{"id":276,"date":"2008-10-21T21:31:21","date_gmt":"2008-10-21T21:31:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/?p=276"},"modified":"2008-10-28T21:25:26","modified_gmt":"2008-10-28T21:25:26","slug":"how-to-break-into-the-it-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/21\/how-to-break-into-the-it-industry\/","title":{"rendered":"How to break into the IT industry"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was recently asked for advice on how someone could get that all important first IT job? Like any industry, all IT jobs require 2 things: training and <\/strong>experience, and it’s the experience part that’s hard to get. It’s catch 22, how do you get a job to get experience, without having the experience in the first place?<\/strong> I’m assuming here that the typical entry level approach is not an option, e.g. enrolling on a company’s graduate training scheme, which is the normal way into a new industry.<\/p>\n

The short answer is, it’s tricky! You need to look at your own situation to see how you can manage to engineer up some experience<\/strong>. For example the person who asked me did have a couple of things in his favour, he had a Masters degree in Computer Systems, albeit from 20 years ago and he had never used any of the (now way out of date) skills he’d learnt. He was also a senior manager in a small company, which gave him some latitude to implement his own initiatives. This is the advice I gave him on getting that all important IT experience and first job:<\/p>\n

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To be honest I think you\u2019re going to find it tough breaking in at a technical IT level with 20 year old classroom skills, despite the MSc from Manchester. I would suggest you spend some time on www.ItJobsWatch.co.uk<\/a> to get an understanding of what skills are in demand, which are going up and which are going down, what skills apply to which industries and in what combinations. There\u2019s a lot of data there!<\/p>\n

Personally if it were me, I\u2019d get into SharePoint<\/a> (which is a document management and collaboration tool from Microsoft). It seems to be on the rise at the moment. Putting \u201csharepoint\u201d in the skills section of www.JobServe.com<\/a> reveals 447 job adverts [at the time of writing]<\/em> for both contract and permie over the last 7 days for example, and sticking \u201csharepoint\u201d into itjobswatch shows every role on the rise from last year.<\/p>\n

Start like this:<\/p>\n