How did you get into IT?

[Protec]

Just wondering, how did you all get into becoming an IT technician?

 

Apprenticeships? College?

[DalekSec]

Apprenticeship, saw one being advertised in the log rag. Went for interview and got offered it on the spot!

[AJWhite1970]

Mid 1980's, training to be a forensic scientist, uni place at Strathclyde waiting, 6 months seriously ill with Glandular Fever just before course started, got into computers while ill, switched degree course to IT course locally, rest is history....

[FN-GM]

I left school at 16. I volunteered at a CLC (when they were a thing) to get experience. A few months later I applied for a technicians job in a school and got it.

[Mr.Ben]

Dropped out of a Computer Science Degree, because I didn't enjoy it, having already paid for 2nd year accomodation in Swansea.

 

Got to the last round of an apprentice job at Ernst & Young. Crashed my grandfather's car on the way to the interview, not seriously hurt but shaken and had a car crash interview.

 

Applied for an IT apprenticeship in Bristol, they accidentally forwarded my application to their Swansea base.

 

Got that job, and enjoyed being hands on, and I already had accomodation sorted!

[MatthewL]

Had no real interest for anything else other than computers when I was at school, managed to get on work experience with local authority at the time.

 

When I left school there was no IT apprenticeships going in the area so went on a business admin at a local haulage company, didn't get anything out of it so company employed me so spent 9 months between there and my local shop working. Managed to get an interview within a year of leaving school into IT in the NHS where I spent 8 years, left and worked for a private sector company doing IT support mainly in public sector for 7 years and next week I start back in the NHS.

 

Never once been to college, did a work based NVQ when I was in the NHS and a few small IT qualifications but nothing to shout about but have 15 years experience and been very active in public sector in my local area so have a fairly good reputation behind me. Tried many times to get into other public sector areas but never succeeded and out of the blue picked this new role up just before Christmas.

 

Never really know anything else, quite happy been a hands on dirty tech simple as.

[mavhc]

My Uncle was head teacher at a school, so got to use their school computer in the holidays, was the first person to use the computer at my primary school, got my own, learned to program, half ran the IT system at secondary school, got to use the 14.4k modem, wrote html, learned about the internet, went to university, used their unix computers all the time, learned about internet protocols, got a job programming, learned Windows, company disbanded, got a job in a school, learned AD, got jobs in other schools. Latest job I got by staying in the building when the old school closed and a new school moved in, same network, new users. Said I'd teach GCSE CS as they didn't have a teacher for it, teaching is easy, humans are easier to debug than Microsoft errors.

[3s-gtech]

Grew up with C64s. Writing stuff in BASIC while my friends had Mega Drives! Just had a Playstation like everyone else in my teens, then got a PC for uni and gradually got into mods and upgrades as we were all mad into Counter Strike. Found I had a talent for working with hardware.

 

No formal IT qualifications at all, but all of my basis for the job came from our group of friends in uni, bunny-hopping around dust2, and the interest in IT it spawned.

 

Not a bad thing to build a career on!

[elsiegee40]

No computers in my school until the Physics teacher proudly showed off the new BBC micro to my A Level set around Easter of my Upper Sixth (year 13) year. Dad brought a commodore pet home from work to use sometimes - no wonder he had back problems!

 

 

Did my degree in “Computer Studies” starting out with punch cards. Trained as a PL/1 DB2 and CICS programmer after graduation on IBM Mainframe. Moved to Technical Support on IBM Mainframe. Still mostly on mainframe when my kids were born in the mid 1990s. Made my fortune in the run up to the millennium making sure the bug wasn’t as issue.

 

Left when being a Mum with two children became difficult to juggle with nights, on call and weekends.

 

Started as a TA at the kids primary school and befriended their IT support person. A virus took out all the computers three days before Ofsted were due. The IT support person wasn’t due back in for another week. I admitted I knew what to do and the IT support person handed over the passwords... I resumed my career in IT but working at schools shortly afterwards.

[mrbios]

how did you all get into becoming an IT technician?

 

I applied for the job, got in that way.

 

I recommend it as a route in.

[SpuffMonkey]

Did a degree in Industrial Engineering, and graduated in 1981, just as all the heavy industry was closing

 

Went on the dole and tried hard to make it as a photographer, I used to run a Darkroom Technique Adult Ed course at a local community centre and (as I lived in really scuzzy dangerous bedsits) kept all my kit and photos locked up there - alas idiots broke in and set fire to the place and I lost nearly everything, apart from a few contact sheets and negs I had at home - it was a fab record of the steel works and other factories in Sheffield but after 4 years of abject poverty, when I went to the bank to try and borrow some money to replace my camera, they just laughed at me. I saw an ad in the local paper for a YOPS graduate retraining course in Hull, learning Unix - applied and was accepted - it was a HND compacted into 1 year - which was pretty intense from a standing start.

Started Jan 1985 and during the summer break, we all had to do an industrial placement - the place I was offered me a job at the end of the summer, so I just started work as a programmer writing systems for lawyers.

 

Went from programmer, senior programmer, product analyst, systems analyst, project manager, IT Manager in various firms, then was seriously ill for a year and couldn't get back in at the level I had been and had to start again in support and then school IT.

 

I thought I knew it all until I worked in a school! A year there should be compulsory for IT people!

[Mayki5]

I "had an interest in IT" for a few years, but really got started when the IT manager at a local primary took me on for a year as a volunteer and got hired on after that.

[sigma]

Graduate trainee programmer in 1980. Consultant Systems Engineer in the 1990s. Motherhood 1998. Accidental School IT technician from 2001.

[caffrey]

 

Downhill from there really

[Davit2005]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]56884[/ATTACH]

 

Downhill from there really

 

I had a Vic 20 at 12years of age for a B'day present. Remember playing text adventure games like Pirate Cove, lol.

Edited February 27, 2020 by Davit2005

[sigma]

[quote=elsiegee40;1827142

 

...starting out with punch cards. Trained as a PL/1 DB2 and CICS programmer after graduation on IBM Mainframe. Moved to Technical Support on IBM Mainframe. ...Made my fortune in the run up to the millennium making sure the bug wasn’t an issue...

 

Left when being a Mum

 

Me too.

[Davit2005]

I was a qualified Mechanical Engineer in 2000 who was asked to look at why the companies web space was been chewed up after they found out I'd done a few of my own websites. I managed to reduce the size of the site from 15MB down to a floppy disk as well as making some improvements i.e. animated gifs after the IT manager left.

 

I was asked to help out the guy who took over the IT manager tasks, we both managed busy production departments as our main role. The company had 3 sites connected via ISDN with a Citrix Winframe server in the head office where I was based so I got tasked with doing a lot of stuff on NT4.0, NT3.5 and Exchange 5.5 . Unfortunately the company went into liquidation soon after but the MD said to me "Why don't you get into IT" . I had no formal IT qualifications but in my next role as a lathe operator I took evening classes and passed a CCNA, from there I did home study and managed to get a MCP in Server 2003. Got a role as a junior field engineer doing real basic stuff in 2005. Spent the last 6 years holding senior tech roles in Schools, Colleges and Uni's.

 

So 18 years as a Mechanical Engineer and 15 years in IT Support in multiple roles.

Edited February 27, 2020 by Davit2005

[BKGarry]

So as a young pup I moved at 7 from a school with 1 BBC Basic that only year 6 had access to over to a different area of the town where the Infants school had 3 RM Nimbus machines in the classroom, and I had to learn from scratch, as I had no experience (couldn't even get my head around holding down shift and letter to get a capital, until someone showed me you had to hold it) went to the Juniors (they hadn't merged into a combined primary by that point) and they has 1 RM Nimbus and 1 BBC Basic per classroom, I was amazed with them, and by the end of Year 3 was quite taken away with them.

 

I then moved to secondary school, had a windows 3.11 RM network, windows was new and shiny and I may have been messing around with Access macros at that point to change the Program manager to the staff one and get to solitaire etc.

 

That secondary school got shut down and I moved to another one, that had various different OSs and networks, IT had one room of 3.11 machines and one of Nimbuses, DT had a different network, then so did humanities and English. By the time I got to year 10 they had combined everything to a RM network running windows 95 clients (even though 98 was out by then) and I got a hand me down IBM Aptiva running windows 95 at home from my uncle and auntie. I was amazed, tinkering, learning hardware changes etc. Then we got a serial v90 external modem and I was online and learning more.

 

by the end of Sixth form and a couple of exclusions for changing proxys settings, editing things etc (never learnt to keep my nose in) I took a shot and applied for a job as an IT Technician at the local Grammar School that had just got the Computing and Maths specialism and was the first time they were expanding to more than one technician and building ICT Suites and changing things as needed. I got to learn trial by fire with 2000 servers and a mix of 2000 and XP machines that crashed fully in 3 months and had to have a rebuild and learnt on the go.

Moved after 4 1/2 years to the school I am at now as an IT Technician, withing 9 months (when BSF TUPEs were happening) I was transferred to a new jobs as a SIMS and Timetable Manager but still have oversight of the ICT Contract of BSF and to deal with issues and push them for innovation (ha).

 

Couple of years later the LA Pulls the ICT Contract (and we lost a lot of money over that) and then we moved to having a contract direct with the MSP, was OK but we had to save even more money so all my SIMS and Timetable stuff got allocated back out to other staff and I went back into ICT directly and took control as Network Manager and have been pushing and changing things ever since. (Still wish I could format this domain and start again though)

[localzuk]

First contact with computers was when I was 3 or 4 IIRC, my dad brought a Acorn Archimedes home from school and we played Repton on it. When I was 6 or 7, my dad bought a Mac Color Classic, which we later paired with a 9600 baud modem ("no longer used" by his school), and got our first taste of the web. Later upgraded the modem to a 28.8kbps one. Eventually I got my first computer of my own, rather than the shared family one - a Mac LC III, which I mostly used to play Munchies. Eventually we moved, and the old Macs were replaced by a single family Mac Performa 5300, with a 56k modem, and its own TV card! Wrote a booklet on how to use all the different shortcuts on the Macs in my primary school and got it sent to the other schools.

 

So, that's where my interest in IT came from, actually getting in to IT as a career, I ended up developing a Windows network for my Dad's electronics department - Around 20 scavenged PCs, ranging from 486 to Pentium 1's, all connected via 10Base2 and a P2 machine as a server. Initially running Windows 95 on the clients, and a Linux distro on the server. Eventually upgraded it to Win NT4 on both client and server, with the server now 2 servers.

 

Went to uni to study CS, dabbled with their Unix servers, worked for the uni in their tech division doing virus removal on student PCs and topping up print budgets and doing basic help tasks, ran a web hosting business for a few years, then dropped out final year due to various issues in my life. Needed a job, so scatter-gunned job applications. Got a job offer in Minehead and well, that's it really!

[Danp]

By chance.

 

Always had an interest in computers, runs in the family, both my father and grandfather(!) worked with computers. When I was around 11 (1991/2) my father gave me a box of parts and said build this computer, took me a while to look up what and how to do it (no internet yet, the computer wasn't built!). Did an IT course at collage but I only wanted to work at that age, all my jobs after that involved me 'sorting the IT'. Was made redundant from one job in 2009 so I setup on my own doing computer repairs, training, websites etc, then after two years my current job was advertised so I went for it. My role has changed a bit, but I still get my hands dirty with machines which is my main passion.

[witch]

Trained to be a Radio Officer/Electronics Test Engineer - no jobs at sea on qualifying, so became a test engineer on flight simulators and then rangefinders. Went to the West Indies for a few months - on return went to a local recruitment consultancy and they offered me a job as a consultant in their new office in Milton Keynes. Loved it and worked my way up to manager. Then had a baby and mrwITch got a job on the South Coast so off we went.

Two more babies later - started to get into computing. mrwITch taught me a great deal and somehow I got a job as a tech in a local school. Trial by fire - didnt know what I was doing. that was 19 years ago...

[CHiLL]

I didn't want to get into IT originally. Sure, I enjoyed playing PC games and fiddling about with hardware - but it never entered my mind as a career. I wanted to do Media Studies at A-Level. I didn't do great in my GCSEs and just about managed to get into Sixth Form, where I dropped out within two months. By that time it was too late to a college course because they'd already covered too much.

 

I ended up at my local Connexions office where they were asking me about interests. They mentioned about an 18 month, NVQ Level II IT Practitioners apprenticeship, which paid £50p/w in a local high school. I decided to go for that and joined a team of 1x network manager, 1x senior technician and 4x apprentice technicians. It was great. I learnt so much and had such an amazing time. (I cannot recommend apprenticeships enough due to how much you learn and experience you gain...which is critical for this industry)

 

The apprenticeship ended and I moved to an 18 month BTEC System Practitioners course at my local college, which was all academic and then to a 2 year Foundation Degree in Computer Science (Business and Internet Technologies). The FdSc degree wasn't great for me, it covered a lot of subjects, like databases, that I am not very good at and I found them difficult and not enjoyable.

 

After that I landed my first job as a ICT Technician in a secondary school. This was great - a great team and a great time. Since then I've worked in a handful of schools in this line of work.

[LeMarchand]

Used savings from a building site job to buy a ZX Spectrum and after a couple of jobs drifted into retail. Got my first "real" computer from Escom, who were in the unit opposite ours, and was always the "computer guy" wherever I worked. After being pushed out of my post, a friend had told her head that I was "good with computers" and I went for an interview. Started the next day and it was a brown trouser moment when my first job was to change the backup tape (computers with tapes?!) but have been fairly successfully blagging it since.

[hardtailstar]

I have no idea how I got into computers. I was always the one fixing anything at home and I just remember picking IT over something else at GCSE and it went from there.

 

Originally wanted to be in the Army or Police. Probably should of gone that way as I might be in a better position in IT rather than in a school!

[the_quick]

Early start at 12 with ZX Spectrum, parents sign me up for Logo programing in a local youth centre. Got the bug, few years later got my own PC and started helping others to fix theirs. Did a degree at the local university, a year in a computer shop as a techie helping customers. Became technician in a school, than promoted to a Network Manager. Simply really, computers were always part of my life