respected qualification for I.T jobs- NOT UNI

My 2 cents is that a sales or pre sales job should be your aim eventually.

I have gone:

2nd line support
Professional services
PS/ Pre- Sales hybrid
Pre Sales

In terms of money, how you get treated, job satisfaction, etc, pre sales is by far the best of those roles, and for me was the biggest leap in salary by miles.
I don't think I would ever go back to PS unless it was as a contractor, and earning serious money.

I would say you need to embark on a similar journey if you want to end up in a pre- sales role, as understanding technology is imperative. If you are looking for a pure sales role, you probably need some technological understanding (not much), but a slab of understanding the space into which you want to sell, along with some kind of results- driven track record. My personal opinion is that you will have a hard time moving directly into IT sales, as you lack the history in selling into similar industries. (Confectionary to IT is quite a leap).
 
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I'd imagine (may be wrong) that most mainstream industries can accomodate good salesmen without a huge raft of experience in the sector. So you won't need 5 years experience of IT to break in to that, it is something that should be achievable within the same timeframe as it would take to study a qualification.

I do IT Presales (amongst other things...) and while I've met plenty of annoying sales people who don't understand / 'get' many things about IT, that doesn't mean to say that they need to have that depth of knowledge to do a good job. Sometimes 'oversimplifying' things is necessary to actually get deals signed and move things along, rather than the endless cycle of Q&A, "What if?..." that techies can throw about.

A good route might be IT Hardware sales maybe, or out of the box solutions. If you go down the route of software houses etc, you will find yourself very dependent on more technically minded people (presales consultants, whatever you want to call them) which can start to cause problems if you don't know the right questions to be asking, can't validate leads properly etc before bringing them into the fold.
 
Conanius said:
I'd strongly recommend an IT Service Desk as a great first IT job. You learn a lot about the good and bad support areas if you want to get technical, and if you are good at your job, some of these will let you have permissions to do their work for them if you prove yourself, further increasing your skills (maybe something basic like a file restore, but its a start). It's all about doing hard graft and getting opportunities.

So... if all that was TLDR, consider starting off on an IT Service Desk. Its a great way to know how a company works, and its a fantastic foot in the door. If I had my way EVERYONE who joined IT would have to do at least 1 month on their new companies IT Service Desk so they can get that overview of IT Health, Customer Demands and generally a good old look at what the IT world looks like.
Click to expand...

Sounds like sound advice, I'm in the same boat at the OP. Currently work for a massive insurance company, working Customer service role on the phones 100% of the time. Looking to do CCNA and M$ quailications on my own back, but I have a interivew for a Service desk job in the local NHS PCT in a few weeks, any tips at all? Any advice would be great, i have an ok knowledge of IT and networks and quiet a few years of customer service experience. (ideally in years to come looking to get into network admin/server management)
 
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The main problem in IT is that there are endless new editions of the software. I was a successful IT contractor under VB6 and then Microsoft introduced .net and all of a sudden all of the .net jobs required experience, which I did not have and could not get (due to lack of experience). Consequently my income fell markedly.
One thing that I thought of was to do the Microsoft exams in India.
http://www.koenig-solutions.com/
This company organises courses, which at the time cost about £2k, including accommodation. I was very tempted but I had been to Goa a couple of years previously and could not stand the heat. I think that you would have to do a lot of reading prior to taking the course and it is geared to passing the exam.
Even if you only passed 50% of the exams it would give you a leg up career-wise and the preparatory reading would give you a good idea if you were suited to your new career. Programming/Analysis requires a different type of thinking than normal and you may not be suited to it.
Good luck.
 
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