How many here have IT training, but have ended up in non-IT related jobs?
In this day and age, every one needs to be flexible, and willing to try new jobs as they come up. It’s not like I’m not looking for a new job, but right now I still have one so my looking around isn’t at the higest priority.
So while I take my time looking, I am finishing off my IT degree, and learning new skills in the process.
I working for a small company that once had a real IT department. The formal IT department has since been folded under finance, and in the process there’s less IT work to do (no budget, no growth).
I work more as a customer admin. and less as a network admin. They laid a lot of people off over the past few years, and I’ve ended up staying because of my willingness to learn something new.
At first I hated the customer admin job because it seemed below me, but in many ways I learned a ton even though it is relatively easy to do.
First of all I’ve learned to listen to people, and work with them to solve their order and shipping problems. I had to learn to communicate not only verbally but also in written correspondance.
In addition I now work with the business software system. I can now appreciate what the poor users used to complain about! Geesh this program is annoying. It’s difficult to query on stock items and backorders. So difficult in fact I put together a data download query to get me the backorder status on different products.
Prior to my download, my manager used to do this manually. Now I run a hot key, and there it is nicely sorted in an Excel spreadsheet.
Since I came in with a technical background, my manager has shown me how the finance tables interact with the order-processing side of the business. Now I run the sales journal upload, and produce order reports based on different queries to help finance with the month-end processing. There are also daily revenue reports and other status reports that I’ve learned to run.
So learning skills outside of IT isn’t really a bad thing especially if one can make use of your previous skills and add them to the non-technical job.