 Daniel, welcome to the channel, my friend. Thanks for coming on today. Basically, Daniel was able to get a job in information technology in about one month, and he's going to come on the channel and tell his story today. So, hey, Daniel, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to have the opportunity to speak with you. Awesome. Awesome. All right. So let's go ahead. Just start at the beginning. Maybe just introduce yourself. Give us a little background about yourself. Then you can talk about how you discovered IT. Yeah. So, basically, before I started this journey, I was working full-time as a restaurant manager. I was working 12-hour shifts about four to five days a week. It was a stressful work environment. You know, plenty of challenges. And it was just something that I didn't see myself doing long-term. Actually, it was so stressful. I couldn't take it anymore that I just quit. I went on my vacation because I had allocated vacation time. And it was about a week. And I felt so good being out of that situation that I pretty much called my boss and I said, hey, I'm not coming back. And I really didn't have a plan for what was next. So that's kind of what led me to course race. Got it. Okay. So really stressful restaurant environment. I think a lot of people can probably relate to that if they've worked in a restaurant. Extremely fast pace. Having to work super fast. People call in. You're having to deal, you know, do two or three people's jobs at once. Yeah. And like you were saying before, sometimes chefs can be really mean. They really do act like Gordon Ramsay. According to the idiot sandwich meme. Up his part about my job. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So you discovered course careers. How exactly did you discover it? Just browsing YouTube? Well, I had been following Josh for quite some time. And once he announced that he was partnering with course careers to try and get you into the IT industry within three months. Since I'm an avid follower of Josh, I completely trust him. You know, he's got amazing content and a lot of really good advice. So I knew that when he was making a course to try and help people like myself, that it was the perfect thing for me. And it was the best opportunity for me at the time. So I just took full advantage of it. Got it. Awesome. So just for some context, he's talking about my friend, Josh Matacor. Josh basically, you know, I've done interviews with him on YouTube before in the past. And Josh partnered with course careers, which is a company that I'm a huge fan of friends with the CEO of course careers, Troy, I've had him on the channel as well. And they basically help people to get jobs in extremely high demand careers as quickly as possible. And they do it for a very reasonable price. It's like $450 if you use the coupon code, which by the way, I'll put a link down in the description as well as the pinned comment below to a free training that you can check out to kind of talk about the different career paths and IT and exactly what the course is all about and all that you it'll teach you all that stuff. And I'll put that down below. Yeah, so Josh came out with this course and very recently, I think he launched it like month or two ago, something like that. And immediately we started getting people results with it like two weeks, one month, we're getting people jobs left and right. Daniel was one of the first ones to get a job with the course. So tell me about the course like how was it in general just tell me about like the different features of the course, how was it going through it? If you could kind of detail that a little bit. So the course that Josh basically just gives you a brief introduction of the IT industry, what to expect. And then so the courses in two sections, I guess you could say the first section is basically just giving you a educational foundation of what you need to know in your first position in IT. So you're going to learn basic stuff like basic networking, the physical components of a computer. And you're also going to learn about important things that you do on the help desks. So a lot of information about ticketing systems. So that's kind of like the stuff that I remember. And then the second section is actual practical stuff that you would potentially be doing in your job. And it's actually a lot of the stuff that was in the lab portion of the course. I do a lot of that stuff on a day to day basis. So I would say some of the most important labs is like the active directory lab, you know, setting up your own active directory environment, setting up a domain controller and connecting clients to the actual domain. That's something that I've done at my job a billion times already. And I've only been there two weeks. And that was something that came up on my interview. So that was super valuable information that I learned. Also, you're going to be setting up like your own ticketing system from scratch. That is, I work with a ticketing system. So at my interview, when they asked me about different components about ticketing systems specifically, I already knew it like the back of my hand. So I was super prepared. So those are just some of the things that the course prepared me way ahead of time so that I was really crushing the interviews. So yeah, going back to your question. So the first part is going to be the educational foundation. And then the second part is going to be like the actual practical labs that you would potentially be seeing in your job. Got it. Awesome. And he does have you kind of set up a portfolio so you, you know, you can put that portfolio, link it on your resume to make, you know, make it very obvious to any potential employers that you really know your stuff, essentially, like you don't just put like, hey, I know XYZ. Like here's an example of XYZ that you can very easily click on in five seconds and you'll be able to immediately know that I actually know the skills basically. Right. And a lot of times during my interviews, they would ask me what type of experience I had and I immediately pointed straight to my portfolio. You know, so that was pretty much the meat and potatoes of my experience. I would just talk in extreme detail about what I was doing in the projects on my portfolio. Got it. Awesome. And how long exactly did it take you to get your first job offer? So it took me about two weeks to finish the course and then another two weeks to kind of send out applications. We're here back from companies, start the interview process, and then I ended up getting three job offers at the end of the two weeks after I finished the course. So all in all, it took me four weeks. Okay. If you could break down a little bit if you remember the numbers. So like how many applications did you send out if you could remember? I actually, I don't recommend people apply the way that I did it. I did it super disorganized. I didn't use a tracker. I was kind of just shooting stuff out and just seeing what would stick. So a lot of and a lot of people were getting back to me and I wouldn't know who was who. So that was kind of like the about that. But if I were to ballpark it, I may be applied to like maybe 30 or 40 different jobs. Okay, gotcha. And then how many interviews did you get? If I had a guess because I didn't go to all them. I only went to the ones that were the jobs that I thought were the best. I probably got like 10 interviews and then I did three. Okay, so you did three interviews and you got three job offers. So 100% success rate there. Yeah. Those are those are pretty good numbers. That's pretty awesome. And then you ended up going with the one that basically impressed you the most. So you ended up kind of going with the one that you really wanted. Okay, awesome. All right. So one month total, you got three job interviews. If you could share your salary, whatever you're comfortable sharing, maybe you want to give me a range or if you're comfortable sharing the exact salary for that first entry level job. So right now I'm hourly. So I'm at $20 an hour. Okay. Got it. Yeah. And that's really good for like an entry level job and the career track. Typically, you're probably going to make it to $100,000 a year within like three or four years, essentially. So the way I like to tell people is especially with these like high demand careers, you're essentially just like getting paid to learn. Instead of going to college where you're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, you're getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn. And in the same amount of time that it would take somebody to graduate college, you're probably going to make it to that six figure level by the time, you know, somebody else was graduating from college. So that's pretty awesome, man. So how's the job especially compared to like working in a restaurant? Tell me like that kind of like a day to day basis like your your work life balance, your job satisfaction, etc. It was my first day. It was too good to be true. I actually was kind of shocked at the culture at my job because it's so laid back and relaxed. It was like totally opposite of what I was normally used to. There was no training. You know, they just showed me my office, gave me all my equipment. You know, I did my basic onboarding stuff and they were like, Hey, welcome to the team. So I actually just went to my buddy's office, my coworker, and I was like, Hey, man, I'm just going to hang out with you for like the first two weeks so that I can kind of learn what exactly is going on. But everybody's super amazing. You know, they're extremely helpful, especially with my attitude and my work ethic. The thing about me is that I want to grow as fast as possible. Self development is a huge thing for me. And that's a really important thing in IT. The more you're hungry, the more people are going to respect you. And my coworkers are very intelligent, they're very experienced, and they're willing to share that knowledge with me. And they're actually really happy to have me on the team because of my hunger for growth, right? Got it. That's awesome. So compared to kind of the restaurant life, it's like kind of night and day, right? Like the work life balance is just much better. You probably have better benefits, better, you know, much more opportunity for vertical growth, horizontal growth, if you want to like switch into a different tech career within the company. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. And that's something I kind of like to mention on my channel is like, when you go into a career path that's saturated, there's no abundance and there's not like a lot of like extra money out there. So, you know, the company is going to nickel and dime you, they're going to try to make you work as many hours as possible without paying you or paying you the least amount possible. You know, it tends to be kind of like a toxic environment because there's just not a lot to go around. Like imagine if you were like stranded on a desert island, there's no food, you can imagine what would happen, right? It's kind of the same thing, but it's with money. Yeah. And that's just how it works. But if you go into a career path where there's a lot of opportunity, there's a lot of abundance, everything else gets better, right? Your work-life balance gets better. You get paid more. There's more opportunities. Workplace tends to be like a more wholesome place, a collaborative environment. It's just literally everything gets better. It's like night and day. So that's why I tell people is like, there's there's a lot of kind of entry level jobs that are extremely saturated. So many people go into them. And you know, in those cases, nobody wants those jobs and most people are going to be very unhappy in those. And then going to college, there's a lot of kind of like medium level jobs that are pretty good, but you know, some of the college jobs can be good if you get a college degree. And then there's these careers, which are the ones I like to focus on, where there's just an insane amount of demand to the point where you do not need to invest a ton of money going to college, you do not need to invest all your time, you know, going to college 5.1 years on average, you can just learn those basic entry level skills and then get into the career and then you get to learn as you go along. So it's just it's basically like a cheat code, learning these high demand skills is essentially like a career cheat code. Now, one thing I did want to mention is you actually started applying right when all the tech layoffs started happening. So everybody was freaking out. I remember my comment sectioned everyone every five seconds, I was getting a comment. Oh, Shane, is this job still good with all the tech layoffs? People were freaking out in my discord. Some of the people in my discord were completely changing their career path. They were switching from tech to health careers because of the the layoffs. And I was just like, Oh, calm down. It's like a little tiny blip in the road, please. And then you go, you apply at probably the worst time you could possibly apply. And you get three job offers in a month. So were you kind of worried about that with all the tech layoffs and everything? Yeah, yeah. Well, I honestly wasn't worried because of my mindset. I had like the mamba mentality, I guess you could say I was like, I'm going to get the job done, no matter what anybody tells me, because I really didn't have any other option. But I do have relatives who work in it and they were kind of telling me the same stuff that like, Oh, no one's going to hire you until after the new year. No one's looking x, y, z, blah, blah, blah. And I was kind of like screw that, you know, I finished this course, I've got my resume. I'm going to I'm going to apply and hope for the best. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. So what would you say to somebody who is, you know, maybe they're a little bit scared about the tech layoffs or they're a little apprehensive about going into it or they're thinking about buying the course careers, investing in the course careers course and trying to get an IT job. What would you say to that person? Work hard, work hard and apply yourself as much as possible. Because like you said, there's a big demand for IT professionals and hiring managers want to see that you are working hard and that you have your own home labs and you're practicing and basically creating experience for yourself. If they see that you have a can do attitude and you have the, at least, you know, the foundational skill set, you are extremely employable. I think that the most valuable thing in terms of IT is what I just said is that make sure that you have the foundational knowledge, right, which is like knowing the stuff that Josh teaches in the first part in the course, really getting that down pat and focusing on building out your portfolio and doing your labs because that's the main thing that's really going to get you hired is having the knowledge and putting it into practice. You know, and don't be afraid because I was afraid. You know, I was extremely afraid. I was extremely skeptical. You know, I called my brother on the phone and I was crying saying, I don't know if this is going to work, but I went through that part and it worked out for me and another thing that I kind of want to say that I said in Josh's interview that is extremely motivational that I think just about 100% of people in my situation would relate to is that when you're going through this course, it's like a part of your life where you are trying to grow a tree and you're not going to see the tree sprout up and you're not going to see the leaves and all the branches and one day, you know, doing the course is kind of like the part where you take the seed and you put it in the dirt and you don't see anything, but you are continuously watering it. So every day that you're doing the course, you're watering your own career seed and each day that you gain more knowledge and you continue to do the labs and you continue to increase on your foundational core skills, nobody sees that and you're not making a salary for it, but it's kind of what's going on in the background and eventually that will pay off and eventually you will see that tree start to sprout up and kind of show itself and that's kind of going to be you getting hired eventually. Got it. And would you say that you have to go to college to get hired in IT? No, no. Matter of fact, so I have people above me and people on the same level as me and everyone has degrees. I am getting paid as much as other people who do have degrees and all of my colleagues told me that their degree did nothing for them. Yep. Yeah. That's the typical thing that I hear over and over again. Yeah. Well, hey man, thank you so much for coming on, sharing your story. I really appreciate it. Awesome story. Congrats on landing that job so fast and hey, maybe we'll get you back on for an update in a year or something like that. Oh yeah, with the way I'm working, it might be sooner than a year. Thank you very much for having me. It's an awesome opportunity to be able to speak with you guys who are essentially changing lives and I want to be, if I can be a part of that too, that would be a great thing. Awesome man. Well, thank you so much and have a good one. Take care.