Posted: 6/3/2012 8:34:58 AM EDT
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So far in my quest since January for a job I have had exactly ONE interview for a short term contact that I didn't get (went with someone with higher education than me). While my resume could certainly suck, my not having a degree, in this economy and job market, does not help me stand out from others even with my 14+years of experience at my last company (20+ overall). I am also considering paying to have my resume professionally done, but honestly, I don't know if the money would just be better spent on school. If anyone wants to read it and critique it, I'll IM the link.
So I need to consider what can I do to build a better me. I am still in school for an Associates in Computer Science but I will not be graduating until 2014 at the earliest. I will try to go to school full time and clep out of what ever I can, but having a degree "tomorrow" isn't going to help me and my family "today". My plan was to get the AS compsci from my local community college, transfer to GATECH for the BS compsci, and then see about a MBA afterwards.... Anyway back to "today" and my summer schedule. I am taking two java courses. Maybe that can be worked into an entry level java SE role. I am taking a PMP cert prep course. I don't have the 7500 project hours for a PMP but I could take the CAPM and get that. Maybe another entry level role? I am learning Python/Ruby from "Learn ____ the hardway" tutorials. I have some SQL knowledge from a long time ago but I could brush back up. I enjoy writing but I don't have any real experience in technical writing other than writing out instructions for users or other functional groups to follow. I have built out some webpages but I would need to brush up on CSS and some of the other technologies. The last time I brought up certs, many suggested I look at networking or security. One guy in the infosec field I spoke with says that he does a mixture of systems IT work with a security viewpoint. I already have some of the background for the systems IT stuff so learning the infosec could work out. I don't have much experience with networking other than running or building cables and some light server/desktop/laptop configs. My "best" work is finding out of the box solutions for IT problems, piecing together apps with glue code, evaluating software/hardware, and automating windows server/desktop/laptop processes or tasks. Working with clients, figuring out what they really need done, and giving them a few views and ideas on how to approach or solve their needs. I can't join the .mil as I'm too old. If I have to travel a lot, I'll do it. If I have to live remotely and come home once or twice a month, I'll do it as long as it works financially. I live in NE Atlanta and I'm hitting every job board I can find. I cannot move the family as my wife has a divorce decree not to leave the state with the kids. I just need a good direction to launch toward, that I can use some of my experience to bolster myself. I'm a quick learner and a hard worker. At this point I know many say to do what you love, but I have to feed the kids, so I'll do it even if I hate it (but I'm really horrible at sales so let's not go there). I would like to stay in IT to some degree as I've spent some much time in it, rather than starting completely over in say construction or plumbing. So, if you take someone with 20+ years in multiple IT disciplines (development, operations, systems IT, QA, virtualization, and professional services) and I need to make myself over, what do you do? I don't ever see software, networking, databases, or security going away. But I do see a lot of it being evolving with new languages, vendor models, or off/nearshoring. Sorry for the rant. It gets tiring being beaten down. |
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Honestly? You may need to do what I did. Move to a more lucrative market. There are PLENTY of good IT jobs in Southern California to be had. Not trying to be negative but I would have to separate from the wife then. Her divorce states the kids canot go out of state and he ex will fight it to keep them from moving. So it would have to pay enough for me to get some kind of apt in cali and to travel back home for a weekend/vacation once every mth or so. Are there going to be jobs like that? For someone with no degree with lots of IT related experience? |
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I have no degree and lots of varied IT experience.
I resigned Friday May 26th and I just accepted a job offer Friday June 1st and start tomorrow 
I say that to say this, IT is looking the best it has in years right now, and if you look in the right markets, there are plenty of jobs to be had. Atlanta area appears to be fairly strong, I am getting lots of activity from Dice and Monster for ATL, that would be in state for you. PM me your email and I will shoot you my resume, I had it gone over by a professional resume writer, it may help you gather your thoughts together. |
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It's gotta be some combination of I don't meet the reqs of the jobs, there's a ton of competition, or the companies aren't really hiring (that doesn't really make sense but who knows) here in town.
I agree that Atlanta is home to so many companies that, somewhere, there's got to be somebody that is interested. I have been leaning on all my social contacts to see if they know of anyone hiring without much success. Tried also at my school for anything open (not hiring for my skills). From a certification standpoint, what's going to get me the most immediate bang for the buck that doesn't have crazy pre-reqs (like PMP's 7500 hour reqs, or 5 years for CISSP)? I am already working towards the CAPM since I don't have the hours for the PMP that I can document. Side note if you were to build the "AlphaGeek", what combination would you do? CCNP, CISSP, PMP, Oracle DBA? Everything? |
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Over the past decades of IT work, I've come to realize something... Personal and Interpersonal skills can be the difference between a fair job and a great one. There are a lot more techs held back by interpersonal skills than by technical skills, IMHO. I agree. I came up through the Help Desk so I know about service and about dealing with folks over the phone and helping them. Not a script reader. I helped everyone I worked with up through D and C levels. How do I show that on a resume though? They won't get that unless they talk to me. I am a "outside the box" thinker. One director once called me a wrecking ball because I refused to accept a situation the client was in and smashed every traditional approach in the way to fix it. |
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Honestly? You may need to do what I did. Move to a more lucrative market. There are PLENTY of good IT jobs in Southern California to be had. I just noticed you are not in NV any more..... Nope. Family and much better career opportunities called. Reno is dead as dead for IT. The economy is running on air right now. At least here there is a moving private sector. Gov is broke, but they all are. I miss some things in NV, but not the economy or the meth heads. Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile |
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When you say you've got a lot of IT experience, what do you mean? Systems administration? Programming? Sample of a resume? Do you have any certs at all? I really need more info I think to give any advice.
Sending a PM as well. ETA: I read through all of that and still don't really know what you do. Maybe I'm not the only one having that problem. Do you use a generic resume or do you target it for each job you apply for? |
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When you say you've got a lot of IT experience, what do you mean? Systems administration? Programming? Sample of a resume? Do you have any certs at all? I really need more info I think to give any advice. Sending a PM as well. Ok I'll try to not ramble here.... First "job" was a summer job for the DoD in Germany for an onbase (Heidelberg) IT group doing systems admin work while I was in high school. Cabling, user support, racking/unracking equipment, small server updates, and even printer repair. Worked there for about a year and a half before moving back to the states. This was back in co-ax cabling days. After graduating I kicked around for a few years with cummy jobs (dishwasher etc), then moved to Atlanta and went to work for a mom/pop shop making sure their network, database server, and all desktop clients were patched, working, repaired as needed. 2-3 years later I went to work on a pharma support Help Desk (getting foot in door). And shortly after I went into the hardware/software configuration/image management for automating windows platform imagin/configuring, rebuilding, data migration, and qa. I programmed in Windows Interface Language (WinBatch http://winbatch.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinBatch) daily for 8+ years in that role. Then got promoted into account management/professionial services taking care of the clients application support issues (coordinating between dba, hd, hardware, and other players) while also still managing their field salesforce of 10k reps. I did that for 2 years and got another promotion, with the same client, just more project management stuff in addition to my other responsibilities and still programming projects here and there for the client. I've specced out and built servers in the datacenter. I monitored them beter than the IT group and I was the primary point of contact for anything to do with my client's equipment (os patches, application, etc). Added in new arrays and tape backup drives. I've made sure that machines were patched, software was updated/installed/configured. I've run down user issues within AD/LDAP (people in wrong OU's or the GPO got bent on login etc). I've run down issues with DNS/DHCP and a few small networking problems with my servers. I've run many QA projects and coded a bunch of automated qa test scripts. I programmed a bunch of one off apps to cover failed SCCM installs for reps in the field or to give them new functionality for the laptop to save calls to the HD. I built up self service support kiosks for use on site at client training/deployments with cutsom code using HTML interfaces. Hell I've run onsite deployment support desks as well. I built virtual training machins with VMWare & deployed those out to the entire field of 10k users. I also got them on the cloud with S3 via a framework I built to handle database transactions. Basically I had no time or money to go to school after high school as I was on my own before I graduated. Life catches up, kids com along, etc, and I finally set aside some funds for school & POW get laid off. All the "training" I took in the company's education center did not count toward any certification programs or college credits. They would not reimburse me for school either. |
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I sent you my resume and a short critique of yours.
I won't get into it here, but you seem to have good skills, just need to have some help to put it down on paper. Remember, your resume is not your life story, it just is a teaser of the highlights to get enough interest generated for them to call you in. Don't lie, don't exagerate, but find a way to paint your experience in the best light and use keywords that the recruiters look for when they scan the boards looking for candidates. I was hired, because the HR dept found my resume on Dice and liked it enough to call me in, they were in a hurry to fill the position, but waited an extra week for me to get back in town, and a lot of help from above 
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It looks like a lot of sys admin type stuff with some programming and scripting thrown in. It's not bad, and the problem might be in how you present it.
If you are going for a Sys Admin role, target the resume specifically for that plus the project management stuff. The scripting exp should help. I see Powershell and Perl listed a lot in job descriptions. you might spend some time trying to pick one of those up. The experience looks pretty good so I'm not sure why you aren't getting more hits. If you want to work on a cert the CCNA would be a good place to start and with any type of networking experience shouldn't take too long to complete. In my opinion you need to target a particular type of role and design the resume around that, and be sure to have keywords listed in it that recruiters will do searches for. |
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When you say you've got a lot of IT experience, what do you mean? Systems administration? Programming? Sample of a resume? Do you have any certs at all? I really need more info I think to give any advice. Sending a PM as well. ETA: I read through all of that and still don't really know what you do. Maybe I'm not the only one having that problem. Do you use a generic resume or do you target it for each job you apply for? See that's a big problem for me. I'm not sure what to say I AM. I can certainly say what I've done and why I've done things. I've been using a generic resume with a targeted cover letter for each opening. |
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It looks like a lot of sys admin type stuff with some programming and scripting thrown in. It's not bad, and the problem might be in how you present it. If you are going for a Sys Admin role, target the resume specifically for that plus the project management stuff. The scripting exp should help. I see Powershell and Perl listed a lot in job descriptions. you might spend some time trying to pick one of those up. The experience looks pretty good so I'm not sure why you aren't getting more hits. If you want to work on a cert the CCNA would be a good place to start and with any type of networking experience shouldn't take too long to complete. In my opinion you need to target a particular type of role and design the resume around that, and be sure to have keywords listed in it that recruiters will do searches for. My current resume was built by the outplacement service my old company hired for everyone they laid off. Out of the group here in town that got laid off, no one had gotten a new role yet. I think that to build me up for a wider audience, getting more training in networking would be a good thing, just as getting more experience in Linux. I think getting a security cert wouldn't be bad either. If I could say that I can program/script in a few languages, plus have a networking cert, security cert, a project management cert, and all the experience I have, it should open some doors. I do think the resume has a lot of room for improvement. |
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If all you are interested in is getting a job, I would suggest targeting a resume to a few jobs and see if you get any hits. Most sys admin roles aren't going to care if you do programming. Obviously that isn't always the case, but I've never been asked to program anything. A little scripting sure, but that's it.
Do you have any management experience? If so, design another resume to target management roles and apply for those as well. Most people will say not to specialize in any one thing because that will limit you down the road, and I agree to an extent. Focus on one area of IT, whether that is systems, programming, networking, web design etc.. Which ever you enjoy and think you would excel at. All of them will overlap some but unless you are an expert in all area's it just seems a bit disjointed. When I read through that list of stuff it seemed like I was looking at someone that didn't know what they wanted to do. Now maybe that's just me, or how it was written but it seems like you've jumped around in different areas and in my opinion that doesn't look good to a prospective employer. If they did that shitty of a job writing resumes, you might pay someone to redo it, but I'm always hesitant to pay someone for something I can do myself. |
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you are going to have to re-write your resume based on the field you are trying to get into.
it isn't just the skills you have, but how they help you in that field you need to put down on paper, and in a fashion someone in the field you are targeting can understand. having all that stuff just jumbled in, makes it hard to see what you want to do. it makes it shot gunning for a job and managers get paranoid about those people. Jack of all trades is great for a small company, if you have a focus. If you have done it all but didn't stay, then it looks like you aren't any good at any one of them and are trying to find something to do. OR YOU haven't decided what you want to do, and you are just dabbling. another thing for a right now fix, look at craigslist for computer jobs. not the computer job area, but the one off stuff at the bottom. people need one off things fixed, their techs cannot handle at the moment, or they don't have one yet. don't do the at home guy that needs to figure out how to load windows. look for the business person that needs to setup a server or whatever. That guy might need someone more permenent in the near future. if the old companies you worked for are still in business, be sure to email old bosses that loved you and ask if they have any openings, or know of anyone that has any openings. pretty much all of my last few jobs were found that way. was laid off for 6 months last time. took a job as apple iphone tech support paying like 12 bucks an hour to feed the family and get insurance again. fortunatly my networking paid off while I was in training for the job, so I got back into my regular line of work. don't forget QA automation is pretty high in demand. but most want you to have qtp. if you have that, you pretty much can write your own ticket into a few places. |
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the lack of degree will hurt you for big companies.
I found that out myself. you are working towards that, so don't sweat it right now. What I found was that getting through the hr department was the hardest part. once I got the interview it usually meant I got the job. in most cases, it was lost due to the actual fit, not if I was qualified. One job was lost because I didn't have a high enough degree. I stopped at AA, for the same reasons you have stated. life happens. they required to have the managers have a BA or higher. Getting through HR requires you have all the key words and tricky phrases listed in your resume some where. Most HR people, even recruiters have little to no technical background. they through your resume out if you don't match up all the key words that were in the ad. Since you can explain something multiple way's, and some things are called multiple things, I found I got more responses if I listed stuff like that in my resume. for instance, at the top I listed skills. like defect tracking. in the body of each job, I listed the actuall application used like clear quest or bugzilla. That way if they were looking for someone that used it before, I have it listed, but I don't have it listed redundantly. gives me the oportunity to tweak it without having to re-write the whole thing. I saved every email I sent out and every reply. I put out nearly 800 resume's in that 6 month period. I got like 10 interviews. most not really in my field. they interviewed me because I spun my experience to show how it would work for that field. now, I didn't do that well in a lot of them, because I had never done that kind of work before. I stood out, but in the end, I think most passed knowing I could make more once my field opened up again, and I would be leaving. so you have to be careful there jumping around too. |
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Thanks all for some good information here. I think I may just need to pony up for a resume writer if I still fail after I give this another rewrite.
The thing I keep coming back to is what do I want to do. I know I want to be able to work for anyone, anywhere and 50% traveling isn't a big deal breaker as long as I can get some hometime. I first thought about going into Industrial Engineering in order to look at problems and figure out beter ways to deal with them. While that is ok, I think the CompSci degree is a more general degree that I can work into more fields than the IE. I could see my systems admin leading into networking then into security. I see my programming staying programming (for the most part) or with more project experience becoming a software program manager. The thing I keep thinking about is that programming is always going to change languages, networking and security will always be upgrading and improving as well. Then again I can certainly see more offshoring of low level programming with on/nearshore managers as well as I can see some of the networking being shuffled off site into other datacenters to save money, or have remote techs setup and configure the equipment. Other thank programming, most of the other IT roles are a business overhead cost, that some folks are always going to want to cut somehow. Long story short, if you were going to branch out and focus on a career track, what would you do and why? |
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I just took a job with a SaaS provider because there won't be any shortage of SaaS, Iaas, PaaS and those type of companies for the foreseeable future. The "cloud" is going to be one of the big things for the next 5-10 years in my opinion, and either way, supporting an environment of 4000+ servers won't look bad on a resume and will still allow me to work with a variety of technologies.
If I could do strictly networking, that's another area I wouldn't mind specializing in. I have some experience in but not enough to do it full time. The only other thing I might pursue later would be a network or systems team manager. I don't see a problem finding a job in any of these areas in the coming future as long as you have the skills for it. I can't comment on the programming area too much since I don't have much experience in it. However, if it's something you are good at, I don't think you'd have a problem finding a job even if more stuff is outsourced. All the areas will require continued learning as things change over time. All of IT will be like that. |
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BTW I've been reading this today:
http://www.techexams.net/forums/general-certification/69594-certifications-have-brought-you-most-success.html Looks like CCNA is king so far to those folks. |
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Sent PM. Thank you! I'm really trying to look at this as a layered, growth career path. I'm thinking that I should stay in IT as I've done it forever and it's something i'm pretty good at when dealing with explaining tech to d/c leve l folks. I'm just not sure what the title for that crazy mishmash of experience I have is. So one thing I could to is to focus on networking then throw on security, add on project management, have the experience with programming and things should be very well rounded, yes? |
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Sent PM. Thank you! I'm really trying to look at this as a layered, growth career path. I'm thinking that I should stay in IT as I've done it forever and it's something i'm pretty good at when dealing with explaining tech to d/c leve l folks. I'm just not sure what the title for that crazy mishmash of experience I have is. So one thing I could to is to focus on networking then throw on security, add on project management, have the experience with programming and things should be very well rounded, yes? yeah, I would think so. I've gotten two emails about a 6 month contract job in SC for a network admin. The work is out there, just have to have the right skills and find the right job for you. |