Starting Salary, No experience, A+

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I was made redundant from a mickey mouse office job that perhaps a monkey could’ve done (perhaps one of the reasons why I was made redundant ) and now I’m studying for the A+ & N +. I’ve seen some postings that mentioned starting salaries of £12 - £14 k for a first ever IT job. But, relative my last unskilled job’s salary, is it unreasonable to expect quite a bit more in a skilled job? By the way, I’m not going on the information about salaries from the website IT jobswatch, nor the claims made by training providers (I’m doing self study anyway).

 

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Hi Welcome

12k - 14k is normal you could get more if your lucky but you could also get less.

 

Thanks for the (amazingly) quick reply. Without wishing to sound too naive, it just seems a bit daft that I might not (albeit initially) be earning much more (or even less) than in my last unskilled job .

 

Once you get into it and get experience then your salary will go up. It just depends on how much you are willing to drop.

I have a bigger quandry, if I get my first IT job I could end up dropping as much as 6k or even more as my work are discussing give me a 7k pay rise, which mean I might drop 13k. Take my advice and get your first IT job ASAP then you wont get in a situation like me.

 

It's one of the weird things about this industry. You get paid stupidly low wages for having reasonably high levels of skill, whereas you can get paid more for knowing how to answer a phone and fill in a form in an office.

The thing to keep your focus on is where you'll be on 3 - 4 years time, you could be on 3 times the wages running all sorts of stuff in the IT role, whereas you'll still be doing the same stuff in the office job on probably the same money.

You've gotta thing long term I'd say

 

good avice Willt Rep Given

 

My first IT job as first line support in a call centre paid 11k for the first 3 months (training rate) then 13k after that. Did that for about 18 months then walked into a 20k second line support role, now thats gone up again as I have taken on the Exchange admin role and run a project or two. IT jobs at the entry level are not the best paid, its when you get to the next level the money can start to get much better, and upwards from there.

 

ding ding ding! Exactly right!

 

Some of the replys that have been posted already are good information. But all in all its about how big of a community you live in. Unless you plan on working for a company that your going to take in Help desk Tickets and repair there computers.

If your looking for the most exp I would go with a company that only works on Private computers. These systems are from your everyday joe and the amount of exp you will gain from this is unreal. In a large company your most of the time going to be working with outlook and working on network connectivity witch is not bad but you will not learn hard enuff.

The amount of money will be low with a Basic A+ job since in the IT world this is a low end easy to fix problems. For Someone that does not have exp this does not sound true but a year from the time your job starts your going to get bourd of fixing Sys32 errors and virus removels. You wil also get a huge range of problems and it might be 60 days before someone else had that same problem.

I worked for a PC company in USA with a population in my home town of only 30,000 people. I was only making 8.50 USD per hour. Witch is really! low, but it was worth it and I got everything I needed from it to learn the next book.

Also a plus from small repair companys are that they do Networking contracts. You will more than likly only be working with 1 or 2 people and sometimes it might just be you. This is were you might beable to do some contracts with your boss. While I was working for that company I got to setup my very first network. This was only 1 Active Directory Server Linked into UPS with only 3 workstations and a print server. IT OWNED!


( This is only if you plan on gaining A+ exp: Mastered)
(Once you have what you need quite on them and say: PwneD!)

 

Hi Jo,

You're selling yourself short by saying you have no experience - you might not have an awful lot compared to some of the guys on here but you'll have more than some as well, its all about how you dress it up.

Anyway, back to your questions - the last place I worked had a starting salary of 15.5k and some of people who worked there had very little experience (one guy was a fridge sales man beforehand) but were ok in interviews. I think if you don't have a lot of experience, willingness to learn is the next best thing.

Best of luck anyway

D

 

also if your finding it tough getting interviews then try and volunteer your time in the It department at your current work. It will look great on any CV.

I started at 16K but think I was fairly lucky to get that so aim for anything above 11K to be reasonable, remember you don't stay there forever!

Good luck!

 

Good advice from all above.

I got my first job without completing A+ (though I'd studied a fair part of it) and was on 15k.

I'm now on a significant amount more on my 2nd job, in under a year and without any certs.

 

Yep... your salary starts low, but it goes up with experience... experience that you cannot gain by working in a "mickey mouse office job", as the OP puts it.

 

It is hard to start with i retrained and started as a help desk analyst 3 1/2 years ago, then desktop support, then IT admin of a small company and now have just got myself a new job as a system support eng looking after servers and desktops for a huge organisation, the salary i will be on is nice now compared to what i was on as a help desk analyst logging calls on 1st line. but i saw getting the certs as the way to open the door and the experience has allowed me to walk through it, be patient and persistent, always set your goals and go for it. i always say to my kids: The only person stopping you getting to where you want to be is you..