 I started my career, and I say career because it was a hobby before, career first job in IT back in 1995. So I've been doing this for a little while. Which brings people to a lot of questions. They asked me of how do I get started in IT or what certification should I get or should I go to college. And I want to qualify those statements right up front with this is a story of how I got to where I'm at. And I didn't maybe choose the same path as someone else but that doesn't make it right or wrong. The other problem is there's not a way to do A-B testing. I can't roll back in a time machine to my high school days which I graduated in 1994 and say what if I would have went to college instead of jumping right into IT or following an opportunity I have. Because there's not a way to replay those two scenarios for me to give you a strong opinion on it. I'm going to give you the opinion of my path but I don't automatically and I don't understand some people who do. They found success without going to college and they go well this college is stupid you shouldn't go it's a waste of your time and money blah blah blah. I don't poo poo on that idea of going to college or getting certified even though I both lack certifications or a college education in a formal sense. And I say formal sense because I've done a ton of training and reading because one common denominator that I will absolutely agree with is whatever your path to get educated is you need to get educated on this. You need to be very in-depth with IT. It's a very complicated field. You need to stay current with it. You need to keep trying new technologies. You don't want to be one of those people stuck going but I still love that old version of Windows and I still love that old version of the software and I don't like using new ones because we run into a lot of IT guys like that. IT guys girls IT people who are just stuck in the old ages. They only like the old days when they had this thing. So to be good at it you do need constant forward education. That doesn't necessarily mean but it could mean certifications. It doesn't have to mean college. It could mean college. So my path started as a child. I was hugely into electronics. Anything I could get my hands on. That meant a lot of times literally garbage picking for old electronics equipment. I was probably nine or ten years old when I started doing this. I garbage picked some of the old computers that I had. That was in the 80s when I was a kid that just was an absolute fascination to me. I did not have a family that had a lot of money that could afford to buy fancy things like Commodore 64 which would went fancy back then. So it wasn't easily affordable for my family just to give me technology but I was driven and passionate and garbage day was exciting to me. I won't lie if I could find someone who threw out some piece of electronics so I could build something out of it. So my trips were not to Toys R Us. I was much more of a Radio Shack kid. I spent a lot of time here getting electronics. So I've always been into this. So a career in IT and some of the electronics repair background that I have was kind of easy for me. It was what I've always had a passion to do. A lot of people say well I don't know where to get started and I'm not sure what I'm passionate about. That becomes a bigger existential question. I don't know why someone becomes so driven towards it and other people are not. I don't know where you should start in IT. Some people should I be networking. Should I be computers? I kind of suggest trying it if you don't know. I've always been passionate about all of it and just kind of jumped around through paths. So my first job was in 1995. That job was because I went around and just asked places are you hiring? Are you hiring? Just knocking on doors. That was what you did back then. There was no Google back in 1995. I was online with a mostly using a BBS and I use Gateway Online so I communicate with a lot of people online. Things like that have always been involved in the tech communities as well. We'll see online back in the dial-up days and then we had all the different search engines but that wasn't really how you found jobs. It was more of a physical thing and I went to places. Now there's a lot of people that's interning is not a bad thing at all. I offered myself less as an intern more as I worked for really cheap because I didn't have experience but I wanted to do it and I ended up working at a couple different places. They didn't all work out and part of it was I didn't care for the management there and things like that but then I finally did land at a small mom and pop shop. Now it was great working for some of the other places because one of them set me in the back room with very little to do because they opened a new store. The owner had money but had no idea how computers worked and I sat in red books. That was actually what I got paid to do which is pretty awesome. It was a minimum wage at the time job. I was a sales guy but they opened up in an area where there wasn't anybody coming in in a kind of a rural area. So I spent all day nine hours a day at a store reading books all the time. So I didn't get a ton of hands-on experience. We'd only get maybe one customer a day. Granted this is a 1995. So it was kind of like I spent just poured through books and I've always been a bookworm that back in my electronics back even in high school I used to skip classes just to read more engineering books electronics books programming books any books I could get my hands on. That was just an absolute you know huge part of my career and this comes back to the education I mentioned. You have to get educated on this whatever your passion is my passion was as much as I could possibly absorb. Like I said always been kind of a bookworm and not I don't mind dedicating 12 hours of my time to reading a technical manual you know subscribing to things like even the 2600 magazine that's a collection of all those I was into kind of the hacking want to know how everything worked in depth not just the you know surface area but I want to know the real technical details of how things functioned how they worked. Now I still have that today I'm now 45 44 and I still have that same drive passion to constantly know what you know what how everything works in depth and take it apart. It led me a lot to the open source and things like that. So when it comes to certifications they weren't really that many available. I mean if I would have gotten certified back in the 90s when I started getting into tech you would have seen I think it was net not net where it was not where novel not where. So you have everyone had their novel certifications back then then it became the Cisco certifications and things like that. So certifications when you're running a business much less important matter of fact I have not been asked but maybe twice in my 15 years of owning this company since 2003 about certifications. I don't I remember someone asking and I just said no and they didn't they kind of glazed over it they don't really care. The one client that cared was actually very amusing. We met with them and it was kind of an awkward meeting because we were taking over from a complete disaster where they had lost data. They had lost the company been down for seven days due to failures from the other IT company and it was a calamity of errors with them and I mean I don't I don't necessarily like to dog on the other IT company but the rack mount that's on the wall where the you know MDF you may call it where all the racks and switches are fell off the wall landed on a server and they didn't have backups of the server that it crashed onto. So that's couldn't be described more as the IT guys fault. That's not like maybe the client didn't spend the money right or something like that. No they the thing fell off the wall and crashed into the server the most physical literal way you can crash into the server. So which then they found out the backups weren't right. So then they went through data recovery to recover data on this is the IT company had sold them the rack installed the rack sold them the server and configured the server and their network. So there's no way to blame previous companies. They have been their IT people for four years. They weren't anymore and I laugh because apparently the warning signs were there because this IT company has series of failures and this leads up to the conversation about certifications. So the owner looks at me and he says so what kind of certification you have. I'm like well none is there something specific that we need to you know working equipment. I'm just being honest. He goes no. He goes every time I yelled at the other IT company they told me they were certified. I want someone who's not certified because I was going to certify your ass right out the door. He goes I'm I'm sick of it and I just kind of laughed and I think that becomes a bragging point too many people and honestly when someone brags to me about oh I'm certified in this I look at them as you can regurgitate information right in a paper. Great. That's that's fine. It's not a requirement. I have people with certifications. I don't require it. It's not where I where I go when it comes to hiring. But if you work in a corporate environment and this is where we're going to have a big difference here. If you're applying for a job you know I really want to be a network engineer at XYZ company and they have a requirement that I have this cert. Well companies use it for slightly different reasons. It's not necessarily because they want to know that you know the thing and they require a certification but it becomes an HR thing. HR goes how do we know if someone knows Cisco. We want someone who's Cisco certified so we put that on there as a requirement on a resume. Also creates a filter for them. If you have at least gone through the certifications they will have an idea that you must know an understanding to some extent of it. There's further testing they need to do but at least they can qualify that off the checkbox because it's really hard to quantify what we know as IT people. It's very fuzzy because the market shifts and changes so fast that certifications, college, all those things they are good filters when you're getting a job to from an HR perspective to try and say I just need to weed some of these people up because if I just put nothing on there I would just have everybody applying and that would be very problematic. So they sometimes just use them as a methodology. There was a while here and I work at Detroit Automotive. They actually put a two year college degree as a requirement just to be a line worker putting parts on there which they didn't even care what your degree was in but it was a filtering method so when they were hiring people that the line workers in the automotive they wanted degrees because that we have less applications because so many people are applying. So sometimes they're used as that so you may need to get certified. So even though I don't have certifications and have found success in the IT market you may need to get certified because your career path is going to require you to or your desire is to work at a place that requires certifications you're going to have to get certified. So which one should you get depends like I said comes back to the existential question of what do you want to do and once you decide that look at the careers that you want this is you can go to any of the job boards that the place is hiring and go you know what I want to be a network engineer I want to be a field engineer doing this I want to be an infrastructure wiring engineer whatever that is you know whatever you want to do look at the certs that those jobs are asking for and maybe those certs even if you just take the study exams and play around so you get an idea what that job entails that wouldn't be bad now you can also look at doing some of the internships at places a lot of places do offer limited amounts of internship you're trading your time but you get some learning experience that also may help you decide what you want to do but the certification thing are they required which one should you get it's hard to say now a good place to start to bring it all together might be in help desk help desk is the lowest on the totem pole of doing it answering the phone and telling people did you reboot it that's unfortunately a lot of times what you end up doing but that also will kind of give you a perspective so if you get a job in corporate help desk a lot of them require just really basic easy to get certifications or some programs even right here in Michigan we actually have a few programs are some free training that people can get to get them a help desk job it gets you in the market you may be really smart you may be good at it and you may progress really fast you may not you may decide that this is not the career path for me so it helped us because a good starting point where you're going to do the most basic of functions hopefully not get too burned out dealing with that so when it comes to these certifications that I said there's not an easy answer but what you can do and probably while you're here now because you're looking this up is there's a lot of good YouTube videos out there you can watch some of mine I've done stuff on technology there's a lot of YouTube videos when it comes to all kinds of different things you want to learn there's plenty of information on the web that is still free that you can go and learn there's the tons of people who maintain a lot of their you right now in 2018 Reddit is so great resource to interact with a lot of the sysadmin community and even if you don't even post on Reddit I learn a lot just by going and reading there a lot so all these different online forums between Spiceworks Reddit stack exchange which you know good or bad you're always going to get someone who's going to tell you to RT FM but just read through all the problems and solutions you can kind of get an idea of a lot of things and then start tinkering that is the biggest thing grab something like I said when I was a kid I would I would go around grab anything I can to start building with it and just figuring out how it all worked going through manuals going through you know any book I could get my hands on it and trying to tinker writing basic programming and things like that that is a huge part of it is just constantly doing that now I do this as a career but I still as a hobby so to speak come in here and just tinker with things how does this work how can I make this work let's come up with a project idea you know there's so it's actually less expensive than ever to buy things like raspberry pies and put them together I mean the kits are really reasonably priced and you can start tinkering the biggest thing is just constantly pushing forward constantly learning and keeping curious and this kind of goes back to the college so I didn't go to college either college is as I understand it from my friends who did go to college a strong structured learning that you may learn how to learn this is what a lot of people that I that seem to be successful get out of it not that they just learned on the things that they were taught through college they learned how to learn and I think that's an important thing on there and it it does work I mean there's there's various as people went through college like it's not the career path I chose but it's not one that I say you shouldn't choose maybe you need that structure I find a lot of people it's just over the years I've realized some people require very structured environments to work in I don't know why they do I have a very hard time with structured environments applied to me versus I build structured environments the way I see fit which is what led me to being a business owner and that's a lot of what I'm what I do here if you want to take a bigger perspective of not just running an IT company but I build structure for and process that my employees follow that's a lot of what it comes down to in your business so if you're thinking about coming into the IT business I've talked about this before or sales is one of your hardest parts but something really important as an IT business is creating processes and structure and it's really probably for any business if you want to expand out from there you create processes and structure and purpose for people to do to make the machine run that machine just happens to be a business with a bunch of people as the moving parts of that business so process is people bring computers in for repair or people call for networking repair and there's a whole structure by which we handle that in a process that I've given to people now if you want to start an IT company and you're the one that runs the entire process without documentation without that and you're the center of it by the legal definition you have a business you probably file taxes but by the bigger definition of business you just have a job because you haven't created processes that need that can operate without you those processes may involve people may not depending on you know what your systems are but that's just something to think about in perspective there but one thing you will get from college one thing really important that you were going to get out of college is a good base of people that you know and you see this a lot and this is something that I know I'm missing often not going to college is your network of friends that you have that are also successful because when all these people come to college a lot of them come together for the purpose of learning for the purpose of expanding their knowledge so they're very driven especially if you get into let's say an MBA program a business program you have a bunch of people with a common goal starting a business so a lot of them will achieve that goal at some level of success they also at the same time business owners such as myself and lots of us we we help other business owners is kind of how it is we find people who drive in passion I'm never afraid to say you know I volunteer time I share information here on YouTube and other platforms I volunteer time at some of these startups there's a startup incubator that I volunteer about a day a month I help and consult with just helping companies get started and they message me a lot and I you know hey this is how we do this is I did I you know I'm willing to give back to the community you'll you'll find a lot of other people are and you'll find a lot of them Bill Gates and some of these other ultra successful people my feelings are mixed on Bill Gates it's a different discussion but you'll find that oh his college buddy Steve Ballmer became there other college buddy became another position you'll find a lot of these people got together under a common goal so that's one thing I did miss in college by final following a career path that didn't have that group of driven people with a common goal I missed out on that and it's funny talking to some of the business owners and having unrelated IT having conversations with what their best things from college and I think some of the most honest answers I got from some of them so she won was flat out he says I met all the contacts that built my multi-million dollar company when I was in college you know the son of this guy he sent his son to college his son was very good at business dad was great at business I started a company that was complimentary to them they use my services they were my first big contract landed and his friends use me at my company and there's this interrelationship that helps a lot because who you know as much as you may not like it who you know does have a giant influence on there and it's not necessarily like there's some political you know underpinnings and manipulation of the world like someone likes to play no people buy from people they like it's kind of simple they know you and they don't how do they know one company from other it's really hard to subjectively like we brought up how it's hard to qualify an IT person it's hard to subjectively decide whether a company's good or bad needs these qualifications just scale up to business so they go well I like Tom I met him at an event he seems pretty sharp I will hire his company to do it the thing so this is why we go to all these networking events and stuff like that back on to the getting started in IT career for a diverse too much into other topics so if you want to go to college for it it's not necessarily bad one downside right now here in the US as I understand from looking at it and the fact that I have kids coming up on college age there is a lot of money on college so please carefully think this out before you go into debt trying to decide what you want to do this is a really you know important thing so don't take your decision lightly research as much as possible like I said don't take my opinion for just because I didn't go to college don't just check off the college time didn't go to college and he's successful or you know this person's a dropout and they're successful because there's a ton of examples like that but they're often going to be edge cases colleges and not necessarily a bad thing I'm not just saying absolutely not go I'm saying carefully think about before you put yourself in debt second you know really decide what you want to do in it because I know some people that went to college right he hated it and now have a career in some other place and still paying off loans on a college degree they're not using so that's just a lot to think about if you have free college awesome if you're in someplace outside the US that just has some type of free system and nothing I know is free someone's going to go ranting on this I know it's paid for by taxes or whatever the methodology is by which it's paid something think about now I do like in kind of a third topic might be vocational classes they seem pretty good we had a vocational class back when I was in high school and this is 1993 I took a cobalt programming class so I don't know what value provides it was probably relevant back when cobalt was relevant in the 90s and that's why well in the 80s cobalt was relevant and starting to become irrelevant but I had a class on it and then I mostly got trouble in class for hacking the computers they never proved it was me but it was they had a pretty good idea I was just having fun with it and changing the names and the teacher kept his password on the desk so literally that post-it note password problem a computer teacher in the 1990s had that problem and I also did was change all the names to be all my friends name so they had a strong suspicion it was me but you know they just yeah so before I get too over up back on that it's back to my passion and curiosity for these things so location don't rule that out on the biggest underlying thing I want for this entire video to you think is you have to constantly be learning you have the concept of educating you don't be afraid to take it with this build your own virtual lab get a raspberry pie start making lights blink on it start with the most simplest of the product and keep going up from there you can find in right now I believe they're offering like an Azure you can spin up all kinds of basic instances they offer you some of the hours for free I think Google has the same thing in their cloud stuff so you can just start playing with their cloud and doing that there's a ton of online training places if you decide programming is the thing you want to do now I got into coding a little bit when I was younger I did basic programming in Q basic for those of you that remember that I wrote programs on the counter I wrote programs on a TRS 80 that I took apart had to fix a chip in it that was in the garbage I did get a TS 80 of the garbage picking that was one of my best finds ever and so that you know there is ways you can start learning way easier than when I was a kid so it was hard I did get my parents to drop me off at the library to find find these now you can go there and there's just tons of free courses you just Google free programming courses and they'll start you through a lot of the basics which language you start with I don't know try all of them once you have a concept of structured programming you learn which languages you love and hate and you'll find that maybe you really have a passion for doing it this way or doing it that way but there's so much you can do to learn and start with hello world that's why we all start as programmers echo hello world oh it prints something on there awesome you know these are different things you can do to start and Linux big passion there of course being open source I've always liked that because I think that's one of the underlings of Linux is the fact that they've had this community of open sourcedness and being able to get it for free so you can just start tinkering with it and it kind of brings you easier into your wow I can learn how to set up a server I can run my own web server in my house without licensing Microsoft later and even Microsoft if you want to get into some of that you can get 180 day evaluations of their server software download it find something loaded on and do it it does not I have my tour of a virtual lab it does not cost a lot to get a virtual laps up it's not insurmountable matter of fact it's substantially less than college you can find old servers that are being decommissioned from companies and you can find among Craigslist you can find cheap old servers sometimes that you can take home and just start building it check out Reddit our home lab there's all kinds of people in there to have guides and tutorials how to build your home lab and start you know playing with this stuff and this is what leads you to that career in IT is that passion to figure it all out you build your home lab you figure out how to build virtual machines you figure out how to do networking on my friend who does Cisco he's absolutely amazing him as a wonderful career he has flown around to do some of the really high-end routing work if you've ever been in his garage and seen how he built all this he has a garage full of every Cisco thing he came up with every lab scenario and built his own giant wall of Cisco stuff man and he had to be like put extra electrical in just while he's all the stuff but that's what he does he learned all of this his passion was he just kept taking the old Cisco stuff learning it you can find these old routers for cheap puts them all together plays and tinkers with them and learn how to do all the networking so these are all the things you can do to kind of get into IT like I said I know you're maybe came here looking for a solid single answer of do I go to college in a yes or no right now because I got to make a decision do I you know do I take this course or do I not that I can't choose you know my path was not going to college I don't have certifications it was just raw passion for this and that's what's worked for me I do well without structured environments I do have no problem just grabbing books and reading it and just heading right into the project I still do that here you know I'm 45 44 years old I'm still taking things apart because I want to know how they work you know even some my reviews I'm like I got the screws out of things all the time I want to know what's inside I want to look at the chips inside that still fascinates me so that maybe is how you are maybe that's why you're here at this video because you're like I'm my playlist is nothing but how-to videos in there has just been some amazing YouTube has been an amazing platform for all the people and all the problems that it may have the big perspective I still have on it is there's no better way at scale for me to share my knowledge with people share knowledge with people in general YouTube has really raised the bar and it's a great platform for knowledge sharing when it comes to electronics and things like that when it comes to controversial topics that's a whole another issue I'm not debating right now but obviously that's where people get their problem if you turn it into a new site I don't think that's the best platform I all the time find some of the best knowledge on here how to take apart things I have a phone that I'm going to fix my wife's phone is messed up and I'm going to I watched three YouTube videos on it I think I know how to fix it and I'm you know you look at YouTubers like Jerry Rigg everything the guy does some of the great testing that you don't want to do yourself you don't want to crack your screen this is what this platform's for and I think this is absolutely can help slingshot your career into IT and there are companies that offer paid services so once you kind of go okay I've gotten as far as I can as many videos as I can but I still need more in-depth knowledge on specific subject that I can't find it you may have to pay for some of it but we're honestly some of the online training probably a whole lot cheaper than college and will give you the knowledge you need because to me the most important this goes for my staff this goes for people I work with in the industry the most important is that you're knowledgeable on the subject not that you can pass a test and regurgitate answers and know the answer if I give it to you but can you actually do it do you understand what you're doing are you just typing keystrokes you just go I don't know why it does it but if I take this sequence of commands that's it and maybe you're not curious more than that and that's that's where you're are that's that's fine I guess but it's probably not where you probably want to work for me if you're like that but if you're truly passionate truly curious this is an amazing career I really enjoy IT it's challenging it's diverse it changes quickly but how do you get here start with passion I'm gonna I will leave with that and you know I'm gonna quit rambling on about everything else make your own decision on college really think about that because I said if you're going to go into debt over it it's definitely a life decision you should not take easily certifications if you want certifications go for it if that's the career path you go I want this job at this place they require this sir I guess you're gonna have to get it that's that's probably we're going to go other than that stay curious and keep reading alright hopefully this was helpful with some of that I know I kind of babbled on a bit but hopefully this was helpful I'm gonna send this as a reply to people who want a definitive decision that's right you that definitive decision thanks for watching if you like this video go ahead and click the thumbs up leave us some feedback below to let us know any details what you like and didn't like as well because we love hearing the feedback or if you just want to say thanks leave a comment if you wanted to be notified of new videos as they come out go ahead and subscribe and the bell icon that lets YouTube know that you're interested in 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