 What degrees or education would you recommend getting for IT related careers? That, that is a big question. So, there is no set education path for any of the tech fields. Because the field is so new that there are so many different routes that you can take. So you can go to the traditional route and get a degree in IT. And then after that, you can get a job in IT. And you can do that. You can also join the military like I did. You get a GI bill and they'll pay for your college. And you'll also get experience. It does take a certain type of personality to deal with that. So I would strongly against it if you don't think you're that type of person. You can get a certificate, an IT cert. Those are huge in the IT field. And then you can get a job in that because that verifies your knowledge. You could also just create your own experience and set up an LLC. Make your own projects post to YouTube videos on tutorials that you create and show that to a potential employer. And you can put that in your resume and be like, hey, I did this. It's really up to you and your personality type. There are so many different ways. You don't need a degree. You don't need a cert. You don't need military experience. You just really need to be able to sell yourself to an employer that you can solve their problems. And that's what's so amazing about the tech field, maybe not on other fields where it's more traditional. But in the tech field, there are limited possibilities. And with a little creativity, you can get a job with limited experience and no degree. So fairly quickly. Got it. Okay. That's some great insight. What would you say actually matters when it comes to getting a job, specifically from the perspective of someone who maybe just graduated high school and they're looking to get into IT and the tech field in general, or maybe someone who already got their degree and they just graduated college. So what actually matters when it comes to getting that first job? You know, there's so many various factors. But if you have a degree and you're looking to get into the field or even looking to change your field, I would say creating projects and creating your own experience. So there are many ways to do that and you can do it all in your home. You don't have to go anywhere to get the experience. But I mean, Google is your best friend and you can create your own projects, put that on your resume and gain your own experience. Show an employer that you have a lot to offer to them. So not only can you learn tech, but you can also create videos and do all of these different tutorials. And most important, you can learn on your own and be resourceful. So those are really important skills for tech is you have to continuously learn on your own. And that definitely kind of portrays that to an employer. Quick break guys, I forgot to mention this during the video, but there's a really good certification that's highly rated. It's the IBM Cybersecurity Analyst Certification. And I'm going to include that in the description down below. It'll be at the very top of the description. And then also there is a phenomenal way that a lot of students who go to some of these alternative schools like WGU use to test out of classes. And that's how they are able to finish their degree in less than a year. So I'll leave both of those down in the description below at the very top. Definitely check those out and let's get back to the video. So you can create your own experience by creating an LLC and then making YouTube videos of tutorials. You can also create a GitHub if you want to do more security projects or web development or software development. And then you can put that on your resume. You can link to your GitHub with your experience. So honestly that right there. And then that shows that you have resourcefulness, which is really important in IT that you're eager to learn and that it also shows what type of employee you leave. So that's already demonstrating leadership abilities right there. And that is exactly what employers want. They don't want to tell you everything you need to do. You want you to think on your own and kind of think outside of the box. Yeah. Yeah, one thing when people ask me for advice in private, a lot of the time I tell them that one of the best strategies you can use is there are certain things where you want to not stand out. It's a good idea to not stand out in certain areas to be normal, so to speak. And then there's other areas where you really do want to stand out. Like it's extremely important. And one thing you can do to make yourself stand out in a positive way is just to try to get their attention in a creative way. So you could maybe make your own video in order to get their attention. You could do a project to show them that you're able to teach yourself some of these skills like the ability to make videos, for instance. That's a skill. It takes a while to teach yourself that. And if you're able to do that, teach yourself that and do it in a creative way, chances are you're going to be able to take on a bunch of the other tasks that require you to think outside of the box within the business itself. So it's just a great way to kind of demonstrate that to a potential employer. And then you also kind of just stand out in general. I mean, you're the person who made the video. They don't even know your name. They're like, hey, what about the video guy or something? That's a great way to kind of stand out from the crowd, so to speak. But again, I don't want to speak for you, but that's kind of one thing. No, you're right. Yeah, you are right. Kind of standing out, but within the box. You don't want to make your resume colorful, but you just want to show your skills. You know, you want to be like, I'm the best at this kind of, you know, but not like I'm weird and I'm going to cause problems or I'm going to try to, I don't know, but yeah, exactly. Yeah, it is a that's one reason why I've never made a video about it because I feel like people would it's kind of general information and people would try to apply general information to like a specific job and they probably wouldn't do it right. Unless they got kind of advice directly from me. So that's one reason why I kind of don't include that in videos, but I've seen it correctly before and I've seen people get jobs that are just like their dream job like right away by doing that. So it's definitely something you can do. One thing I wanted to ask you about Nicole is are there any pitfalls that people should specifically look out for when it comes to getting into IT? Yeah, so these were some of my pitfalls. I would just read. So I'm really big on reading and love researching and I love reading and I just find it all fascinating, but I wouldn't do anything. I wouldn't apply these skills to tech. I would just continuously gain all of this knowledge, but I would never apply it. I did this for years, probably early career for the first three or four years. I just learned stuff and read and watched YouTube videos, but I never set up a lab and actually did it. So when it came to actually applying that knowledge, it was just useless knowledge. It's completely useless to have all this knowledge and not use it or know how to use it because I never did it in a lab. I just theoretically knew it. So that was my number one pitfall. My number two pitfall is I stayed at the help desk a little bit too long. You can kind of get stuck there and it pays well and you're like, well, do I ever really need to leave the help desk? You're like, this is nice, but you can get stuck at the help desk. So your goal when you get a help desk job, if that's where you start is to get out of the help desk as fast as you can because you can just stay stuck there. You also don't need to spend a lot of money on a degree. I did it, but some people spend like $80, $90, $100,000 to get a help desk job or even a system administration job. You don't need any of that. I suggest WGU. I have some reviews on it, but it's quick and you can get a degree fast and it's just functional. It works for tech, not for other fields, but for tech it does work. And then also in this field, you can kind of get lazy because you get paid well. So you have to motivate yourself to continuously learn new things and new skills. Otherwise, you're going to become outdated really fast. And that's also a benefit for anyone entering the field because the skills you learn are up to date. Whereas people who have been in the industry for 10, 20 years, their skills may be a little rusty. So I mean, you're going to get replaced with the newer screw in the great business machine, which is a pro end con. So I would say those are the major pitfalls. You know, a lot of people who watch this channel, very young, sometimes they're in high school, sometimes they're early in college. And they're kind of at that point in their life where they don't necessarily know what job would be best for them. So what type of personalities or, you know, personality type traits tend to be really good or tend to enjoy this type of career? I always liked puzzles. And so someone who likes puzzles would do well in this career. And also you have to be very curious. I was always curious about everything around me and I loved to learn. I was just continuously learning as a high school student and a college student. And in this field, it really satisfies that because there's so much to learn. And once you get in a little bit, it just opens up a whole new world of just tech. And it's just absolutely fascinating. And then you can apply those principles to other things in your life like business and relationships and it gets really nerdy. So curiosity, number one, number two, someone who can kind of go with the flow, not too rigid and kind of it needs to be this way because in tech you're going to you're going to destroy things in a sense and you have to be okay with that and you just have to go with the flow. You're like, oh, I broke this and then you just have to fix it really fast or something will come up or a customer or a network will go out or someone hacks your network. You just have to be like, oh, this happened. Now how can I fix it? And so someone who's solution oriented and not problem oriented because the problems are going to happen. You just have to find a solution and just be like, I'm done. All right, let's just fix this. So someone who can be like water, someone who's curious, someone who likes puzzles. But I would say those are the three things and then also someone who's resourceful and self-reliant because it is a lot of figuring things out on your own. Someone's not really going to tell you what to do. My boss has no idea what I do. So they're not much help. And then you're continuously thrown in new situations to where you have to learn really fast. And that comes as you get more experienced, you can learn things faster. But yeah, I could say those things. Got it. What about introvert versus extrovert? Do you think that applies here or does it not matter? That's a big thing. So I'm more introverted and I can go days without talking to someone. But if you're an extrovert, you may have issues because you're going to be surrounded by introverts. I've seen it happen. I've seen extroverts trapped in introverts jobs and it's not good. I'm not saying you can't succeed. You can become an IT manager and there's roles that do deal a lot with people like desktop support, help desk, things of that sort. But you're going to have a lot of quiet time. And you're going to be around people who also enjoy the quiet. So I'm not excluding. Like if you enjoy working with people, I'm not saying tech isn't for you. It just made me different. It just, I don't know. I don't want to deter anyone here. You know what I mean? I don't want to be like, well you're an extrovert so you're going to do terrible. I don't know. You just have to know when to flip it on and off. What I've found just looking at different careers is if it's a really common career where there's just like hundreds of thousands or millions of jobs, it really doesn't matter all that much what your personality type is because you're going to find like a sub career within there that's at your personality. So for instance, there was one girl I knew who went into accounting and she didn't really like doing bookkeeping. And you know, she thought she wanted to do it. She didn't like bookkeeping, but there's so many accounting jobs out there. She was able to find one that she really liked and it was more in the recruiting side of things, right? Where she's interacting with people. And there you go. Like if you go into certain careers that are extremely niche, you might find yourself stuck there. But if you go into one where there's just like a lot of sub fields, there's a lot more flexibility. So I kind of usually recommend people do that if they're not 100% sure what they want to do because it gives them more flexibility. Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. There's tons upon tons of jobs. I'm sure there you could do business and then do like the business planning and that's work with stakeholders for IT infrastructure. They're definitely jobs for everyone in IT. Some people who like compliance and you can definitely do career changes too. So into IT with just a few skills, gain a few skills and then you can make a transition to IT pretty easily also.