Dropping down a ladder. Or at least attempting to.

We met up with a friend the other day, currently in a job in retail that they’re struggling with. And they asked what they could do to break into the tech industry.

I want to stress this - we have never worked retail. At this point in our lives, I don’t think we could work retail, beyond possibly checkouts - and then only in outlets that let you sit down. And so if you can do that, congratulations, you’ve got something over us already.

transparency

While keeping things vague, we work in the Operations team of a managed service provider, working our way up from Help Desk level 1 and level 2 in the same company over the past 5 years. Our current salary is somewhere between £30K and £40K, pre-tax, pre-overtime. ¹

We could likely earn more elsewhere, but beyond a particularly aggravating return to the office stint that has now ended, we don’t have any reason to leave unless pushed.

Our monthly required expenses are minimal; we do not drive, never went to university, and the house we live in is fully paid off. We pay all household bills (council tax, energy, water, TV license, etc.), our share of the groceries, and that’s basically it. As such, we have Enough.

preface

As with all articles here, this is simply about what worked for us.

The UK job market now is a lot different than when we entered it, and we have not looked at the general market in quite some time.

We also have the benefit that we lucked into an apprenticeship, something which would not be available to us now if we were trying to switch careers.

Most of this is ideas for a CV (that’s Curriculum Vitae, not the other one) - we don’t have experience with US resumes beyond knowing that they’re generally meant to be shorter.

certifications

Our general level of education is A-Level, and our A-Levels weren’t particularly great. ²

Our current list of certifications is as follows. Most of them have expired.

• European Computer Driving License - we volunteered at a local drop-in computer centre for a bit while reporting into the JobCentre, and needed this to be able to invigilate the exam for people who needed to prove basic computing literacy.
• CompTIA A+ - part of apprenticeship
• CompTIA Network+ - part of apprenticeship
• Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate in Windows 7 (70-680, 70-685) - part of apprenticeship
• Microsoft Certified Professional in Windows Server 2012 R2 (70-410) - also part of apprenticeship, but handled by the employer rather than the company providing training
• ITIL Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management - current company, at a time there was a big push for getting everyone of a certain level qualified in ITIL.
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) - a requirement for previous role in current company.

Given some of the choices in operating systems, you can probably tell approximately when some of these were.

Of these, if I were a hiring manager, the A+ is a very good way to demonstrate fundamentals, even if it was somewhat out of date when we took it. (I do not think there is ever going to be a practical situation where we need to know the number of pins on a floppy disk drive connector and cannot search for this information).

However, the A+ also costs money to take; we just got lucky in having it be paid for. So my actual advice if starting out now is to seek out resources such as Microsoft Learn, with free courses that will give you a digital badge for completing. It’s not much, but when starting out it can show some technical aptitude.

specialization

Some companies will talk about wanting what they call “the t-shaped professional”, knowledge of a broad range of topics with a deep focus in certain areas.

If you’re neurodiverse, this might be sounding familiar - and yeah, if you happen to have a marketable hyperfixation, this may help a lot.

Our CV (which needs updating) lists a wide range of technologies, but I make sure to focus on my love of automation.

As far back as I can remember I was writing batch scripts for just silly things that needed doing. Once I started working, I learned a lot of PowerShell - I still wish we’d had the opportunity to learn Python in school ³, but particularly with it going cross platform, PowerShell still makes a great glue language.

But that’s us - still, if you’re enthusiastic about some area of technology already, it can be a big help.

transferrable skills

If you do already work in something else and are looking to get into tech, remember that a lot of the soft skills will transfer. If you’re going down the helpdesk route, a lot of the job is dealing with customers, but usually at least with the luxury of a phone between you and them.

And don’t forget that a lot of home technical experiments can be enough to get a hiring manager’s interest. Read through some job descriptions, and then see if you can find some low-cost ways to explore them - e.g. if a job mentions being heavy on virtualization, see if you can find a machine that a business has chucked out and install Proxmox or an evaluation copy of Windows Server with Hyper-V.

MS will give so much in Azure credits for signing up for a trial with a new email (just make sure to switch things off after you’re done with them). An Office 365 mailbox costs about £4 per month, which isn’t nothing but it can give experience of what it’s like using the Office 365 administration consoles, which are increasingly more relevant for first line positions.

If you have personal projects that require a level of technical aptitude, those can all count - whether it’s setting up a Pi-hole on something cheap to protect the privacy of everyone in your household, or at the more extreme end, setting up your own TV station including making channel idents, networking and the like.

At this stage, you’re just trying to demonstrate technical aptitude and hopefully something interesting that signals a hiring manager that they might want to talk to you.

interviewing

OK, the rest of this might be vague but this is going to be more so - our last formal interviews were 5+ years ago, and we’ve mostly blocked them out. Interviews are stressful at the best of times, so some general tips:

• Bring a plain physical notebook and pen. There’s a lot of information that might need to be written down quickly - but also, try to avoid looking at it directly too often; practice writing off-axis.
• Bring a copy of your CV. There’s been at least one interview we’ve been at where the person interviewing didn’t have one - and it also helps for last minute double checking some details.
• I forget where we picked this one up from (possibly Tumblr?), but if you struggle with eye contact, the bridge of the nose is often close enough.

further resources

Soatok has an excellent set of articles with tons and tons of advice, far more expansive than this article could ever be, but with the focus ending more on the development side of things.

With that said, version control in particular is becoming more vital at all levels - your entire team may now be run out of Github ⁴. Ours is increasingly more reliant on it.

footnotes