Some career advice needed....

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Hi All,

I was hoping to get some of your opinions on how I should take my IT career forward. I'll try keep this short basically I went straight into a IT trainee support job after school I learnt my trade there for about 2 years obtaining my NT4 Workstation and Server MCP's. I then moved onto an IT outsourcing company called CSC for 16 months not sure if you've heard of them they were a pretty shocking company to work for but I still earnt myself some decent experience.

My first job pretty much consisted of 1st/2nd line desktop support role doing the usual stuff. My second job was a bit more 2nd/3rd line stuff working on mainly remote server support and other maintanence work Backups etc. After the way CSC treated staff it soured my experience of IT for a bit and I embarked on a 4 year university course in media technology doing a bit of IT contracting work in the first two university summer holidays, which brings me to now.

I've decided to get back into IT it's just what I seem to be the best at i've maintained an interest in computers and IT in general. The problem i'm having is trying to get back into IT support. Recruitment agencies i'm talking to are all saying the same thing that i'm lacking recent IT experience which is fair enough. I'm still having problems getting to interview stage for basic 1st/2nd line support positions at the moment which i'm surprised about considering i've got a couple of MCP's and nearly 4 years prior experience.

I could start applying for the really bad call centre positions but i'm not that desperate yet plus I don't think I could get much career progression working in that environment seems a bit dead end to me.

I've decided to try and update my qualifications a bit so I was hoping for peoples advice on where to start. If you were in my position where would you start? I'm not sure if I should be starting on the Windows 2000 or 2003 and XP qualifications. Also because i've been out of the game for a while can people give me some idea where they think the future of IT support is going to be? I'm realistic enough to see that the basic IT support jobs will end up being shipped off to india eventually I saw that beginning to happen at CSC while I was there. I keep seeing a lot of mentioning of Oracle is that something worthwile considering?

Thanks for reading

 

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First of all - Hi and welcome!

It is difficult to give a hard and fast answer to your questions.

Yes - I've heard of CSC - big American consultancy which charges fat fees but not much seems to filter down to lower levels! We (or rather a company we merged with) had a big expensive system from them that basicaly did nothing. Mind you - a lot of the blame for that was down to the company we merged with!

For basic call-centre stuff you need good experience of XP & 2003. I'm not surprised that you are getting flack from agencies - imagination and thought are not their strong suits.

My advice would be to keep plugging at applying while updating your MCPs.

Oracle is a whole different ball-game. You can download a personal edition for free - but don't expect to get very far quickly!

Harry.

 

Hi there,

Thanks for taking the time to reply much appreciated. You summed up CSC pretty well there actually they were at times a complete shambles of a company! Have you got any suggestions for which MCP's I should tackle first? I'm thinking first off:

Exam 70–270: Installing, Configuring, and Administering Microsoft Windows XP Professional

Then if I can get through that one move onto:

Exam 70–290: Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment

Just seems like the best ones for me to start with for my situation. Eventually i'd like to move onto Exchange but thats a while off i'd expect.

 

Sounds a good choice to me! And keep applying! A lot of Windows stuff hasn't changed *that* much, so some more enlightened employers might decide to take a chance.

Harry.