A Career in IT - which direction should we be training in?

In my first role out of uni I spent a lot of time in Germany developing and training in BPM for one of the big vendors, I had a great time with trips down the alps on rafts and all kinds. I stayed with the company a year and then moved on to a smaller company who put me through MS exams etc.

I would say that as a first job you should try your hand at pretty much anything, as you progress you will find out what you like and more importantly what you dont. When your set, work out what you want to specialise in and head down that track.
 
When I finished Uni I've been working as a phone monkey. Been learning and creating web sites on the side but no one will touch me as I don't have "web design/development experience".... even though I can create one from scratch and manage it. Hate living in the North West, that;s where all the sh1tty IT jobs are :(
 
elrasho said:
When I finished Uni I've been working as a phone monkey. Been learning and creating web sites on the side but no one will touch me as I don't have "web design/development experience".... even though I can create one from scratch and manage it. Hate living in the North West, that;s where all the sh1tty IT jobs are :(
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Move then? Sometimes you need to take a few gambles in life, you've analysed what you think it is thats holding you back but your not prepared to do anything about it!
 
JBod said:
And a beard!
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At our place the only people in Unix with beards are the management ...

To the OP, it really does depend on what area you want to go into. MCSE, or equivalent, wouldn't be of any use to me.

RHCE
VCP

Knowledge of ITIL, Prince and cloud related things are useful. Knowledge of security related topics, like those required to meet PCI-DSS would be good as well. Knowledge of SQL can be useful too.

Personally, I need to do my RHCE next year, (by which time RHEL6 will be out), as my LPIC level 1 certification expires at the end of 2011. I'll also be sitting the HPUX v3 CSA exam before the end of this year (although my v1 exam doesn't appear to expire it's a bit old now). I'll probably look at getting an AIX certification too and I need to do my VCP exam (I've done the course but am getting a bit more hands on first).
 
VMware is where its at.

We've just about moved all of the contents of our data centre over to Virtual machines.

We've got a handfull of customers on our older physical servers, but we've got migrations right the way through to the middle of next year all planned out that will take us to a 100 % virtual server hosting.

As quad core and 6 core processors become cheaper and more common, VM is going to become increasingly more important to take advantage of the benefits multiple core servers can offer.

Unix / Windows / Mac just depends on who your employer is. My current employer has a strict windows only policy, so not a bit of linux / unix to be found anywhere. No trace of macs either.

But every employer is different.
 
ringo747 said:
SharePoint, VMWare and anything to do with the cloud based side of things really. SharePoint in particular has a massive future IMHO.
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I have to agree, with SharePoint I have been involved in WSS2, WSS3 and now WSS4 implementations and its evolving and improving with each release. It’s become an extremely valuable tool for us and as time has progressed we have introduced some really handy workflows and custom code to improve our internal processes.

Initially this was as a cloud service which was provided by a company that has a few employees that are members on here. As our customisations became more than their cloud implementation could cater for we moved it out to a data centre. Anyway I digress but I have to agree that I have seen a good uptake among our clients.

Beware though as although it is powerful it can be an absolute nightmare to customise beyond the standard settings, specifically when trying to skin it or navigate the object model for the more complex customisations.
 
Anything VMware. Open source OS/Apps as i think we'll see a big shift in the public sector away from MS when the current licensing agreements are all sorted and the public sector have to start paying (properly like the private sector does) for Win7/Office/Server etc (you could also lump novell in there too, as i think Novell will take a loss leader on their products to displace MS in the public sector environment as it's a big market). Virtual desktop environments are also just on the horizon too, so knowledge/certs in that will get you in the door too!
 
I'd agree with the masses that VMWare & Sharepoint are the way to go.
Although there's no qualifications for it, familiarity with MS CRM would be a good idea too imo.
 
hm

Interesting that SharePoint has come up - I am traditionally anti-microsoft but I am not as choosey professionally (as I like to get paid, so if I can get better paid by picking up something MS'ey ill do it :-P ).

Thanks all ill take a peek at learning SharePoint & taking VCP Certs.
 
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