Retraining in a family friendly IT role - am I day dreaming?

[Fourstickymitts]

I?ve two DSs, the youngest of who will be starting school next summer and am currently am a SAHM by choice. I have worked part time since DS1 was about a year old, but we had a big house relocation last year due to DH job, so I resigned from my last job during the summer last year and have been a chief cook and bottle washer domestic goddess ever since . I?m now pondering returning to work next year, and am going around in circles a bit with it.

My qualifications and background experience are in human resources, but I?m not sure if I want to return to that. We?ve moved to a rural area, so a traditional office based HR role would most likely require a fairly hefty commute (20 miles or more in bad traffic). DH's role is also very involved (long hours/travelling for work), so I?ve had to be the one who is more 9-5 or school hours as a result, and adding a commute onto that really limits my options. Faced with those kind of limitations, I?ve been thinking about what I could do from home or what I could turn into a working from home role either with my current experience or via some additional training through a local uni or the Open University. I?m quite taken with the idea of retraining, to be honest. I loved being a student pre-children.

But what to do? I?ve always been good with computers as a user (advance Excel user, HR database ?super user?/trainer, etc, for example) but never as a programmer, network support or whatever. I did a business degree which had a lot of IT subject matter within it and I always enjoyed learning how to use a new computer package. I could have been a computer geek but ended up an HR suit somehow.

So, I?m wondering if there is anything I could do that might support working from home in some sort of IT capacity. This all sounds like a lovely idea, but it?s a bit uninformed at the moment. IT is such a huge subject and it has been years feels like eons since I did my initial degree and I?m very out of touch with what technologies are bankable/desirable. This post is a bid of a brain dump of my inner rambling to be honest, but I was wondering if any IT-working Mumsnetters had any suggestions?

We live in central Scotland, and I understand that our local area is something of a base for some computer games producers, but beyond that I?m clueless. I need some help in finding a direction to research to understand if there?s any potential in what is a bit of a pipe-dream at the moment.

I?m not particularly artistic, so I think graphic/web design would be a non starter, and am pants at maths I?m not mathematically inclined.

Thanks for reading if you?re still with me. I?ll stop waffling now.

I?ve two DSs, the youngest of who will be starting school next summer and am currently am a SAHM by choice. I have worked part time since DS1 was about a year old, but we had a big house relocation last year due to DH job, so I resigned from my last job during the summer last year and have been a chief cook and bottle washer domestic goddess ever since grin. I?m now pondering returning to work next year, and am going around in circles a bit with it.

My qualifications and background experience are in human resources, but I?m not sure if I want to return to that. We?ve moved to a rural area, so a traditional office based HR role would most likely require a fairly hefty commute (20 miles or more in bad traffic). DH's role is also very involved (long hours/traveling for work), so I?ve had to be the one who is more 9-5 or school hours as a result, and adding a commute onto that really limits my options. Faced with those kind of limitations, I?ve been thinking about what I could do from home or what I could turn into a working from home role either with my current experience or via some additional training through a local uni or the Open University. I?m quite taken with the idea of retraining, to be honest. I loved being a student pre-children.

But what to do? I?ve always been good with computers as a user (advance Excel user, HR database ?super user?/trainer, etc, for example) but never as a programmer, network support or whatever. I did a business degree which had a lot of IT subject matter within it and I always enjoyed learning how to use a new computer package. I could have been a computer geek but ended up an HR suit somehow.

So, I?m wondering if there is anything I could do that might support working from home in some sort of IT capacity. This all sounds like a lovely idea, but it?s a bit uninformed at the moment. IT is such a huge subject and it has been years feels like eons since I did my initial degree and I?m very out of touch with what technologies are bankable/desirable. This post is a bid of a brain dump of my inner rambling to be honest, but I was wondering if any IT-working Mumsnetters had any suggestions?

We live in central Scotland, and I understand that our local area is something of a base for some computer games producers, but beyond that I?m clueless. I need some help in finding a direction to research to understand if there?s any potential in what is a bit of a pipe-dream at the moment.

I?m not particularly artistic, so I think graphic/web design would be a non starter, and am pants at maths I?m not mathematically inclined.

Thanks for reading if you?re still with me. I?ll stop waffling now.

No idea how I managed to post that twice. Not so IT capable after all apparently.

Hmm, don't tell any future employer that you are pants at maths if you want a job in IT!
I have worked in software design, web programming etc, currently doing integrated database and web design for a university. For programming in general (And presumably therefore for computer game programming) you need to be very logical (And therefore generally good at maths) - able to take a problem and split it into a set of logical steps and explain those steps to somebody else, in this case a computer using the computers own language. However if you are an advanced Excel user presumably you are quite au fait with VBA so that shouldn't be a problem. If you haven't done lots of VBA maybe that would be a place to start - start trying to program Excel so that it can control Word etc (not using Macros but VBA) that would give you at least some indication if you could program in a more general sense. If you enjoy it and want to program I would suggest doing a course in either C# or Java - and work on the assumption that once you can program in one language learning any other is fairly easy. It would be worth though looking at the local company websites to see if they say what languages they use.

I have to be honest none of my programming jobs for other people have been possible from home - the first job I did involved lots of off site client work - e.g. could easily spend 4 months living out a suitcase in a hotel, so not great once had a family. Or I have been working on confidential code checking so couldn't take off site. Currently I am working with student data so not accessible off site. I am not arty but did work self employed doing web design whilst my DSs were small - I enjoyed the programming side but hated the arty side of it. I used to look at other sites for artistic inspiration.

Hi, I'm a software developer by trade. Working for a company that sells business software to some very big companies you'd have heard of. First we don't consider ourselves IT. That's the people who support and run our network and computers! It's a completely different thing.

I don't know how IT support works, and hopefully someone on MN can answer you that. In software development, there are two main roles - developers and testers. Like LittleMissGreen says, developers require you to be pretty strong at maths. My company requires you to have a numerate degree. Depends on your target application it can be different type of maths. Mine involves quite a bit of hexadecimal/binary maths, and you have to be pretty confident to think and read them to design and debug them. I'm now a Java developer, and learned in C++. It doesn't matter what language you know when you start, in interviews, we test your ability to solve problems in pseudo code, which like LittleMissGreen explains, the ability to break a problem into logical steps.

I wouldn't recommend starting as a game (or app or social network) developer, unless you have to. They are considered sexy and will be filled with young grads working for less. Most software are not sold to end users but to other businesses. But definitely look around your area.

You can also consider to work as a tester. Good ones are very rare and very in demand. You code, but only to automate testing in scripts, so it doesn't require the same numerate logic as a developer. Our testers come from a much more varied background than our developers. (I sometimes despair explaining hex/binary to them)!

I have heard of developers working offsite, but that's mainly in the new social media/web space. I've interviewed for one that works on an open source CMS, and it requires only one day a week in the office. Traditional software house requires you to be on site (or client site, which is way worse), because it's very important to have face to face meetings, as we work in a very close knit team. However the time is very flexible, as long as it's something resembling work hours. For example, you can start at 6 and finish at 3.

Oh want to add that the IT support people I know are on-call. If the network goes down, you'll have to come in to fix it no matter what hour it is. Also, big companies tend to have big transactions done overnight, which means IT must be on call during those hours. That might or might not suit you depends on if your DH can guarantee to be at home over your on call periods.

I am interested in this thread. I am a SAHM and I used to be VB 6 programmer and I know Delphi 3 and SQL server 6. I have a physics degree and I adore maths, however its been over ten years since I had a programming job. The IT world moves very rapidly

How do you think I could get my foot back in the door? I would be happy to do either testing or development. I am doing a couple of evening courses, but I lack confidence as its been such a long time. How do you think I could get up to date experience.

reallytired I was a postdoc researcher in CS before becoming a developer. So I have been coding in Java, know the current web stack, but not to the same standard as a proper developer. I studied the SCJP in my spare time, using something like this, so I could pass the programming tests in the interviews. (Only google allows full psuedo code when I interviewed, everyone else uses Java as I applied as a Java developer). I was very honest about my background in my CV, and I definitely have a big gap in the enterprise libraries when I start.

I did IT support in a school for four years and it not as family friendly as you think. I have found it very hard to find part time work in IT support. My employer were truely vile when I wanted to reduce my hours after maternity leave.

If you want to get into IT support you are best to do Comp TIA A+ and N+ qualfiication and the Micrsoft Windows 7 exams. It would also help to do a Windows 2008 server R2 course.

This website has some interesting videos.

www.professormesser.com/

To get yourr foot in the door you need some experience, prehaps some volentary experience with a charity would help. Most people start on a help desk and work up.

I think you have to think what type of people you are. Do you like to work in a team or solve problems on your own? Are you an introvert or an extravert?

I think that for most IT jobs there would be some communting.

DH and I are at the senior end of IT Project Management but have seen it all done it all in the past 15/20 years between us!

I don't want to sound pessimistic but things you need to consider are:

• Rarely is this kind of work done off-site/at home, often due to security reasons (firewalls, etc) as well as client requirements;
• There is a lot of offshoring of technical skills at the moment, with most companies drastically trying to reduce headcount and costs....and so the key here is cheap and highly skilled - typically this would be graduates (they offer cheap+flexiblity) or offshore - onshore resources need to be very skilled with up-to-date experience; which brings me to the next point that you would need that "foot in the door".
• IT Is traditionally not a "family friendly" industry - it's getting better but I would say that HR is much more family friendly. IT Is generally customer facing and stressful/deadline driven and when something is going pear-shaped you are expected to work all hours/weekends.

Hope I didn't put you off but they are things you need to think about I guess!

Would agree that testing is a non-starter if you want to work from home. Due to the potential data sensitivity and network/ firewall issues None of the testers I have worked with have been able to work remotely. Most of the time they have had to have logins with no access to Internet or external email.

Have you thought about writing technical documentation? Dull as f* but does allow more flexibility wrt working patterns/ location.

Actually I think programming, testing or support is pretty family unfriendly. My dh works silly hours at times.

I work in IT as a developer and although I am lucky to have flexible hours now I wouldn't have been able to have got into part time without the experience that I had gained previously. It would also be difficult to work from home because I often have to be in meetings or be able to speak to users face to face.

One thing you could do remotely is data analysis, especially if you have good excel skills as this is the preferred package of many employers. These jobs vary considerably in complexity so you would have have the opportunity to start small and work your way up, however I think you would still have to prove yourself before you would get an opportunity to work from home.