moving into another IT job with little experience

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I just been givin a job as a junior service engineer a month back in july.
However, desktop engineer isnt the type of work I want to be doing for the next for months as travling to sites is dire and painfull in central london when driving a business car.

To make things worse, I only started doing IT work since this june making my experience very little.
I would like to do active directory or anything that doesnt require business travel or very little. what kind of role should I be looking for?

And is 3 months IT experience enough to start hunting for IT jobs?

 

What do you mean when you say you'd like to "do Active Directory"? What do you know about AD? Do you mean migrations, install from scratch, scripting...etc, etc. Business travel can work to your advantage!

For 2 years I was stuck in an office doing AD and Netware - in my new position where I'm out and about meeting people I feel somewhat free to manage myself. I also deal with important people all over the region they do nothing but sing my praise to my manager and his manager!

We all have to start somewhere - with your limited experience I'd stick it out as the other alternative is service desk work which will involve reseting AD passwords - that'll be about as close as you'd get to AD work! Also you may have to stick a broom where the sun don't shine and be expected to sweep the floor whilst answering phone calls.

They pay your mileage and provide a car I presume? Have you invested in a Tom Tom navigator? Few of my work collegues cover London and have advised that their job experience has changed since they got a Tom Tom unit!

 

I did a lot of active directory stuff at my past job with the NHS which was great for someone with no experience at that time.
I did alot of stuff on AD like: renaming, creating, copying, changing user name, reseting passwords, profile and login scripts.
no migrations or installations though.

I have done the MCP side of my course, however it feels like alot to study for a subject like SQL admin to complete the MCSA side.
Then theres the problem of getting experience in SQL which is my bigger worry why I delayed studing sql

car wise, yeah they pay for my fuel and congestion charge.
I tend to borrow my bros sat nat, its cool and is a life saver in london.

I did get that odd work or too when I was at the NHS, but it was mostly call outs to see probs with local PC's.

 

SQL is not a requirment of the MCSA! Dunno where you got that from! MCSA is 1 OS, 1 Server, 1 Network Environment and 1 Elective - can be Exchange, N+ and A+ together! My point is that SQL is not a requirement of MCSA or MCSE.

 

sorry my bad, should have looked into it more, thanks for the correction.

 

You realise that AD is a lot more than just creating/copying user accounts and changing passwords right? Im not trying to be funny here, but you need to be sure you know what you are getting into.

My last job was working in AD, and all I was doing was account creation/deletion/modification, reporting/querying, and applying group memberships. That barely scratched the surface. If you get into AD as a specialty, you need to be able to design and implement the best AD solution for the company in questions needs. Vital to that is understanding how its all put together, and the different setup options available. The first few chapters of the 70-294 covers DNS/DHCP too, so you need to know about that in detail.

You also need to know about replication, and how to modify/optimise it for the requirements/physical infrastructure.

Theres also the fact that you need to be able to troubleshoot problems with pretty much every aspect of AD. For instance, we had new users who werent getting the correct email addresses assigned to them, my colleague had to know how the custom recipient policy worked, which server it worked off, etc, in order to track down the issue (turned out a particular service wasnt running on the server in question).

AD is a fairly high level specialty. So you really need to know your stuff. Im not saying this to put you off it. I myself have an interest in AD, and began studying it before I got into development (I will likely try to keep my hand into it too if i can, doesnt hurt to understand a technology that you can tie programs into). Im only making sure you understand that, from the sounds of it, your experiences of AD so far are only a tiny part of AD. You could of course, just focus on that aspect. Thats pretty much all my job did.

I would recommend you do a lot more investigation into the field before you commit to moving to another job. If you find its not for you once you are in, and leave after three months with them, its not going to look good on your CV. You dont want to get a reputation for a job-hopper.

 

thats awesome infomation, thanks guys for all your help
I do some investigation into the field before commiting to moving to another job.

Thanks again.

 

You can hunt for IT jobs with *no* IT experience... but you'll generally be limited to entry-level jobs. AD administrators are typically network admins with several years of experience. It's great that you got a little AD experience where you were... but as has been stated earlier, it's just a small part of the big picture.

If you're looking for a role that requires very little business travel, then you may be limiting your job opportunities. If it's incredibly important for you to do so, that's fine... just want you to realize that limiting your opportunities, especially early in your career, can limit your potential to advance in IT. You're not yet in a position where you can easily dictate what kinds of jobs you will and won't take and not have it affect your career.

 

well said. eveyone needs to pay their dues, esp when just starting out. although your job is not ideal, a lot of members starting out would love to be in your position. good luck.