I am 30 years old and looking to begin my journey to find my dream career. I have dabbled in many areas of the tech world as a hobby and as a side business. Everything from web design and building to graphics, hardware trouble shooting and repair, applications support and system setup. I currently work for a Fortune 500 company as an industrial electrician. I’ve been here for almost 12 years now. I am currently doing a lot of project management work. I am the ‘cyber security leader’ for my operating department which basically means that I am responsible for ensuring all our controls LAN PCs are meeting our CSA requirements. As a power and controls tech, I do a lot of controls troubleshooting and machine programming in PLC and Function Block programming languages. I have been using Linux for a couple of months at home, so I’m learning more and more and *nix environments. I enjoy learning about near every aspect of the IT world. I receive far too many tech related Newsletters in my inbox to really keep up on.
I enjoy a fair amount of the work I am currently doing. But at the same time, being here for 12 years working for such a large corporate entity, I’m feeling quite undervalued, underpaid and somewhat run down. I do not have any college education other than 3 credits from PSU for an MIS 130 class I had taken a while back on a Concepts in Database Management course. Having had already done some small Application and Database programming prior to taking the class, I didn’t really get much of anything out of it and was turned off to finishing the remainder of the classes. They were extremely slow moving 4 hour blocks of my life.
Not really knowing many people in the IT field (at least, other than the ones that work for the same company I do, which quite frankly, do not impress me much) I’ve always had the impression that in order to work in IT, you had to know all aspects. Now, the more I read, its becoming apparent that most IT professionals are specialized to one or maybe a few given areas. My plight, as I’m sure is true for so many millions of others, is that I’m having a bastard of a time trying to decide which one or few areas I would really like to focus on.
So to get down to the point of the post, I’d like to hear from folks some thoughts, comments and suggestions on some of your favorite resources. I’d like to hear about any good IT career type counseling services. What are some of the more well respected Online Education services for IT education? Am I seriously mistaken thinking that starting my own business or going into freelance work will be a much more enjoyable work life for me (and hopefully better paying) than working for a large corporate entity?
Thanks for taking the time to read my post, I look forward to hearing what everyone has to say!
Mike Grabowski
