Sheep Guarding Llama

Most professions have few elements that you can bring home. The more technical the field generally the less you can take home. But IT is one of those really cool fields where there is almost nothing that you can do in the office that you can’t do at home as well. This is good and bad. It means that to really excel you may have to bring your “work” home with you. But for an ambitious IT professional-to-be it presents itself as a unique opportunity to move ahead of your peers.

As this is a “Breaking In” article I will focus only on the areas where “Doing IT” at home applies to getting your foot into the door. Today almost everyone already has a computer at home. It wasn’t that long ago that having a computer at home was itself a differentiator for IT candidates but today the expectations for home have gone up considerably and this is expected to continue. If you are interested in the IT field you should, at a minimum, be doing as much as or more than any of your non-IT peers are doing at home. Today this can apply to entertainment as well but this is not so much a factor from an IT perspective although the more you do with your computers the more you will be comfortable with them.

The bottom line is that the more you do with computers and networks the more you are going to know and be comfortable with them. It takes a lot of time and experience before you will be ready to handle any situation and no one is completely ready. Learning to research answers to your problems online without anyone to help you, fixing hardware and software issues, troubleshooting from scratch and more are the skills that no one can teach you. You must learn these skills on your own. Doing this at home gives you an advantage that you can’t get in other ways. Take advantage of it.

Entertainment: Today “convergence” means that you can do almost everything from the Internet and personal computing platforms. This can include video games, shopping, Internet television, streaming Internet radio, podcasting, vlogging, blogging, photo hosting, etc. As more and more non-technical people begin using their computers for a wide array of entertainment purposes the knowledge base will continue to increase and being knowledgeable about a wide array of computer uses can be very helpful to a budding IT professional. This is a perfect pursuit for “leisure” time but should not be done at the expense of serious “IT at home” studies.

Networking: Almost everyone has some amount of home network whether it is a simple Internet connection or if it is a mixed Ethernet and wireless network with firewall, print server, multiple desktops and laptops of both PC and Mac variety, media centers, VoIP phones, wireless handheld video game systems, video game consoles, etc. Ordinary people are beginning to add network storage into their home networks along with other advanced features. This raises the bar significantly for someone looking to “do everything at home.” I was lucky that when I first started in IT the level to which you had to bring your work home with you was much less – but that will be saved for another article.

You can begin by choosing to work with more advanced network equipment than you would have used if you were simply maintaining a traditional home network environment. Most home networks are protected with a minimum of a “consumer” grade firewall. Now that you are working in IT it is time to move away from “consumer” technology products. For example, Netgear makes two lines of firewalls at the time of this writing: WebSafe for consumers and ProSafe for small offices. ProSafe equipment offers greater security, more features and more configuration options. Many companies have two obvious paths into their product sites – one for consumers or “home” and one for professionals or “business”. Experience with consumer products is not your goal. It is time to move on.

One of the first lessons that needs to be learned about buying technology products, even for home, is that you can almost never just run out to the store and buy the parts that you need. Most companies’ commercial product lines are available only through authorized partners and online. A few companies allow their commercial products to be sold in stores but generally these are small product lines. You will never find HP or IBM servers, Cisco enterprise routers, etc. sitting on the floor of BestBuy.

Since this is probably your first venture into serious home networking you can probably safely start fairly small. A good, quality commercial firewall. You can probably start with an “all-in-one” device with route/firewall, switch and sometimes wireless built into the base unit. I prefer separate units for learning – a firewall unit, a switch and a dedicated wireless access point. But it will depend on your focus as to where you want to spend your initial funds which are most likely limited.

Many homes today are already wired for networking but many are not. Go ahead and run CAT5e or better to every room of your house. Maybe more – your home office location will probably want several runs of cabling. Over time you will likely find yourself using several ports near any computer. In some spots you may want to consider additional, small switches to limit the cabling needs and sprawl.

Having a good, solid network is important for all of your IT studies. Almost everything that you do will be done over the network not just your “network” studies. And having a good Internet connection is, of course, essential.

Wireless has grown in importance and by working with wireless extensively at home you can get first hand, practical knowledge of the difference in wireless protocols and security standards.  Many people are using wireless today and just about everyone has major concerns about security and privacy.  By working with commercial wireless solutions you can be prepared for that task as well.

Computers: Of course you have to have a computer. But when you are working to move into the IT field you should have lots of computers. They don’t have to be cutting edge. In fact having computers from different eras (but not legacy machines) and of different types can be beneficial. You will want to have machines available at any time to rip apart, rebuild, install different software on and start all over again at a moment’s notice. Early on you will probably spend a significant amount of your time working with the physical hardware – building and modifying the computer itself. Even building a computer or a few from scratch can be fun, rewarding and educational. Picking out computer components is its own education in cost and performance factors.

Your home is your lab. This is the place where you can experiment with those things that may be embarrassing or dangerous in the workplace. At home you can push the computer to its limits until it breaks and or attempt to tune it for performance or whatever. In the office environment almost everything about a computer that makes it useful is its ability to connect to and communicate with other computers. Your home computers should be similar. This can be difficult as home networks are often single user affairs or else the others users are often only casual users but you can learn a lot by doing things all by yourself as well. It just becomes purely educational and not functional.

At home you will have the ability to learn new platforms like Windows XP Pro, Vista Business, Mac OS X and Linux. Select your targets based on your immediate needs and future goals. Not every technology is for everyone but IT tends to reward broad knowledge almost as much as deep knowledge so having worked a little on Mac or Linux even for a Windows desktop support professional might prove to be beneficial in a shop that has one or two Macs for some specific purpose but doesn’t need a serious Mac pro to support them. You never know how your knowledge might come into play in the field.

Computers can be expensive but for a lot of “learning” needs quite old computers can fill the roles quite nicely. With the availability of eBay there are many computers, network appliances and parts available that can make excellent educational tools at very reasonable prices. Good, older computers often with built in Windows licenses are available for well under $100 US.

Today virtualization technology like VMWare Server and Microsoft Virtual Server and Virtual PC have made it much easier for anyone to have multiple computers in their homes. A good, fast desktop with plenty of memory and disk space and easily virtualize several desktop and/or server machines without needing to purchase another computer. This can save space, power, time and money.

Printers: While this skill set is rapidly becoming less and less important it is still wise to be well versed in installing, configuring and sharing via the network a printer. Most people have printers attached to their computers but few people configure their computers as printer servers or use dedicated network attached printer servers to drive their shared printing needs. This can be another simple but important differentiating factor between job candidates.

Applications: You have computers in your home but what do you do with them? You learn many applications of course. The obvious choices are the Microsoft Office Suite and the OpenOffice.org Office Suite. These are the principle business productivity suite players today. Not many IT jobs actually require an in-depth knowledge of these non-IT tools but many helpdesk professionals use them daily and knowledge of common applications is always useful. Using many IT applications can only be helpful.

Servers: Now we reach the real differentiator between the advanced home computer user and the hard-core, ambitious IT professional home network – the server. Unless your target job is in programming, analysis or management having a home server can work wonders for your confidence, skills and career. The options for a home server are very wide and your choice will need to reflect your goals. If you are only using the server as a means to learn about desktop maintenance and to provide a place for backups and storage then most likely you will just want to have a single Windows Active Directory server as AD is the current most popular desktop management environment. But if you plan to go into system administration for UNIX you may want to have several Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc. servers. Some physical and some virtual.

Working hands on with real server hardware is a big deal. Just because you can virtualize doesn’t means that it is the only way to go. This is about breaking in and having hands on experience to server class hardware can be effective. Since only very serious potential IT professionals usually have real servers at home this can turn heads. Having multiple will do even more for you. This is where costs start to climb but so does career value.

Don’t start buying servers when you aren’t ready or your investment will be too early and not effective enough. Get familiar with the desktop technologies, basic networking and applications before venturing into the server space. Once you do be sure to shop long and carefully on eBay or other discount used equipment location. Servers definitely don’t need to be new. For a few hundred dollars US today you can have very good, reliable, entry level enterprise servers at home. They are often large, loud and ugly (to others) but they are things of beauty to the IT professional who sees them as opportunity and experience at their fingertips.

You can use servers at home to fill a variety of roles just like they would in the real business world. You can use them for storage, security, network authentication, application hosting, remote access, name resolution, host configuration, desktop deployment, etc. The list could go on for a very long time. Eventually your server(s) will become the heart and soul of your home network. Once you get passed these beginning phases you can start doing more exciting and useful projects with your server(s) but we will save that for another article.

When shopping for your first server look specifically for somewhat advanced servers with features like hot-swap hard drives and hardware SCSI/SAS RAID controllers. Features like this are not available on desktop class hardware and being able to work with it first hard is important. The most important feature is that the hardware be from a well known enterprise server vendor such as HP, IBM, SUN or Dell. Do not spend time with whitebox or custom built servers. Enterprises are interested in your experience with the category of equipment that they will be using.

Programming: If you are interested in getting into programming or web design then much of this is unnecessary for you. You need to spend your time writing code or producing web sites. It is far easier for these “soft” skills to be honed at home as there is practically no barrier whatsoever for someone to spend time learning and practicing. Open source projects or volunteer web site design can be perfect ways to produce real, “production” code that can be used as part of an interview process. Saying that you can write code carries little weight but producing actual code that you have written does. This lets a potential employer see what you can do firsthand. It means a lot.

Of course often programmers and web site designers need to cut their chops on some entry level jobs before really being in a position to get into the discipline of their choice. For this purpose getting some experience at home in other areas such as desktop support can be helpful to you as well.

IT differs from many professions in the way that employment is handled. This is caused by many factors on both the employer and the employee side. In most careers and certainly in most jobs people work under the “employment” system. Here in the US this can be called W-2 employment because the tax form involved is called a W-2 and contracting is often referred to as 1099 employment because a 1099 tax form is used. (Much of the information in this article is specific to employment within the United States as employment laws vary from country to country.)

There are many differences between these two types of employment. Full employment under a W2 workers are protected by regular employment law. Under 1099 they are considered to be self employed and there are few protections. Under W2 full taxes are paid, as usual and as expected, by both the employer and the employee. This is the same form of payment that you would receive whether you work at McDonald’s or at IBM. Under a 1099 the employer pays NO taxes and all taxes are the responsibility of the contractor. Generally this is offset by the worker receiving higher wage rates to compensate but this must be examined carefully with an accountant as companies will often attempt to pay effectively lower rates via 1099 partially because it is harder to determine what is a lower rate and partially because the people involved are unknowledgeable about tax laws and only think in terms of hourly rates and not in tax ratios and write-offs.

Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. W2 employees are entitled to certain benefits but 1099 workers have more flexibility. Most people, by far, prefer W2 status but in IT there are a certain number who are willing to work under 1099 and a few who prefer it. Most serious IT professionals that I have known personally over the years have worked a mixture of the two but the 1099 seems to occur most often during the earlier career years when people are more desperate for work to fill out their resumes. But with experience of the tax system and a good accountant a 1099 can be a great way to work. But it does require careful financial management and bookkeeping to make really work well and lends itself towards more ambitious professionals.

When working through a consulting or contracting firm the IT professional may be paid through either a 1099 or a W2. Be sure to always check before accepting a position – you should always specify your required rate as $x/hr on a W2 or $x/diem on a 1099, etc. Never leave the question open to debate later no matter how obvious it may seem at the time. It isn’t worth it. Often consulting firms will use a 1099 to get paid from the customer but will hire the professional on a regular W-2 creating the confusing “W-2 Contractor” position which is valuable and is just as good as any other W-2 to the professional but makes for difficult terminology.

Check with your accountant but in the US you have traditionally been allowed to do a small amount of work under a 1099 without paying any taxes at all. If you get just one small contract a year in addition to full time “normal” work you may get a nice tax break making that contract extra valuable.

Much like interning volunteering can be a great way to get experience in IT both early on in your career when you are having problems getting those first few jobs as well as later on when you are well established and what to be able to demonstrate breadth and community but in this article we will focus on the former. Volunteering is much like interning except you don’t have the advantage, normally, or having a mentor or a professional peer to provide you with a recommendation. Because of this a real internship is much more valuable to you professionally. But volunteering shouldn’t be overlooked for two reasons. Firstly because everything that you can do to add to your resume is important and secondly because being a good, professional citizen means giving back and starting early gets you into the swing and makes it easier to keep giving later.

Volunteering can take on a lot of forms from working with local charities, churches, private schools or other non-profits. You might have to hunt around to find organizations open to working with you and some non-profits will simply not be interested in having volunteer help (if you can believe that) but don’t be discouraged because somebody will be very excited to have you helping out.

The type of work that you are likely to do when volunteering could vary wildly. You might be helping out setting up computers much like you would with a basic desktop tech position. Or maybe you will be helping the organization get set up with their first website. Maybe a small, private school could use you to teach a computer basics class – or the same in the evenings at the community center. Maybe a local organization needs help setting up an Access database or needs OpenOffice.org installed on their computers and someone to show them how to use it.

Volunteering is likely to give you a chance to do some mostly basic work but perhaps in new and meaningful ways. By volunteering you are practically assured to be increasing the diversity of your experience portfolio. You may have a chance to learn new aspects of a technology but more likely you will get a chance to apply business rationale to the technology decision making process.

When volunteering quite often the organization that you will be working with, especially when they are quite small and you are the only “computer guy” that they have access to, will be in a position to turn to you to help with IT business decisions. These decisions are likely to be quite small but they can serve as an important tool in your own educational process. Maybe they need help deciding what small firewall product to purchase. This is your chance to carefully investigate firewall products in their price range to determine features, cost, stability, maintainability, integration, etc. Maybe you can help them choose their office suite or maybe you can do some wiring and help them set up an entire office. The opportunities are there and if you do your “job” well they might have more and more need of your services. Often non-profit organizations are limited by the availability of support that they can get. Your voluntary efforts might be a significant factor in their ability to become more technologically advanced.

Often overlooked as a means of entering many industries is the practice of interning. While paid cooperative learning experiences and paid internships might relatively rare the more traditional unpaid internship is still widely available. Unpaid internships are hardly glamorous but they do offer a significant means of rapidly entering the IT profession.

One time in an interview early on in my career a technology recruiter told me that six months experience was considered to be equal to or better than a four year degree specific to the field (i.e. an IT or CIS degree and not a CS degree – unless you are doing research, of course.) Now this might be an exaggeration but in what direction? Perhaps real world experience is worth even more than that. Maybe some less but my experience agrees with that assessment. Experience beats certifications, education – anything.

Some people manage to get entry-level jobs without having to intern, get a cert, take a class or whatever. These are the lucky few. I happen to be one of these. I got a very entry level job just two weeks out of high school. I happened to have been in the amazing position of having proved that I likely possessed the skills for the job and was offered a very low-paying position that I hadn’t even applied for or knew existed. I took it and the rest is history. The job paid so little that I might as well have been an intern but it gave me real world programming experience and introduced me to large scale UNIX systems that I had never worked on previously. I did my first networking and worked with lots of hardware that I had never even seen before this job. I did this entry-level position for a year and a half. It made more difference than anything I have ever done before or since to advance my career.

That first job put a stake in the ground and declared, in writing, that I had a “start date” in the industry as well as someone to use as a reference. Even today my “career length” is still determined by that first day working in IT. It is unlikely that anything else that you do in your career, at least for the first several years or decades, will have so much effect as your start date. Everything that you do before getting your first position should be focused on getting that first position. Once you get that entry level job, no matter how mundane (but beyond working at Circuit City,) you will be amassing “experience” that will add to your total from there on out.

One of the great advantages to interning, paid or unpaid, is that because of your incredibly low cost and obvious ambition you have a better chance of being allowed to work with technologies that you might be barred from otherwise due to your lack of experience. And your boss will probably love you because you are costing him or her next to nothing. It isn’t hard to get an incredible return on investment under those conditions.

Interning is not designed to be a means for gaining gainful employment with the company that you are interning with but, obviously, that is a possibility. Do a great job as an intern and the company is very unlikely to turn around and give their next job that you can handle to an unknown entity when they have someone that they know right there. But this is not always the case.

Interning is not meant to last forever. Six to nine months is usual enough. A year isn’t out of the question. Interning is my personal recommendation for anyone who is starting their career during their normal “college years” and has the advantage of living at home with the folks. If you are older it might not be something that you can reasonably do. If you are really motivated or lucky you can often get into a good internship during your high school years. This is the optimum solution. You can often walk out of high school and right into the field. Or even get work before then. It is rare but it happens.

If you intern for too long the benefits will start to go away. You can only work for free for so long before it becomes a problem. I suggest looking for a paying gig starting somewhere in the six to nine month range of your internship. It may take a while for the right position to open up. Interning is perfect because the company that you are at can’t complain about you heading off to interviews.

While interning you shouldn’t be kicking back and taking it easy figuring that you are earning it because you are not getting paid. What you should be doing during this time is working on certifications. Even if you just get one or two during this time it shows a lot more ambition than just interning alone and it provides more material for your resume which is critical at this early stage.

As an intern you should act as much as possible like a professional employee. This is your chance to learn how to be a professional without the pressure. Take advantage of it. Do the best work that you can do. Show up early and work late. Work hard, do your best, take time at home to study the technologies that they are using in the office and be persistent in asking to be allowed to work on more and more advanced projects once you have proven yourself on more menial tasks.

Chances are if you are able to seriously consider interning you are either one of those amazing people who doesn’t need to sleep or else you are young and living with family and have few or no bills that you have to take care of yourself. If you or your supporter(s) argue that interning is a waste of time, that no one should work for free and that college or university is a better use of your time and money then consider this:

Interning can begin during high school or, if not, as early as being immediately out of high school. This gives ambitious interns months or potentially years of a lead on their college-bound peers and their lead puts the proverbial stake in the ground showing the beginning of their careers. College does not do this.

A four year college student who waits until after graduation to pick up their first IT job could be five or six years behind their peer who left high school to take an unpaid internship. That former intern could potentially be well situated in a lower mid-career position before the college student starts looking for their chance to “break in.” That lead is very tough if not impossible to overcome.

Additionally the college student probably has debt. A lot of it. Racked up from years of not working and spending like crazy. Most colleges are very expensive and most require that you spend a lot of money on dorm rooms and activity feeds. Not only has the intern way ahead in debt load but has probably been making positive cash flow for almost the entire time that the college student was in negative cash flow.

Now the obvious retort is that the college student has some level of education that is so valuable that he or she will instantly be able to do more tasks and advance their career faster than the former intern. Perhaps. I will talk about that issue in another article. But assuming that the educational advantage is real lets look at the equation again.

The college first person has a four year university degree and finds and decent, entry-level job right out of college. Life is good. Degree under their belt and the first job underway. The former intern has four or five years of experience under their belt and no degree at all. We will assume that both of these potential professionals have an equal number of certifications and other factors are generally comparable. At this stage the former intern has the massive career and financial advantage. It will take two to five years for the college graduate with the same skill and drive to likely approach the interns career potential at this point in their career. That is a long time.

As we move into the future, let’s say another five year, we see the college student now has five years of industry experience and is now mid-career. During the past five years the former intern, being a mid-career professional, was given the benefit of getting to go to university as part of their pay package. Educational benefits have a tax advantage for both parties and many companies will pay some or all of college education and often other types of education. So after ten years the college first professional has five years experience, a college degree that is very out of date and a large debt load to show for it. The intern has ten years of experience, a more recent degree and no collegiate debt.

The bottom line is that college is a huge risk. It is a gamble. In many industries college level work is required to gain entrance but in IT it is more likely to be a barrier. The risks associated with foregoing real experience to spend time in college are very high. College isn’t the “safe” route that it is with other industries. Often IT professionals are more likely to look at “dedicated” time spent in college as party time as so many professionals did their degrees while working. IT is not other fields and people going into IT should think carefully about how taking the “safe” route will affect them in the long run. A four year degree is very likely to be enough to get you an entry level position but for an ambitious, career-minded IT professional it can be a stumbling block that can have ramifications that will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Additionally, an the intern had a safety, a fall back, all along. If, at any time, they were to be in a position where they were unable to find a position whether due to a contract ending or being laid off or whatever they could simply enter college at that point. Take classes until another position came along and then switch back to working using college as something to fill the gaps. Or they could do college at a slower pace doing evening or distance classes which are generally geared more towards motivated professionals and not full time non-professional college students.

One of the big mistakes that people often make when considering a career in IT or soliciting advice about moving into the career is to look at IT as if it was any other professional domain. But IT is very unique. It is larger than other fields and has more of an employment gap. It is a constantly changing field where a college student going to school for four years is likely to have the knowledge learned in their freshman year be nearly useless by the time that they graduate. This doesn’t happen to engineers. This doesn’t happen to teachers. This doesn’t happen to chemists, to pharmacists or lawyers. All of those fields change but IT changes at a pace that other industries cannot even imagine and it is likely to stay that way. IT is broader than other disciplines. IT is different. Accept it. Embrace it. It is what makes IT so great but don’t be fooled because what worked for your cousin to get that job as in insurance is not going to get you into IT.