 Before we begin this video is a part of a larger course available out in Udemy. There'll be details at the end of the video and well down below Why get into IT? Well, it's fun. It's always changing. So there's never a dull moment. It's very lucrative I mean you can make a lot of money How much money you may ask? Well, I'm sure you've heard of people like, you know The guy who invented Microsoft or Apple or Facebook or Tesla They're making billions of dollars. There's some of the richest people on the planet That is how lucrative IT can be Now you may be thinking well, you know, I'm just boring. I'll meet I'll never invent a Microsoft or Tesla or something like that. But guess what? You don't need to do that to make a lot of money in IT. For example, it's very trendy. You've heard the term going viral Let's say you get into computer programming. You make a mobile app You upload it and then instantly 200 million people buy it even if they only bought it for $1. You're now $200 million richer Think of that. Let it sink in. You don't have to be a Bill Gates. You don't have to be an alien musk You can do very boring things. For example, you can work in the financial sector Maintaining their back-end infrastructure But because it's so old and so important to their business, no one else really knows it They're paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars to basically sit back and watch the lights blink That's insane. None of this existed when I was a kid When I was a young lad They were talking about What is a stable field and nowadays technology is a stable field? But back then they were talking you had to be a doctor a lawyer or something along those lines That's all change. You now have people in the IT field that make more than doctors and lawyers You have billionaires that have sprung up overnight from the basements of their home So did I mention that it's very lucrative? You don't have to be a rock star. You can be just a normal person and still make millions and millions of dollars Now the hard fact is the average person is not making millions of dollars But they're making way more than working in a factory or in a sales job or something of that nature This is pretty much just my personal journey. Feel free to skip this video But I wanted to give you some perspective on my journey and everyone's gonna have their own unique journey in the IT field This gives you a little bit of insight into just how crazy some things can get and some weird situations You're gonna bump into and we've talked about hybrid roles a lot and you're gonna really need to set some boundaries with yourself But you also need to understand when to move on when to look for a job and things like that So my career started with I learned how to make webpages It just simply was interesting to me and then from those webpages I want to connect those to databases and you know put JavaScript and flashy things in there that landed me a job and I ended up as a visual basic developer and all you developers out there are probably laughing because visual basic is kind of the The joke of the programming world But that was my first real programming language because I was learning you guessed it ASP which used VB script under the hood to automate those webpages From that I learned C sharp and I was a hardcore programmer from there. I loved that that framework Network administrator and my boss got into an argument one day And I like I said in a previous video Magically became the server slash network administrator and I now owned a small server farm that I knew nothing about I never logged into a server So I quickly had to learn how to do that That's what I mean by absorbing a hybrid role. I just basically became two people and did not get a pay bump at all Needless to say I didn't work there very long I used all of that experience in server administration and programming to go get yet another job making double what I was making automating servers This was great. I was on a massive network making double the money and I had set hours I wasn't staying till midnight every night. I was logging out at 3 30 every afternoon. I was going home playing with my cat relaxing So from there I learned a lot more things I learned how to do networks and switches and things like that and then virtualization came about So I started virtualizing these servers Then I was automating the networks the virtualizations and the servers you see how the skill sets can really overlap Programming led to automating the servers Knowing the servers led to the virtualization component knowing the virtualization led to the networking piece Which led to you guessed it pretty much everything else and along the way I picked up database skills and things like that eventually I saw that I'm just gonna say it and I think I've said it to some capacity, but Younger people were coming in and there's nothing wrong with younger people I too was young once and I heard to who you're talking to I'm probably still pretty young But point being they were coming in at a fraction of what I was making and they were working longer hours So that put a lot of pressure on me. I Still love IT. I still dip my fingers in IT and I still program and I still teach computer programming But I switched over project management just to give it a try Really what I wanted was a fallback plan so that if something happened and I just couldn't keep up anymore I wanted a backup plan so I could step out of IT or into a management role That led me into cybersecurity because by then I pretty much knew all the technologies inside and out So it was just natural to go into security and project management So I became a cybersecurity project manager running teams of cybersecurity experts That of course turned me into a manager and then I became an IT manager and I've shifted jobs several times since now What I'm trying to drive home here is The main takeaway which is you may start in one field you may start at a call center That was actually one of my first jobs were just simply answering a phone But your career will change over time The goal of this course is to give you the tools you need So as you transition from one role to the next you can feel confident writing your resume Walking into that job interviewing and getting the job one thing that always just bothers me is the word cancer Somebody will come to me and say well, I can't because I can't get a ride to school or I can't afford school Or I can't find the right material or this or that We live in the golden age of information Google is your best friend and I'm not joking you hear me say Google a lot because it is a worldwide known term everybody from New York City to Japan to Afghanistan to the heart of India to deep horn Africa, they know what Google is people that don't even speak English People that have barely connected with society. They know what Google is So here's the thing You can find almost anything for free on Google. I am not condoning Piracy or copyright infringement or anything like that But most books you can simply type in the title of the book and put dot PDF in the back of the search Or at the very end and you'll find a PDF copy of that book that you can just download and read Again, do not violate copyright. Do not violate any laws understand what the laws and jurisdictions are and now I'm not taking any Any sort of responsibility for your actions, but I'm just telling you you can find that also video training You can go on YouTube and get millions. I mean literally millions of hours of free video training right now You can literally go to YouTube and type in How to become a Linux administrator or how do I learn to become a programmer or how do I learn project management? And there's videos out there millions of hours of videos for free. There's zero excuse. So Also understand that video training itself is becoming very very prevalent. For example this very course Many instructors myself included will if they feel so inclined to give free coupons from time to time Sometimes you can just mail the instructor and say hey, I'd really like to take your course, but I can't afford it I'm a starving student. They may give you the course free or at a deep discount. Just simply ask Now unfortunately with instructors before you go out and just ask them most of them are not even going to respond If they do respond they may be a little rude because you're basically saying give me your hard work for free other times They hit a limit and this is what I often hit is I have a lot of training that I've done out on you to me and You to me really throttles the number of coupons I can give so I'll give them all away for free and then I get two or three hundred people saying dear sir Please give me your course and I'm like, I'm sorry I can't you to me won't let me make any more coupons and you can kind of tell they're like, yeah, right? You know, they think I'm just trying to sell them something harsh reality is I'm not allowed to give out too many free things In case you're wondering how to get free coupons There are Facebook groups out there You can just go to Facebook or even Google again and say free you to me coupons or free online courses and there's literally millions so Anytime somebody tells me and I know this course will probably generate some of those messages of I can't because My first responses. Have you checked Google? No joke that will be my first response Because 99% of the time someone will say to me. Well, I can't learn this language because I have no money Okay, have you gone to Google and type how to learn whatever the language is most of the time they haven't so very simple Getting a free education is literally as simple as googling it Now you're gonna hit a lot of roadblocks and you may hit a lot of paywalls as they're called Meaning you get so far and then they want money because guess what people want to get paid for their hard-earned work a Free education does not necessarily mean a bad education But it also comes with the caveat that if it's free, you're probably not going to get much support So if you get free material and you ask that instructor for help don't expect them to help you because you're not paying for it So I found out about certifications when I was fairly young and I have a lot and I mean a lot I've probably forgotten some of them, but some a high level I have like an a plus network plus security plus MCSA MCSE MCITP Linux Linux plus Multiple programming certifications VMware for five and six certified I'm also certified in solar winds Cisco CCNA and on and on I could keep going I also have a CIS this be a P&P and multiple sub domains I've got a lot of tests under my belt. So I personally used certifications as a kind of Insurance policy because like I said, I do not have a formal education from a university now you should note All the years of me taking tests I've probably invested as much money as if I'd just gone to college and gotten a master's degree to begin with But I've spread it out over decades and I bought it basically as I need it So if I needed to become a server administrator, I'd learn how to do it. I study at cram I'd learn and then well, I'd go take the test That in my opinion is probably the best way of doing this simply because you learn by doing you gain the experience and Education and certification to go along with it. You have Three best things education Experience and the certificate a third party stating, you know what you're talking about so I found this out because I was in a job and I was a programmer and I applied for another job as a programmer and they asked me a weird question They said, do you know anything about servers? Well, yeah, I've worked on some servers. They said, well, do you have a certificate and I said Certificate, what do you mean? They said, well, are you a Microsoft certified systems engineer? I'd never even heard of that And they said well, okay Well, we'll hire you and they slit a piece of paper across the desk and the salary was embarrassing It was a fraction of what I was making and their justification for that was I was not certified. I Actually said now look, I know what I'm doing So they sent me to their own internal test center had me take a barrage of tests everything from Windows server DNS to Active Directory, I mean I sat there for six hours on their test system I scored in the 99 percentile on every single test. I knew my stuff and he still looked at me said, well, you're not certified They only offered me about a thousand dollars more than the original offer and I obviously refused the job But what I did is I took out of that. Why is this so important to them? What was the requirement for the job? They were contracted out the contracted company wanted that certification So I did a lot of research and I just started studying So really what we're gonna cover is a lot of the real basic certifications and when I say basic They're not easy. It means they're gonna take you very far in your a lot of people get this delicate dance Really confused and this is really at a high level what it looks like Resumes go to job sites job sites have automated systems Companies have automated systems that talk to those job sites that coordinate with HR now when we say HR That's human resources a actual person who will sit down and review your resume You see from your resume to HR is a whole lot of automation So there's a lot of automated components that are gonna go through and scan your resume and pick out certain keywords and phrases And look for things Under the hood you're really assigned a point on a point system and that varies from job site to job site and From automated platform to you guessed it the other automated platform For example, if you post your resume on something like monster.com You're going to be given certain values based off the keywords in your resume That's an automated system a company who's paying monster comm is gonna pull down a bunch of resumes who match those keywords and run those through Their own automated system. That's going to kick out a list of candidates Those candidates are then given to the hiring manager The hiring manager often does not know the score. He's just given a list of people who met a certain criteria Unfortunately, the world we live in it's very easy to cheat those systems just by plugging keywords into your resume Which means someone who's vastly unqualified for a job gets before hiring managers So even though all this automation is in place the hiring managers often inundated with Before we dive in what if you haven't gotten any of you? So what if you shot your resume out and you're just not getting any phone calls? Take a deep deep look at your resume add more skills to your life Make sure you're matching the keywords. I cannot emphasize those three enough 99% of the time when somebody says hey, I'm applying, but I'm not getting interviews That's actually the cause one of those three Look at your resume. How is it four-minute? How is it worded? Do you have a lot of misspellings bad punctuation things like that? How does it look from across the room? I can't emphasize that enough. It's got to look nice Add more skills to your life if you have exactly one skill you're an expert in printers Go learn a programming language. Go learn how to work with desktops. This is not super hard You can find YouTube videos out there that'll walk you through in about an hour or two and Review your resume Ask friends family to review it make sure you meet the requirements consider adding education and consider adding certifications Get an inside perspective as possible meaning find someone who works at that company this day and age It's really not hard you get on Facebook or LinkedIn and just search for the company name and then message them and say hey I'd like to know more about your company. I'm interested in applying there and usually people are very friendly and receptive They want to talk to you There was actually one time where I did that and I just messaged them said hey, I've applied about a dozen times I never get an interview. What seems to be the case? Turns out they weren't actually hiring. They were just collecting resumes in case they were hiring I hope you liked this video if you did this course is available on you to me calm It's big. We're gonna cover just about everything you need to know from how to get experience and an education even if you have no money and How to make a resume how to apply for a job how to interview for a job Ultimately how to accept a job and if you don't like it how to decline their offer or negotiate a better one and How to be a rock star at your new job?