don't go for you for this job, if you leave a good enough impression, they keep you in mind in case things go south or they need more help. Some jobs if they have enough budget even make up positions to get good hires if they think you are worth it.

Once you get more experience under your belt, much easier.

So true.

I do the same stuff myself and get about 62K if I work overtime (easy).

Be me
>No certs
>2 year IT related degree at now closed school
>worked shit IT related jobs through schooling
I get call backs in under a week for about 30% of applications/resumes put out.

You.l can use powershell for almost anything on a modern server if you’re resourceful. You need to approach the question more along the lines of what you think powershell can do for your employer and chase the problem down

In a really basic environment you can leverage task scheduler to write scripts that do basic service health checks “is this service running? If not start it”

A big automation that’s gotten me a lot of credit in a couple shops is update management automations. Something as stupid as juggling update schedules. You can use workflows to do parallel executions across an entire environment (granted your login principal is good across the environment) and do automated installs across a bunch of boxes at once, service restarts across a bunch of boxes, reboots or whatever.

I could go on but the key is figuring out what is painful at your job and finding a way to automate painful workflows. Powershell has been great for that, as it’s really easy to jump into and it’s really versatile across Microsoft shit.

A lot of my powershell these days is very specific to our environment, I’m able to quickly bake up a script that hits our products API, gathers info, goes out and executes SQL shit and does some azure things. You just have to be proactive in “wow this is a stupid process why would anybody do this by hand every time” and find a way to put the pieces together in making something a script.

Something like Jenkins is nice is primarily due to complicated multi step scripts can be boiled down to “stages”. As you find new ways to tackle parts of a complicated workflow, you can interact with a specific stage or build a new stage without really hauling around this huge script. Additionally it’s easy to make scripts you develop into nice team friendly workflows.

>be me
>just graduated from college (MIS degree)
>worked almost a year in a call center, just took a job for a contractor because i'm a young dumb idiot
>it's just renewing PCs for a big company from Win7 to Win10
>only pays 13 an hour, 7 vacation days and 0 benefits.
>still looking for other shit since it sucks

Am I fucking over my future career by taking this? I didn't want to turn it down because I really don't want to risk not being able to find a job later but I'm not even sure how useful this experience will be on my resume.

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If you have a 4 year degree from an actual accredited college (NOT some online shit) and you are only making 13 an hour you are fucking up badly.

My friend makes 15 an hour doing the same shit as you but he has no degree, only a high school diploma and hes an immigrant born in mexico... he does have a green card.

I make 22.50 an hour with a 4 year degree and its mediocre.

well what the fuck should I do?

Welcome to shit jobs. Anyhow it will work in your favor on a resume. Dealing and troubleshooting with Windows 7 to 10 migration is going to be a big thing in coming years. That is a major resume addition. Want to fuck over your career? Go with geek squad or other shady business groups.

You have a 4 year degree...... go apply to places that actually require one.....

Utilize the degree dude. What the fuck.

What do you think I'm doing you insolent fucking nigger, why do you think I'd take a 13 an hour job if I thought I could get a job that uses my degree right now. Fucking dumbass, go dunk your head in a piss ocean.

Thank you for the actual advice user. I will straight up cuck these guys mid-training if something better comes up but for now

Also, there are people out there that have it worse.

My friend got 50K worth of loans, got a master in Chemistry.

He got a job right out of college as a result of nepotism, his fiances dad was an executive.

He then fucked up multiple times and lost the job.

He then went unemployed for 3 months and finally got a job from a temp agency for $10 an hour. He was paid that rate for a year, and then finally got $13 an hour.

after 6 months they put him to $16 an hour.

Really, it could be worse. Big Pharma blacklisted him for being a liability.

I'm going to let you in on a secret.

Nobody in my 9 years has actually "required" a degree. It's a NEET gate. Apply anyways. If you don't suck you'll do fine. I've had many jobs that say they require a degree and it never came up outside of small interview banter "why didn't you go to college".

It can actually be a talking point, at some level in your career how you've built a rewarding career without formal training. I wouldn't go around flaunting it early on, but I've definitely had a handful of interviews (both of which I landed the job) where the people interviewing me seemed to take a real interest in my lack of education. Just sell it as "I'm self taught and driven enough to pursue the tech I'm interested in individually".

Maybe you can't land a good job because of your extreme autism that causes you to sperg out when people try to give you advice

Nepotism pisses me off so much, I had a whole group of friends who all got amazing jobs out of college because of their dads then rubbed it in my face.

>insolent fucking nigger

You're the wage slave making $13 an hour, not me.

Enjoy your life.

>dude... to get a job... just get a job... dumbass

great advice. I hope you choke to death on your own vomit.

I'd bet every cent I have that those people aren't going to be very good in their field.

At higher levels, the person that stands out are always the individuals who had to legitimately fight to be where they're at.

Yeah, well it doesn't always work out.

you do have to make at least a half assed effort and my friend couldn't even do that.

Agreed, its easy to get entry level professional jobs as a result of nepotism.

If you do a half decent job you can generally land around middle management after 5-10 years of decent work.

these morons always act so high and mighty too

"lol why couldn't you get a 50k job right out of college, its so easy, my dad gave it to me for free after all"

Pretty close to my story.
> Graduated with a MIS degree
> Worked as a contractor at a Help Desk
> Worked my ass off to become a lead over the course of a year
> Left job to work for the state in a computer support position
> Taught myself scripting and automated all shitty things about the job
> Promoted to senior analyst and duties shifted to only include fixing all the shitty and inefficient processes in the department.

Now I primarily sit around and shit post all day at my cushy government job.

I really appreciate the reassurance, it worries me when i look on linkedin and see shmucks have been working this job for 5+ years but they also dont have a bachelor's I suppose.

Did you forget to lie on your resume? Rookie mistake.
Your "call center experience" was actually a help desk job where you provided technical support in [things on the job posting your are applying to]. Enjoy all the job offers that are about to roll in!

We just had a thread like this last week.

I posted in it a bit. I'm a signal soldier in the U.S. Army.

Get at least Sec+ and a Secret clearance and you'll be good to go for so many more jobs.

I've seen people in their 30s with IT degrees from their teens struggle to upgrade RAM and in a case swap a HDD with a SDD. The whole idea of flipping around the RAM to fit correctly escape them completely. I am not kidding, I was there after showing them what to do, watching them struggle with a single SFF HP PC.

I remember I spent ages looking for an entry level job in IT. Then I finally got a 6-month contract in a shitty school and thought it was the best thing ever. They should've gotten rid of the moron they already had and kept me, but nope. Then after that I got depressed and didn't feel like looking again. Two years later I'm still unemployed and can't even find work in supermarkets. What the fuck is wrong with this country.

A+ is a joke

I know plenty of people who have it who I wouldn't let anywhere a PC.

If the person doing the hiring knows anything at all, the A+ won' help

>Takes a contracted gig
>Mad that they didn't fire the guy and hire you
>Decided to do nothing with yourself

Why the flying fuck would you let a dingy ass school contract fuck with your morale like that.

Just get off your ass and go find a job. You're obviously capable of doing the work. You live in the shadow of an entry level contract. Fill your resume with "Private consulting" experience and go do something. Don't let some bullshit timed job ruin your life.

At least they bother responding to you. Got a friend that sent out 300 applications. He literally got 20 replies telling him sorry but no and not even a fuck you from the rest. Literally the best guy in his semester and can't find a fucking job. It's time to burn this shit down and start over.

Most people are lazy shmucks. Work hard, have a positive attitude, and never stop looking for a better job.

To follow up, my advice user. Talk to recruiters. Dont think "I'm going to go get a job today" but more less "I'm training for the interview I want". When you're rusty, hammering recruiters is your best option. Fuck, you vcan even grind recruiters out of your area, say you're relocating...

Make shit up to get them on the phone. Talk to these fucks until you can bullshit your way into another entry level job. I promise you. I've gotten all my bros into IT and this is the way to do it. Dont get haunted by bullshit jobs not working out.

Use a smart-ass email addy by mistake:

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Are you lying on your resume? I didn't get my first job out of college until I lied a little. Just be ready to be adaptive and catch up real fast studying at home and using virtual machines.

I replied to you earlier but I'm going to post another one. Right now I work as a System Admin / IT for a small company. I'm also currently enrolling in one of those psuedo scammy boot camps for full stack. Why am I doing this? Well for one it's because Sys admin jobs are crap, at higher levels you need to have 9 billion certs that you will never use because your predecessor built the entire network and finance is not going to pay for you to change anything. Most of the issues you encounter you cannot fix (example our MX servers IP got blacklisted by microsoft , the obviously solution was for us to port our domain to office365, wasn't allowed to do this for fear of losing 5+ year old information from exchange.) So we just waited it out. Companies for the most part do not understand your job or what you are doing so they have no idea if you are shit or not at your job.

>Fear of losing 5+ years of data from exchange
Your job as a sysadmin is to alleviate that fear. Your company probably has little confidence in your ability to complete a successful migration.

>MX server blacklisted
Again, this sounds like shoddy IT work. You need better control over what goes out. If you're managing exchange on prem you need something like a fortimail to intercept outbound spam, so you're not getting blacklisted my dude

For the American anons, what websites do you recommend for job searching?

I got my start from Indeed, but knowing what I know today I'd find my way on Linkedin. Fluff up your profile (make it look professional, resume-ish), use buzzwords and start adding recruiters.It's not weird at all, these people get tons of adds a day, they're constantly roboblasting DMs and looking for interested prospects

Linkedin is hands down the best way to have and sense of job security these days. I could walk in the dooe tomorrow and tell my boss to eat a dick and have a job by the end of april. Without Linkedin I wouldn't be so sure.

user, I typed up a 5 page play on migrating us away from the third party we use that holds those MX certificates (for some reason office 365 did not support custom domains at the time)

None of the things I talked about in my post were done on the premises, all it was setup prior to me arriving. This is my point, often times as a Sys Admin you will not be the guy to setup everything or fix it .

> >get A+ cert
> >have customer service experience
> >have call center experience
> entry level IT jobs like help desk or basic tech support
I wouldn't hire you because you'll probably quit in two months. Aim higher, to be a PM or something.

tip from someone with experience:
teachers can be your favorite people or your worst nightmare, make friends with them early and make sure they have someone to blame other than you.

also, make sure they know your name, it keeps them from shitting on you like they do the janitors.

This. I started as a service desk rep at a radiology company. That is pretty much take calls from techs and docs when something is wrong in the HL7 or PACS system and if it is a low level problem fix it, if it is not low level then escalate to IS.

After 6 months I moved up to help desk. After about 6 more months of learning all my work flows I have been taking work from the system administrators. Now that we have rolled out UC in our scheduling department and few clinics the company is paying for 3 weeks of cisco VoIP classes. If I just keep learning SCCM, Cisco Unity and get my MCSA/MCSE in Win 10 and Win Server 2016 I should be a sys admin in about another 6 months

was meant for

I will never understand the dichotomy between people's job searching experience, I personally had that guy's experience and all of my friends got their jobs through connections, but you see these posts online by people who are shocked that people send more than 10 applications out. I had a decent gpa and started looking for internships freshman year and it has always been a massive struggle. Feel like I did all the right stuff, my resume was reviewed by career center, parents, peers, internet, etc, went to career fairs, decent grades, normal sounding name, some extra curricular shit but I would literally send out 100s of applications with no response and end up taking some bottom of the barrel position with barely any programming from some literal who company. My two jobs after graduation I had a similar response rate but the strange thing is the companies that actually replied to me were always big names paying high salary and those are the ones I've worked for since. It just boggles my mind how BoomerSystems 30 minutes away doesn't think I'm worth a phone screen for a job my skills match perfectly but all these high paying positions have flown me across the country to interview. Then you have people who say you don't get callbacks because you're spamming applications as if the unemployed people applying for 100s of jobs with nothing better to do isn't going to take 10 minutes to tailor a cover letter/resume to the positions.

The easiest way to get an entry level job is to have lots of experience. That is why it is called entry level.... wait.

I sold adobe to gov't. Since maybe a few years ago, K12 gets a super low price as long as they buy... a certain number of licenses (maybe 100?) minimum. It's retardedly low, like 1/50th of the price businesses pay.

>2015
>NEET for 4 years
>"fuck it"
>join the Navy
>score decently on the ASVAB
>they offer me a "cyber"-esque job
>got a clearance
>job at first duty station is jr. Sysadmin
>they're desperate for potential talent
>shit myself for months because of the learning curve
>end up really liking my job
>became jack-of-all-trades because most everyone else is lazy
>got Net+ and Sec+
>got out after 4 years
>easy 100k positions outside Navy

I got extremely lucky with this opportunity, but it's a hidden gem the military can offer

IT is for retards

If you are skilled come work for Bayer AG (foromely known as Monsanto) in st. Louis

Lie on your resume, make a small portfolio with your skills, and also say you do some kind of volunteer work. Everything everyone tells people about all these resume points and trash on LinkedIn is fucking bullshit. I’m a disabled veteran with 6 years of direct experience in training and safety management and I couldn’t get anything relative to my career field. I rarely even got interviews, and I have no negative marks on my career and won several awards every year and was #10 Air Force wide I’m sergeant promotions. I lost every position to someone internal who knew the person filling the slot. Most of the time they had no experience and they would just repeat the cycle with someone else internally. I just started moonlighting for free with someone who was a geek squad home theatre agent and I got hired after about 3 weeks because I busted ass and knew more than 80% of their hires

I got my A+ and currently studying for Net+,Sec+ and MCSA Azure while doing CCNA and AWS next year. Is this a good plan?

It depends. What is the desired outcome?

big pay check maybe work in a Data center and travel around the world doing contract works.

I think its because BoomerSystems is more likely to just be hiring people internally or based on hiring family/friends of their current workers as opposed to large, competitive firms who actually want people who match the skills they want.

If anything BoomerSystems might not bother with you because they see that with your qualifications you'd leave there at the soonest opportunity. At least, that's what makes sense in my head.

> be me 5 years ago
> no food while studying IT Engineering at uni, so applied for a part time junior linux sysadmin job.
> standards were so low the entry "interview" was a 4 hour task that could be copy-pasted from google searches and digital ocean guides
> 1 year later I easily got hired by a larger company as a DevOps Engineer, because of my solid knowledge of cloud technologies and Loonix
> another year later, I'm at another big company as a Senior DevOps Engineer with a $135k per year salary, preparing for my Solution Architect assessment.

don't aim to be an indian tech support guy, OP. they are cheaper and I hope you don't smell like shit all the time. aim higher as someone else already mentioned and get some actual skills that are valuable.

Are you lying on your resume?
Are you young?

If your not lying then start.
If your young then sell them on your energy and eagerness to learn.

Based Northwest Indiana inhabitant

work for an MSP, they’ll take anyone. Geek squad and Staples want people who can sell shit, not fix computers