What did you do after leaving Educational IT Support?

[flyinghaggis]

Given the current climate in education at the moment (and the increasing number of redundancy, outsourcing, restructuring, etc threads) I thought it would be helpful to have a thread with some feedback from Edugeekers who've left educational IT support and want to share their experiences of what they're doing now?

 

Is there life after leaving education...........?

Edited March 14, 2017 by flyinghaggis

[kwhitcomb]

After 9 Years as IT Application Manager in a PS to 12 Internationl School I am leaving, vowing to never work in education again. Although it has bee agreat learning experience,

the lack of structure, standardizaion, planning is simply too resource wasting intensive.

[RobD]

There's definitely life after Education and actually having a broad skill set put me in really good stead for jobs in the private sector.

 

I've worked in Education twice, once for a school near the beginning of my career and once as a contractor via a company who works closely with Schools and I find the tools you use in Schools is almost the same as large private companies just on a different scale. I currently work for a massive corporate which is a world away from a School, they invest heavily in IT, and I couldn't see myself going back to Education although I do miss the two course lunches.

[powdarrmonkey]

I design, build, monitor and maintain highly available, highly redundant, can-never-be-down Linux systems for clients in biomedical, engineering, research and other sectors. We've done e.g. geo-redundant SANs, parallel compute clusters, n-way routers - everything's bespoke.

[kwhitcomb]

Yes, I worked at Kimberly Clark for 10 years before coming here and they invested heavily in Professional Development and IT. Everything was standardized and Best Practices, I do miss that environment.

 

We are moving from Egypt to Bangadesh next year so I will see aboutgoin back to teCorporate if

[Fazza]

I've worked in both the public and private sectors and in my experience the experience you get working in Education is a hell of a lot wider than if you work for a company which in my experience tend to have a hierarchical structure where you are either 1st line support, 2nd line support or infrastructure support etc. whereas in Education you tend to be all 3 of those things as well as a hole other bunch of roles too!

 

If you're going from Education to working for a company then you'll have a wide set of skills that they can take advantage of. Depending on the School/College/University you work for, you may not be used to the expectations a company will have - for example if the print server stopped working at our place it's not exactly the end of the world (unless it's exam portfolio time that is) so we'd probably go home normal time and begin work again on it in the morning. For a company, time is money and if no one can print things out this could potentially cost the company money whilst they wait for you to fix it, so it would be kind of expected that you stay behind for a bit until you fix it thus saving the company from losing too much money.

[JoeBloggs]

I worked in a School for a year then moved to a Charity as IT Infrastructure & Support - very small team, similar to a School so broad knowledge was essential. I'm now an IT Manager in the private sector, again very small team so we all have to be able to do everything!

[claireadams]

I moved onto a housing organisation/charity (it's complicated, no one fully gets it). I would never go back to edu

[Cazale]

I setup a company. Errrrm... mainly providing IT support, mostly to education establishments.

 

plus ça change...

[Bedders]

I worked as an IT Technician in an 11-16 secondary school which became an academy during my time there. I got involved in all kinds of things such as anti-virus maintenance (server & clients, upgrades, compliance, installation etc.), the school website, desktop support ranging from switching a PC on to training staff how to use software, iPad purchasing and deployment, running CAT5e & CAT6 through the building, CCTV handling including data protection... The experiences I learned during 7 years in Education have stood me in fantastic stead.

 

I initially left to do data entry (it seemed like a good idea at the time - the job was offered to me on a plate, including a higher salary, closer to home etc) but I got bored so after 6 months moved to my current position providing IT Support to a small company (<100 employees). I currently work on versions of Windows Server 2003 through to 2012, have dived into SQL and VB.NET (my manager is an excellent developer and has written a large amount of our software) and work as part of a team of 2 (just myself and my manager. I provide the daily IT support and just ask him where there's things I don't understand).

 

The major shock I found when starting here was how out-of-date everything was compared to the school. All our hardware was second-hand from eBay - old Dell Optiplex 755's. All that we had done was put SSD's in them and they're good to go Our servers were second-hand Dell PowerEdge's. I believe our switches were new (HP and gigabit in case you were wondering), but only one is managed.

 

We are running old versions of Windows Server and have no plans to upgrade because they work fine.

 

We have two physical servers functioning as Hyper-V hosts, and a DPM server for backups. There's probably a couple of other old physical servers lying around too that are running some archaic service that we still use.

 

Servers are multi-roled and some have names unrelated to their functions.

 

We deploy operating systems manually using Macrium Reflect (capturing images manually every 6-months or so to make sure there's never too many updates to do). We have no plans to install WDS and certainly not SCCM as it costs way too much and we rarely image machines anyway. Even running the old desktops that we do, the failure rate is generally so low that it's not worth it.

 

It's been difficult for me too to adapt to a business environment. Here everything is based on 'will it bring value to the business', but this also includes 'if it costs £500 to buy software, and will take you 100 hours to develop, your wages in terms of time spent will cost more than the software so just buy it'. Back in education it didn't seem like our time had such a value placed on it.

 

Leaving education was a fantastic decision that has turned out very well for me. I still keep in touch with the Network Manager at the school (he even lurks on here occasionally - Hello if you're reading!) and would definitely go back to education in a few years - yes, the pay isn't great but the variety of work and the feeling of job satisfaction was unmatched.

 

 

EDIT: wow, long essay!

[Snoochieboochies]

The major shock I found when starting here was how out-of-date everything was compared to the school. All our hardware was second-hand from eBay - old Dell Optiplex 755's. All that we had done was put SSD's in them and they're good to go Our servers were second-hand Dell PowerEdge's. I believe our switches were new (HP and gigabit in case you were wondering), but only one is managed.

 

I always imagined that private industry would be more up to date with newer servers/infrastructure and that they just weren't shiny enough for schools to justify paying money for server upgrades.

 

Is this common, or dependant on the business?

[winng]

I've just been made redundant from my school after just ten months, lack of foresight some would say as budgets are getting beyond tight!

 

It's my third redundancy from a school in the past twelve years. I managed 7 years, just less than 2 years and less than 1 year on each occasion.

 

After 24 years in the corporate sector from leaving school, working in the public sector is a doddle (as someone else alludes to, i.e. there's minimal pressure to get it done right now, unless OFSTED are due in tomorrow). Plus the working hours are good and generally everyone mucks in to support the childrens' learning.

 

Will I stay in Education for my next job? Probably, it's where I can evidence my experience and achievements during recent years. Transferrable skills? Yes, lots from both corporate and education sector so I would be interested in doing something different. I just don't know what unless it jumps out on me!

[webman]

I worked in a medium secondary with @bossman for 8.5 years, and then moved to a small company doing web development.

 

Work ranges from small websites and bespoke web applications for charities/SMEs, up to software-as-a-service for NHS, local authorities and private health.

 

The team is still small, and there is some variation in the role, but it's not a multitude of responsibilities. A major difference is the lack of downtime that you find with the school holidays.

[ellsandell]

Currently the NHS - Network Engineer providing 3rd line support, and on call duties covering almost all IT OOH. (Barring some clinical apps)