I lack...

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Entry-level, by definition, means a job in which you ENTER the IT field. You can't enter something unless you weren't in it to begin with... thus, entry-level jobs do NOT require experience. If it did... it wouldn't be an entry-level job, would it? ;)

 

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It's tough.

It does seem a lot of a time that you need experience to get a job, but you need a job to get experience! Everybody has to start somewhere.

 

DaveMid,

You do NOT need a cert to get a job. I, for one, think certs are very much overvalued, and that they are pushed because there are so many people making a living from the certification industry....

I'm in my 50's, and a career changer with major physical disabilities, and was without a job for 5 years. All kinds of red flags to potential employers. I got into my current position by offering to intern for free with someone who needed some help. Yes, I'd already spent a few years developing skills in my home computer lab, and I do have some certs but my certs have nothing in common with what I'm doing. I'm working with Linux, and I have MS certs. After 4 months of interning I'm now a paid consultant for the same organization, and I'm getting my fingers, so to speak, into a lot of different, and new to me, technologies. This experience is going to make my market value increase greatly.

Now, I spent more than 2 years searching for jobs the way everyone here tells you to look to for work, and all I found was someone wanting to to use me to screw over someone else. A very bad situation.... It wasn't until I just gave up on a traditional job search and started getting really honest with employers that I found a job, and actually had to choose between several opportunities at the same time.

You will be told not to tell an employer you're hard up for a job. I say that is pure bs. I got much further by handing my resume to a decision maker, talking to them about my skills, and my weaknesses, and then telling them I was having a very difficult time breaking into the field. After I did that I'd tell them I thought I could be valuable to them and that I would intern for them for free. I'd say that we would start this relationship with performance benchmarks for me to reach within a certain length of time. If I didn't reach them I'd walk out the door with no hard feelings, but if I did I wanted to talk turkey about a full time job at that point. I told them this was to be in writing to protect both of us.

I got no one that turned me down, and lots of interest. I also started getting paid to work because the place I'd been interning for on a part time basis didn't want to lose me when they heard of the other opportunities that were coming my way.

I have absolutely zero certs related to the work I'm doing. Some of it I've never done before. But the employer knows it too, so if I am slow at something it's to be expected, but at the same time no one is looking over my shoulder either. I just keep digging until the job is done.

Think outside the box of resumes, cover letters and certifications, and start thinking about talking to decision makers in small businesses that need help. Small businesses are always short of good help and money. However, if you prove yourself to a small businessman he'll find a way to keep to you or help you find a job through his contacts if he just absolutely cannot find a way to pay you because he will like and respect you because of your ingenuity, drive, and determination to make it....

 

Well, I make a living from the certification industry... I just have the integrity to tell the truth about what certification will and will not do for a career.

That said, looking at the number of training centers selling "A+ to CCNP" packages to newbies without experience with the lure of a job with high salary, perhaps I'm in the minority.

 

I wasn't casting personal aspersions about any one person, and definitely not you in particular, because there are people in the certification industry, of whom you are one, who do act ethically in this regard. However, those of you who are ethical seem to be greatly outnumbered and/or "outshouted" by those who want to do nothing other than just make money out of people's hopes and dreams and care not one whit about how badly they screw people over.

Certifications, in and of themselves, are not bad. It's the idea that if you don't have a cert you're not going to get a job, or that certifications are the only way to break into the IT field that is ridiculous. I fell for that line of reasoning, and it's just plain old false. If I had just started out looking for a job the way I ended up getting one I would have had a job a long time ago, and saved a lot of money in the process....

If people would look at certs as a way of gaining knowledge and skills, then certifications would be much more valuable. But, and I hold the certification industry at large--and MS in particular because they knew for years how prevalent braindumping is and did nothing--responsible for this, people see them as a way to get a job, and thus study to pass tests, not study to gain skills. That's just back asswards of how certs should be looked at. The knowledge and the skills obtained are the valuable part of the certification process. The piece of paper without skills means nothing, yet I see question after question about how to get certified the easiest way possible, and also see instance after instance of people saying they know they have a weakness in hands on areas but think taking a test is going to cover this weakness. It's really flawed reasoning in my book, but yet I see it from the majority of people wanting to get certifications.

If a person is going to pass a certification test after using nothing more than a Sybex book, practice tests, and no hands-on in a lab, they might just as well take all the money they were going to spend doing that and just have a little bonfire with it for all the good it is going to do them. At least they will get a little heat from the money as they burn it if they're close enough to the fire..... It's just not possible to build real world skills without doing the hands-on work.

It's both far cheaper and far more effective for a person to go volunteer their labor and get valuable hands-on experience in return than it is put out good money and get what amounts to nothing in return for their money because they don't have any hands-on experience.