(This is the second part in a two-part series on getting your first job in IT. Part 1 of the series covers getting a job in the first place; this article is about the sort of job you can expect when you’re starting out)
Working in IT, like anything in life, is a learning curve. You start out knowing nothing, and you slowly gain experience and knowledge that allows you to work at a higher level, on more difficult (and, hopefully, interesting) problems.
A difficult fact for many people to accept is that there is no substitute for real experience. TAFE (community college), University, and industry certifications are not equivalents. These academic credentials have their value, but they’re not an equivalent for experience. They’re like power mirrors or window tinting on a car — they add value, but power mirrors don’t get you anywhere by themselves — you need four wheels and an engine.
This means that everyone will “do their time” working at the entry-level jobs, one way or another. Whether you have any sort of relevant academic credentials or not, you will spend some time learning the ropes, at a job which you will probably feel isn’t what you signed up for (very little IT bears any resemblance to scenes from “The Social Network”).
Now, you might luck out, and your “entry level” job might be that you’re the entire IT staff for a small company (that’s what I did at while I was at Uni), in which case you’re both the printer monkey and the CTO, but it’s not an easy road to travel. You’ll be working your ring off just trying to learn enough to be able to do the practical basics of your job, and you will learn a huge pile of bad habits as there’s nobody with experience to tell you “no, don’t do that”.
This isn’t to say that every single person who has a job in IT spent 18 months as a gofer, and there’s no other option. I only said that you needed practical, hands-on experience, not necessarily a pay-check. There are a few ways of getting that experience that doesn’t involve a regular job as someone’s cable monkey, but they do require a certain amount of effort on your part. For development work, it’s fairly easy to get some experience by contributing to open source projects. You learn a lot of really essential skills: the most important of which is to write real code. No course I know of is even a half-decent substitute for writing real code. You also get plenty of exposure to the real technologies and processes used in software development, like revision control, testing, collaboration, communication, and compromise.
Sysadmins have a bit of a harder time because there’s not many public systems that you can administer as a hobby, but running your own server on a cheap VM teaches you an awful lot about the basics of systems administration (whether you learn good things or bad things is actually far less important).
These sorts of “hobbyist” things you can do often blur into actual work experience, too — running a server on the Internet for yourself and a few friends might get you a job through word of mouth setting up a static website and blog for a friend’s dad who’s running his own small business. He tells a friend of his who runs a bigger business, which leads to something else, and so on and so on. All of that’s good experience, and helps to demonstrate that you’ve got a bit more to offer than everyone else.
Even then, though, don’t get your hopes up. SAGE‘s Core Job Descriptions (PDF) defines a Junior Sysadmin as someone with one to three years of full-time experience as a systems administrator.
