Sorry, Reddit text formatting eludes me.
Six years is a lot of time. I think if you're really motivated you can do it in way less. That said, this was the path I took.
Disclaimers:
1) I have a college degree (film). College went sideways for a lot of reasons and I came out of it with few marketable skills.
2) I work in tech and am decently intelligent with computers from messing around as a kid.
Step 1) Get attainable job that looks good on resume
2011: First job - entry-level support for giant corporation, semi-large city: $12/hour Education required: absolutely none
How I got the job: convinced the employers that was normal, could logically think through problems and solve them, knew how to use computers, etc. This was my first job out of college. Not much else to say here other than it's a support job for a giant, well-respected company considered to have the world's best customer service. I learned soft skills there. The technical side of it was incredibly simple.
Step 2) Befriend a recruiter and make connections. This is important. Getting to know a recruiter and convincing them you're intelligent goes a long way.
Step 3) Teach yourself some basic computer skills. I had built myself a computer when I was younger. That was about all I knew. For those of you out there thinking that that's difficult, it's absolutely not. You can follow a step-by-step guide and learn the process within a day, easy.
Step 4) Get entry-level IT job. A recruiter recommended me (see step 2) to a company for an entry-level IT job.
2013: Second job - entry-level IT support for small company, semi-large city: $14/hour Education required: much more than I had
How I got the job: showing I was eager to learn, demonstrating I knew exactly how to talk with customers (learned from 1), and showing that I had basic aptitude for computers (I could build them.)
This job kicked my ass. I thought I knew stuff about computers. I knew nothing. It was painful. Every day I felt like an idiot. Every day for a year straight. I broke down crying on two occasions, once in front of my boss. But I toughed it out, because I knew I was learning stuff. It was basically 4 years of college in a 1 year job, and I had to answer to customers and my boss. You can probably avoid this step if you learn marketable skills in college.
Step 5) Get mid-level support engineer role.
Recruiter friend again clued me to a company that was hiring, suggested I apply.
2014: third job - technical support engineer for large company, semi-large city: $22/hour + benefits Education required: slightly more than I had
How I got the job: 1 year of IT work at a company looks great on a resume, and I had the soft skills from megacorp to boot. I had shown that I was adaptable and could learn new things, and was a positive person with a great outlook. That's all it takes.
The company was a security software company. In an ideal world, I would've known everything there was to know about network security, how to take a packet capture, how to read packet captures, how to configure a CISCO router, etc. etc. etc. But here's the rub: because their software was so proprietary and in-house, they offered 3 months of training to support it. 3 months. That's amazing. And that's why technical support roles for big companies are so valuable. You get paid 3 months to learn a product, and you can train on universal skills you don't have in the interim. So I made friends with everyone at the job and I got the T2's and T3's to teach me networking and other stuff along the way.
Step 6) Move to a bigger city and get a slightly more demanding support engineer role.
I decided I wanted to move, and so I just started applying to every job I saw on linkedin. After about a month I got an offer and moved out.
2016: third job - technical support engineer for mid size startup, very large city: $37/hour + benefits
Note that I told the company I was making about 20k more than I was when we negotiated the contract. Always important to do that. Education required: slightly more than I had
How I got the job: Great recommendations from previous job, unique skillset of soft skills, adaptable technical skills, and ability and willingness to learn their proprietary, arbitrarily confusing in-house software. Basically, thing I did to get the last job.
So, I hope this helps people. Just a simple little how-to of how I got there. The thing that's so great about support roles, again, is that they offer on the job training, which is invaluable if you have very few marketable skills.
Submitted January 02, 2018 at 11:27PM by Savoir_Faire http://ift.tt/2EEBiPn
