IT Employment

As a recent graduate, I cannot afford to grab any job available because experiences gained from it would determine my next job. I have thought long and hard and my conclusion is that all of us still have to start as a programmer before we can get to the level of intermediate/senior programmer, analyst, architect, team leader, project manager, program manager, etc.

See how easy we can get lost in this maze? One can easily be stuck as a developer (not that it is a bad thing).

Ultimately we all have to know our strengths and weaknesses first before we decide to walk down a particular career path. Some people are simply good communicators but somehow they cannot get along with teams. They can easily be independent consultant if they have valuable knowledge and experience to share.

(This feels like "IT Careers Anonymous") I too got into IT in the 90's as a Desktop technician, and then CAD software admin. At the end of the 90's I got involved in a data warehouse client/server installation that put me in the role of Project Manager. I found that I loved the logical thinking, process control, and resource admin, all things that us IT people like about computers.

I quit my job and got into a consulting firm to a non-IT company. It was a good fit. I found I adapted well to the new information because I was focused on the project, not necessarily what it was about.

Move ahead, I took a job with a non-profit group and just completed 3 1/2 years of project mgmt work overseas.

Problem: Now I'm coming back to the US and I've been utilizing the Internet for a job, submitting my resume everywhere, and I'm finding very few jobs related to project management where my now limited skills are desireable! My resume reads like hop-scotch. Apparently critical thinking and administrative abilities aren't actual skills.

If the reader can stay focused in a specific field within Project Management, and really get to know it, I think it could be a great job to a new career and a fullfilling job.

Interesting occupation for the detail-minded: creating the indexes for non-fiction books. Can be done anywhere and emailed back to the publisher. Google "Indexers."

When I was searching for a new career, I finally narrowed things down to retail pharmacist or computer desktop/network support. I was looking for a job where at least some things got completed every single day and nothing took longer than a year (in my old career, all projects lasted for years and years). I wanted to be able to do something for a specific person, and educate people one-on-one. I wanted to do more than write long documents and sit in meetings. I wanted to do something more hands-on.

Since I had already knew computer hardware pretty well and some programming, and had never taken zoology etc (would have needed to take at least six prerequisite classes before I could even have *applied* to pharmacy school), I headed into computer support.

And six years later, I still love it! But I think Pharmacist would have been similar and possibly more lucrative and long-lasting into old age. Like computer support, I could still be helping "users" (hee-hee, probably can't officially call them that) every day and adjusting my level of support to each person's level of knowledge; acting as liason between the users and doctors/insurance; doing inventory management; perhaps repair of hardware such as pill-counting machines (?); dealing with software and printing issues; dealing with security issues; waiting for approvals from nameless faceless people in a another location; geeking out reading trade magazines about the lastest studies; regular continuing education...