New ICT Support Technician - Needs Advice - Please

[Jiser]

I looked on the job list on the council website. There was a job so I applied. That was working for two schools back in 2007. Then I saw another job on the council website. So I applied for that been @ current one since start of Dec 08.

I have just graduated to well finished 4 year course last may/june - keep looking. Check into grad schemes to.

Easy. If you have a year of experiance + degree you should be ok soon enough. Hope your not just looking @ educational jobs. Plenty of other industrys with a requirement for I.T. staff

[Marci]

How did you guys become Technicians. At one point in time you must have had no experience in schools like me so how did you break the Ice.

I wandered into it on a detour from what I'd been doing...

*wobbly timelapse to 1994*
11 GCSEs at C and above, no other qualifications, 16, living in Leeds on my own, on the dole, but had been playing with PCs thruout school age...

...1995
Started working life at JMR Electronics on the assembly lines on NMW. Technical Manager discovered that I knew how to set up Windows 95, and the company was just starting to consider shifting over from Win3.11. They didn't have an IT Support dept or anything, just the Tech Manager covering it.

They bought in a Win3.1 computer that came with a Win95 license, presented it to me and watched me do it, then took me off assembly line and plonked me in as a Trainee IT Tech / RMA Technician. Did that for a year, and in the process learnt everything I needed to on the basics of networking - the company also happened to be ripping out a load of old DEC Alpha / RS6000 boxes and an old co-ax network, upgrading to CAT5. I knew coax networking from "Computer Club" - predecessor of LAN Gaming parties, usually held in dodgy Working Mens Clubs etc... Stuck that out for a year, bought meself 2 old PCs from work, upgraded them, set up my own Lan at home... and then applied for (and got) a job at the Press Association as IT Support Technician.

...1997
I cocked that job up rapidly - twas high paid, and I was a teenager living alone in a big city, and discovering women who wanted me, and a social life. Suffice to say I ended up homeless, broke, and a bad reference from the Press Association.

...1998
Scraped life together, got a job on NMW at a dodgy highstreet independant computer shop. Got shafted by the ArthurDaley-esque management. Unemployed again.

...1999 > 2007
Got another job at another highstreet independant. In my phases of unemployed-dom, I'd been playing around with webdesign and getting into PCs more and more... with one of the guys at work, setup an online performance computer company (Over-Clock UK - still going without me)...set up the website meself, learned unix (freebsd) etc. Got into performance cooling & overclocking to the point I knew hardware inside and out. Got into phasechange cooling systems etc. Eventually spanned into designing and selfbuild of phasechange systems. Eventually I set to working on a set of high performance watercooling radiators (in conjunction with a thermodynamics engineer from Aus), all developed via forums and emails, for PCs (Thermochill Radiators - Home Page/Latest News), which we got into production, became the best performing worldwide (and to many still are). Got myself a mini-international reputation as the UK's watercooling & phasechange guru in performance computer circles. Sadly economics meant that profits in all this were low... wage wasn't brilliant. I now had a steady partner, child etc. Stuck that out, effectively doing my hobby for my job... got stuck in a rut. Relationship broke down, we separated.

October 2007...
New partner enthused me into change of direction, so I headed back down the "proper job" route, and applied for a job at Horbury School as an ICT Technician... got it based on experience only, no qualifications other than my GCSEs... been there ever since. Pay much better... job, whilst not as much fun, keeps me more occupied and certainly has more career prospects. Now not a complete pc-nuts geek, and have become a petrolhead instead with a passion for motorbikes and racing sidecars... and inline for a payrise as I introduced proper selfhosting of the website, and completely redesigned it and the intranet from the ground up... and also built them a recording studio, and became the schools multimedia tech, and numerous other roles that really aren't in my job description, but will be making an appearance soon alongside the aforementioned payrise.

[Graduate]

Well I guess your the lucky one. With no qualification and proper experience you have made it.

Well done mate.