How can I get started working in IT?

[SleepySuzy]

Can anyone advise?

I'm waiting to be made redundant. My only qualification is RNMH (registered nurse for the mentally handicapped), but I currently work in admin. I want to work in IT, and have a cv now.

Just need to get a foot in the door.

[Uwila]

Where are you?

Possibly you could start with an admin position at an IT company.

[SleepySuzy]

Bradford W Yorkshire

[runtus]

The admin role in an IT company is a good plan - it's what i did and 8 years later I'm heading up the Marketing Dept. Actually, about to leave cos I'm mightily sick of it but hey ho............give it a go.

[DominiConnor]

I'm a pimp, and part of what we do is IT, though mostly in banking. I also have done IT for a few decades.

I first of all have to ask why IT ?

It's entirely possible that your first job will pay less than your current employment.

I'd be very very wary of outfits like CompuTeach et al who suck people into their entry level programmes promising "careers in IT". The reality is that getting a first job without experience is not easy.

It's a tempting but not often wise way to spend your redundancy.

I won't use the term "rip off" for legal reasons.

Admin may be a way in to IT, though it's advantages over admin anywhere else is not guaranteed.
Ironically, I can see a good candidate for your 2nd job but not the first. There are big multi billion pound projects to to NHS IT. Frankly I think that a chemical attack by Al Qaeda will do more for the nation's health, but they need people who know healtchcare and IT.
"Need" is of course not the same as "want", but close enough for your purposes.

People on big government IT projects are hired entirely on the basis of price, not quality.
(I speak as the former director responsible for HM Treasury's largest ever capital spending project).

With all due respect, that might be to your advantage. At entry level you are cheap, which is good. I'm guessing your understanding of relational database theory is not great, but you will quickly find that you are far from the least well qualified on the project. For a start you can type in English.

I know so little about you as a person that I'm firing into the dark here, but I think the sweet spot of effort to learn vs money you can get is to master Excel.
Although almost as many people can drive Excel as drive a car, only a small % have had any formal training in it. You can imagine what roads would be like if that were applied to cars, and frankly many people's use of Excel looks remarkably like car crashes.
There is a good market for Excel people, we've dropped a few into financial outfits, and I can safely say the money was entirely to their satisfaction.
An advantage of Excel is that learning it is not an "all or nothing" game. Almost any office job can be made more productive by knowing Excel, and it's nature means that you don't have to get a "critical mass" of knowledge before you can do anything.
At the risk of overloading the car anlogy, someone who knows about the "gearbox" in Excel is a bit useful, whereas on it's own it's useless in driving a car.
That means if you give up part way through, your time & money is not wasted.
Also you can do Excel on your home PC, and is one of the few lurcrative skills that work on a standalone computer and can be self taught with a few books. (and a lot of time)

Most colleges of FE etc run Excel courses. The ECDL pleasantly surprised me for being quite good.

Also there are a lot of online resources to learn Excel, and a swarm of sites where you can ask newbie questions and (often) get an answer.

Given that I deal mostly with investment bankers, there's some jokes I could make...
One (non client) director at a household bank talks of himself in the 3rd person, is there a medical term for this ?

I can't introduce you to any of our clients, but if you want a quick commentary on your CV,
I'm
Dominic AT Pauldominic dot com.

[Uwila]

Errr... do you want to be a techy? Or just work in IT? Perhaps that admin job followed by Prince II might get you into managing projects.

Not sure i agree that Excel is the place to be.

What kind of IT companies are in Bradford? And what markets do they serve?

[DominiConnor]

I'm not 100% on Excel, but is a realistic semi-techie job.
There is good demand for Prince II currently but that is to an extent a "critical mass skill" which is both good and bad.

Also SleepySuzy, did you do a nursing degree ?
Many firms are very anal about graduates for "professional" jobs. I accept (hope) that most of your education isn't relevant to the job, but does affect your chances.

[tribpot]

SleepySuzy, you may want to give some consideration to the NHS National Programme for IT (esp as it's based in Leeds!). A clinical qualification would be looked upon favourably there, and there are administrative positions available fairly often which would give you a foot in the door.

Have a look at the \link{http://www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/\website} - if you want to chat offboard it's tribunicia underscore potestas at hotmail dot com.

[Kaz33]

DP started with a IT training company called New Horizons (nhtraining.com) - basically they run open days where anyone can go along and the interview is a five minute presentation. They are looking for people with personality and believe that if you have the ability to present you can learn the IT. They take people with no qualifications and no relevant experience.

They were based in the City of London but a quick search shows they now operate in birmingham, bristol, manchester, nottingham, yorkshire. I have no idea whether they still recruit that way but it could be worth a phonecall.

You'll start of teaching Microsoft Word etc.. but if you have the aptitude then you can do some more technical courses and gain microsoft certification.

[booge]

I used to work in hotels and had a first degree in Hotel and Restaurant Management, having a first degree allowed me to do a one year MSc conversion course in computer science at Bristol. I have been working as a developer for the last 5 years and am begining to do more technical project management Quite a few people I'veworked with have done conversion courses.

Bradford Uni do a similar course \link{http://www.brad.ac.uk/university/pgpros/computing-taught.php\here}

[Witchycat]

SleepySuzy - what kind of IT work do you want to do? E.g. programming (in which case you'd need to learn specific skills), admin or maybe something more like IT User liaison/Business Analysis.

I think most of these areas are quite specialist with their own training but if you have worked on any sort of IT project as a User you may be able to use that as a way into business analysis - at least that's what I did. My job is kind of to liaise between programmers & Users & translate techy stuff into something non-techy people understand. I have no technical qualifications (although now have Prince 2)but got the job through IT project work.

t's hard to advise without knowing more about what angle you are intersted in. I do know that the project management/business analysis area seems to be a growing one though as more and more companies realise they need this.

PS - I work in Housing in Bradford area & I know mine isn't the only company looking at the IT/business link kind of role.

HTH

[SleepySuzy]

Sorry, been out for a few hours, I'm slowing working my way through your replies. Some really useful info here, so thank you all. (any more replies will be gratefully accepted)

No my qualification is not a degree, it was the tradition nursing course, before P2000 started.

[Nightynight]

Try your local college of further education for IT admin type courses. They may have links with local industry.

[Nightynight]

oh, and just ignore any employer that quibbles about accepting your qualification as a degree. You probably wouldn't want to work for them anyway

[clerkKent]

I used to recruit entry-level programmers for a software house. We took one ex-nurse who was very good. She found the environment very odd at first - the office was dead quiet as all the techies beavered away at programming (I was one once). Eventually she returned to nursing.

However even for entry-level, we expected some evidence of commitment to IT such as completion of a relevant training course (SQL). There used to be government schemes for re-training into IT - at one time 30% of the company had come from that route. I have no idea if such schemes still exist.

It will be hard to get a job and you will need to find an enlightened employer who will look beyond the obvious to see your potential - but it is possible.

[DominiConnor]

I'm not sure I go along with Nightynight on quality of employers. Yes, it is an error to obsess over being a graduate when the degree is not relevant to the job, but I don't see any correlation (either way) between that error and the quality of the employer.

It's worth referring to your nursing qualifications as degree equivalent, given that if you did this nowadays you would be a graduate.

Fact is a lot of recruitment is by buzzword search and box ticking, and you have to work within that reality.

[Nightynight]

dc, its one of my criteria by which I judge the quality of a potential employer. I play the salary game by changing employers frequently (its worked up til now), and the longest Ive ever stayed anywhere in my life, is 3 years. My questions are...


Are they up their own a*se about "only employing people with a 2.1 from a good university?" (Yes = bad)
Do they show you a written job description? (No = avoid at all costs)
Do they employ a receptionist? (No = avoid at all costs, they are stingy bstds who are too mean to recognise the value of a good receptionist, and will try to save on the cost of your salary)
Does their website make extravagant promises about their customer care and quality of service? (Yes = avoid, unless you want to work til midnight to fulfil their promises to their customers)
Is your immediate manager French and male? (if yes, does he try to impose his leadership on his team, ie boss them around? (not just my experience, in a recent survey, French managers were more likely than English or German ones to do this, and it really pisses me off to have a bossy manager)

now, dont lay into me for this, please. Its not scientific! just the real questions that I ask myself at the job interview, as opposed to the ones that I ask when they say "Do you have any questions about our company?"

[DominiConnor]

I don't have such firm rules, more things that score "points" for/against an employer.

My criteria are more about things like politeness. Good correlation between being offrered a drink, and them being on time and quality of job.
Also between good toilets imply a better employer.
single most negative thing is to be interviewed first by HR.

I don't know what sort of work you do, or of course much about your personal preferences, but I do feel that there is a big danger that your rules will decrease the quality of job you get.

Written job descriptions in my experience are often simply rubbish, and as a pimp I see more than most people. I observe a vague negative correlation between the formality of the job specification and the quality of the job. But that's in finance, have no idea outside. The two jobs that I've got the most from had very vague descriptions, the best was one where they refused point blank to tell me what I'd be doing for two weeks ater I started, ands only then when I made a bit of a fuss :)

We don't have a receptionist...

As for "extravagant claims about service", I find that there is a very strong negative correlation between such claims and reality. As for hours that seems to be more to do with managers than the firm itself.

We deal with a lot of people managed by the French, and there may well be something there from what we hear.
Am I allowed to say the the same about women, or will I get burned in effigy ?


As for the 2:1 thing I've employed non-graduates but I like smart people, and that's an indication.

[cod]

my dhc ant stand workign with french pople
he in IT

[cod]

(but hte Germans are the worst)

[DominiConnor]

I observe a strong difference between working [i]with[/i] French people and working [i]for[/i] them. It's especially made in my trade because French people are on average much better educated than Brits or Americans, and we work in an area where being smart is critical.

[cod]

go oyu must be like a fish out fo water hten

arf

[DominiConnor]

:)
Well, yes. It's not unusual to be dealing with people with CV items like "Swiss National Scholarship for gifted young people", or "came 2nd in Chinese physics olympiad". One of the people we do business with turned down a nobel prize in economics. Me, I don't even have a PhD :(