 What's happening guys? Today we have a very special guest on the channel. This is going to be Josh. He has a ton of experience in information technology and just the technology field in general. And I got him to come on the channel. He's got another YouTube channel and I asked him to come on because I thought he had a lot of really great insights. And so Josh, go ahead and introduce yourself and give us a little background about yourself. My name is Josh. I live in the Pacific Northwest, 37 years old. I've been in IT ever since 2007. I got my first part-time IT job and then it was like two years later. So I ended up getting my first full-time job in IT and I worked in kind of like normal IT capacity with like a bunch of different technologies like system center configuration manager and like basic system administration. And then I kind of transitioned into cybersecurity in 2017 or so and I've been in cybersecurity ever since then. So yeah. Awesome Josh. So I'll just start off talking about some of the general questions that a lot of people are interested in. So this one's probably relatively obvious, but what degrees would you recommend going for if you're somebody who's interested in getting into information technology and then maybe just interested in transitioning to the technology field in general? So as far as the degree goes for IT, like it's in my opinion, it's not really necessary to get a degree, but if you were to select the one I would recommend just getting like any kind of generic information technology degree. Like you don't necessarily have to specialize in like networks or like database management per se because especially in your first job usually people tend to start off in like kind of a help desk like analyst capacity. So just a generic IT degree and then secondary to that I would recommend getting a business degree. If you if you want to get a degree, right? Business degrees are good because the whole like purpose of IT is to kind of facilitate business and provide like some kind of platform like technology to help drive the business like help the money makers like make money more easily and with a business degree it kind of kind of helps you like open your brain a little bit and think about things in a more holistic way instead of just like technology is cool. I like computers like it helps you to kind of think about the business and like why technology and IT exists in the first place. So IT degree or or business degree it would be pretty good for IT also like a degree is like really good to have but the opportunity cost tends to be pretty high. That means that it takes you a decent amount of time to get the degree wherein you could have spent that time like doing something else so because IT is not really regulated like the medical field like you have to you know you have to go to residency and you have to get a degree and to be a lawyer you have to like pass the bar and have a degree like with IT you don't really need a degree. So if you want to agree that's really good but if you just wanted to get into the IT field your time might be better spent getting like an entry level certificate certification like CompTIA plus or something like this. Got it okay well that segues into the next question which is extremely important which is what actually matters when it comes to getting a job so we're talking about internships grades work experience projects volunteering out of those things what actually matters when and the IT field specifically when it comes to getting your first job right out of college or maybe right after getting your certification. So the way I think about getting your first job in IT there's a bunch of different kind of endeavors that you can do and the different endeavors are kind of split up into two main goals like the first goal is to it's really simple but like the first goal is to get an interview and then the second goal is to pass the interview and I kind of split it up like this because there's certain things that you can do that will help you get an interview but won't really help you pass the interview and then vice versa of course like networking is the most powerful thing to get a job but I'm not going to talk about that because I I don't really like do a lot of networking myself like I mean like social networking with people so things that you can do to like get the interview is you know make your resume look as good as possible so for example if you don't have any IT experience you can always kind of generate your own IT experience like you can do a little you can learn something simple and do like a little project by yourself like for example like experiment with like Amazon or AWS or sorry AWS or Azure or something and then maybe like figure out how to do something simple like create a storage account and maybe write like a little blog post about it and you can put it on on LinkedIn or something then you can put on your resume just like little things like this you can do to get experience to put on your resume and then especially for your first job I would recommend getting some kind of certification like early entry level on like com TA plus those things will like be like super invaluable for you like to get at least get the interview because you'll have like kind of experience and at least some kind of credential so that's that's the getting the interview part and then the second part like once you've gotten the interview to pass the interview you can do like a lot of like really simple things like you know polish your physical appearance and those kind of basic things but what I would recommend especially if you're going for like a help desk or something of help desk analyst job is to get like whole bunch of practice questions like 100 actually have some so maybe I'll give you a link and maybe you can put that in the description or something but I would get like yeah whole bunch of practice questions and just kind of go over the questions like in preparation for your interview like not only to kind of learn the answers if you don't know them but practice like saying the answer out loud so you get really good at articulating yourself during the interview because if you go over like 100 help desk questions they're probably going to ask something within here and then when you've already like kind of went through like thinking about how you would answer and like practice saying it to yourself it becomes like really easy once you get into the actual interview and you don't have to you don't have to spend your precious like brain cycles like thinking about how to answer it you can you know offload that because you practice it already and just automatically answer and then you can use your brain power for other things like maybe thinking of questions for them or thinking of like ways to relate to the interviewer or just like you can be more more relaxed and kind of show them your personality more if you've already kind of practiced the process if that makes sense so just those two phases focus on getting the interview things that you can do and then focus on like passing interview practice questions and you know clean you know clean yourself up I guess as much as possible. So when it comes to mistakes that either you or maybe other people you've worked with have made what are some of the pitfalls that you commonly see when it comes to getting into it. This is an interesting question like the pitfalls that I think of might be different than what somebody else might think of but I notice a lot of people like they come into it and they get like a job in a certain area and they have like some kind of expectation for what they're going to be doing and like what's going to happen but very often than not like the reality of like what happens in the business is like way different than kind of what do you imagine when you're going to school like you see like all these memes on on LinkedIn like data scientists like what you imagine and like reality in the reality is like a bunch of boring stuff like making reports that are boring and like interfacing with like management and stuff like this. So I think one of the biggest pitfalls is like not having an open mind of the you do a job and then when your actuality differs from your expectation it tends to like stress people out quite a bit and that just leads to you know if you get the more stress you get more quickly you get like burned out and like you know disgruntled or whatever so just just try to keep an open mind I suppose just kind of be open to to anything and think about everything holistically like why your position exists and like what you're doing to like facilitate the business and you can kind of avoid that a little bit. I totally agree and that's one thing I've noticed with a lot of different careers correct me if I'm wrong here but with a lot of careers especially when you're on the entry level like the first few years you're probably not going to be doing work that you absolutely love you know you're going to have to go through the those first two years get that experience it's kind of like that catch 22 situation where you need two years of experience to get the job but in order to get two years of experience you have to have the job. But after you get those first few years of experience you have a lot more flexibility and a lot more freedom and a lot of different careers with people that I've talked to would you say that's true. I would say that's true just like like you're saying like maybe you you're getting into it like the first time and you want to be like a network engineer or something so you get your CCNA and you learn about all these like kind of advanced routing protocols like you get really good at configuring that and then you get your first engineering like network engineer job and then they just have you like doing configs or something because it's not really it doesn't make sense for them to like throw you onto the core router to like start configuring EIGRP because you're like new. So that kind of like perception is like to be weird and then also for sure. Yeah when you get that experience it really like opens up your your possibility to work like many different places and I've come to find kind of the more you know or the more you know how to do people will they'll see that you know something and they'll try to hire you for something else even if you don't know how to do that thing but they'll base it on like the fact that you know you were able to like you know learn EIGRP and OSPF and then work in like a 10,000 user environment they're like he must be able to like learn how to do mobile device management so they'll like pitch you jobs for like kind of other things if that makes sense the more experience you get the more kind of opportunity like really opens up got it. So what would you say in terms of kind of like the right person or personality what are some traits that you think you would be looking for that would make a really good information technology professional? I mentioned this earlier but flexibility is really important because we don't business is like really I don't know the right word you don't really know what's going to happen like tomorrow or whatever and then IT is kind of it has to it serves the business needs so whatever is required like you have to kind of fulfill that requirement isn't is an IT person so just just be as flexible as possible. I mean you don't have to you know bend over too much like really it's really sucking but just kind of keep an open mind I suppose and the second thing would be be really really open to criticism in fact I would like recommend seeking criticism out because it's really it's really hard for people to give negative criticism even though that's like the it's like the most valuable thing that you can get because it's kind of an opportunity for you to like you know self-reflect and think about the criticism and then have an opportunity to kind of grow not saying all negative criticism it's going to be useful but I would seek it out and like be really good at taking that negative criticism I've had a lot of opportunities because I try to get criticism from people and I'm really really flexible I've had you know people when I was a contractor they try to like make me work full-time or they try to poach me from somewhere else because I worked with them before and I'm like really flexible in the workplace so flexibility and accept criticism well will take you like really really far that's a great point and speaking of criticism this is I think my second interview video so let me know what I'm doing right and let me know what I'm doing wrong down in the description guys I appreciate it you know hope you know I'm just kind of winging it at this point and Josh has been kind enough to let me interview him for one of my winging sessions but we're figuring it out so but awesome so next question is going to be how should viewers go about finding out if it is a good career for them because I know a lot of young people you know maybe somebody who's 18 looking if they want to get a degree or a certification a lot of the time they don't really know what they like so that I mean how can you know what to go into when you don't really even know yourself yet right so how would people go about figuring out if IT is good for them if you don't if you're not already like a big computer nerd and you don't have like a necessarily have a real innate passion for technology IT can still be like a pretty good career for you so like what I would recommend doing to kind of figure that out is I would watch like I guess finished watching this video and then maybe search out some other videos like maybe day in the life of a help desk person or if you know somebody who works in IT kind of just interview them and do like your field research to try to get a general sentiment for the field and like see if those people are doing stuff that you might like doing and if you're still kind of interested in it I would recommend just getting like a cheap like refurbished computer from Amazon or something and then just work through like CompTIA A plus curriculum like there's a lot of free a lot of free stuff on the internet and just kind of work through it and learn about the basic concepts of technology and like what an OS is and like the RAM and like hard drive and all that and kind of experiment with your computer the one you bought don't ruin your your personal computer if you can but I'll just kind of work through it and work through a plus and if you can get through a plus the curriculum not necessarily like passing the exam even but just look around at different people in the field go through the A plus curriculum and if you still feel pretty good about it I would recommend at least maybe finish the cert and then just try working in a help desk job or something like this and if you anywhere along the way if you after you like interview people and you're like that seems boring like I wouldn't really recommend like putting more putting more effort into it because it's not really like it's not really that fulfilling of a job but it's alright enough to where if you feel okay going through the curriculum you it's worth like even try anyway okay that's interesting that you bring up that it's not fulfilling because every time I have a technical issue and I call like an IT guy and he's you know or IT girl and they're able to figure it out for me I am so thankful to them like and I think that they're geniuses as well so like there's been times when I've had like audio issues video issues I call up my friends or you know I call up somebody at the company and I am just extremely grateful to them for being able to fix that for me so I do think it's a job that's relatively meaningful if maybe if you're somebody who just like solving problems for other people would you would you agree with that or would you just yeah I can I can speak to that quite a bit actually I'm glad I'm glad you brought that up because this is very I don't know if I can say it's ironic or not but the I really my first IT job the part-time job and help desk that was that's probably be probably my most favorite job in technology I ever had because I got to interface with people and I help them with their problems and they were like so happy like like you mentioned and it's really nice because even though that that job like paid pretty low I could get like instant results I can just like help people and then like treat them really well when I'm helping them they're happy and I get like instant results and I feel good and I was like man IT is dope I want to like keep working in IT and like when I got my like kind of the next job I was still kind of customer facing and it was it was nice because I could I could still kind of help people a little bit but the kind of human interaction like went down a little bit at that point and it kind of it was okay but kind of like the more my my salary went up the more kind of distance from like normal humans I got I guess and the problems like the more your salary goes up the problems that you're solving this isn't always true but the problems that you're solving are like not easy problems and it can take a long time to solve and you don't really get that like gratification from helping end users so it kind of depends on what you're doing like I really like working help desk I want to work help this every day but I'm like caught in a dilemma between like the salary and like the you know how how fun the job was I guess I rambled for a while there but I hope that kind of made sense like this I think that's a great point actually yeah it's I think that's a great point because it kind of just goes back to kind of figuring yourself out and what you enjoy doing there might be some people who would really not like help desk and interacting with the public and then there's you know it really just depends on your personality so that's yeah a great point yeah for sure I forgot about that I'm glad you I'm glad you brought that up actually I'm trying to extract that value I'm trying to extract that value okay so next is going to be the yes or no question section so if possible we want to keep it like under a sentence or you know one word answers are going to be good here but yes or no do grades matter in college when it comes to it I wouldn't say so no one's ever asked me about my grades and I don't put my GPA on my resume was it worth your time to join clubs when you were in college or maybe when you were getting your certifications I've never joined a club so I would say it's worth it if you can but it's definitely not necessary to to get a job how about leadership positions so if you join a club and you get a leadership position would that be something that's worth it definitely worth it so I would say yes but don't worry if you can't do that it's not really required but but yes I guess and then internships how are internships looked at in the IT field I would say yes it's worth it if you can get one definitely go for it but you can always substitute it with something else like creating your own experience or or anything like this and speaking of experience how about work experience does that matter it does it's really helpful and getting the interview like the getting the interview portion that's really useful again if you you don't have any like you can't get an internship or something you can always kind of create your own and stick stick it on your resume and then I think we already went over this a little bit but is networking important yes yes it is it's the single most powerful thing that you can use to get a job but you don't need it it's very good so yes but you don't necessarily need to do it and then how about skills how important our skills I would say skill is paramount so that will help you there's the getting the interview and then passing interview the skills will actually get you a job so it's it's very important to develop some kind of basic skills if you're trying to get into IT and then how about the school you go to is it that important to go to like an elite level school or you know can you go to community college and then just go to a state school how important is the school that you go to school is it's not important I would say you might even be able to go to like something that's not accredited just for IT like people because people don't really look at it so it's I wouldn't say the school is that important they'll probably just be like oh actually it's okay okay and then you know so it's not it's not that important and then this this is a tough one I'm going to have to read this sorry this is probably tough to do but can you rank from most to least important grades clubs leadership positions internships work experience networking skills projects and the school you go to that's yeah that's a tough one sorry no school I'll have to read from my list a little bit I kind of wrote them down in order so I'll just do my best here so the most most important is skill because that's what everything is about like you you just can't work if you don't have past your interview if you don't have skill next important thing I kind of grouped into one kind of I guess group like internships work experience and projects I kind of put those all under the umbrella of experience these things are really important they help you in both phases like getting the interview and and passing the interview pretty important Iris I wrote certification in here as that I don't think you oh you didn't give that as an option sorry I wrote certification like after internships just because it helps you it'll help you get the interview especially for your first IT job that's pretty important and you're networking I wrote networking after networking is like it's really strong but it's not something that you need to succeed in IT like I've I've never done networking before so I ranked it pretty low and I know a lot of people don't like to do networking I'm really introverted so I'm not I'm not trying to go out just for the sake of like meeting people and like trying to build connections I that's a real thing and I should do that I guess but I just don't so I ranked networking pretty low and then grades grades in schools about the same it's just not really important I've never talked about my my grades anyone and no one has ever asked me about my school and like an interview setting like oh I see you've gone to WGU here like tell me about that let's like never happened to me so yeah WGU I've watched a few of your videos WGU is Western Governors or Governor University is is that correct? Yeah Western Governors University got it yeah and WGU very interesting school you know I did a video about a year back where I told people to you know kind of avoid online schools if possible with a few exceptions and one of the exceptions that I mentioned was WGU now is then in the world since I did that video pretty much all schools are online at this point so I think it kind of calls for a little bit of an update maybe here in the next few months but let me know about WGU what was your experience like with WGU so I had kind of seen online quite a bit before I actually enrolled in it and I was a member of this forum it used to be called tech exams I think it's called like I forget what it's called now in the post-example community but anyway I kind of watched it for like a couple of years and I kind of figured what it was about at least the IT degree portion of it basically like with WGU you you pay for a semester at a time so you pay for like six months or I guess they call it a term and then you can complete like whatever you can complete in that six months is fair game so basically the idea is what what I did and like what a lot of people do is and then they'll just try to do as many classes that as they can they'll be like really disciplined about it and just knock out as many classes as they can like kind of thus decreasing the time it takes to get a bachelor's degree and then kind of decreasing the amount that you end up paying for tuition and it's really good you can pretty much to get out of it as much as you want because it's it's regionally accredited and a lot of the curriculum our industry recognized starts from like CompTIA for example or Cisco or ISE squared so like some of the classes will be like to pass this class you need to get your CompTIA A plus certificate so it it works out really well especially for IT because by the time you graduate you'll have like a bunch of cert certificates already and a bachelor's degree so it's pretty nice so yeah I had that's pretty much what I did I tried to like complete a lot of the certs before I actually enrolled so I I could kind of compress the time that I spent actually enrolled to doing WG work and then once I enrolled I just tried to like bang it bang out the degree as fast as I could so yeah I would say you know I haven't looked into all WGU degrees so I'm not saying but you know everybody watching this video should go there but I would say from from the research I've done there are certain degrees where WGU would be a great option because you could get it done and maybe you know six months to a year and it would hold the same weight as a four year degree from somewhere else and it would also be a lot cheaper so that is an option for some people to look into you know never believe someone on the internet make sure to do your research for yourself so it's a good option for you but I can say that out of the online school options that does seem by far like one of the best options I've heard mostly I would say like 99 percent positive reviews from people who have have gone there so yeah thank you for talking about that that was I think I might actually make a video on them at some point we'll see so let's say that somebody doesn't really have any experience in it but they are interested in getting into it how would they go about getting into the field I actually made like a whole video on this and I kind of talked about it a little bit in this in this interview but people can always kind of make their own experience like a portfolio I guess if you will so for example I guess the best way to explain this would be if like a lot of computer science majors like when they graduate and they want to go into software in addition to their degree they'll kind of make a portfolio like they'll build some applications or like a web app or something and they'll create like a GitHub where potential employers can like go and look at their the stuff they made and kind of maybe get a feel for like how how good they are I guess or the different technologies they've worked in so you can kind of take that same concept and apply it to information technology or cybersecurity or like kind of whatever field you're trying to get into so for example look at some technologies that are like really in use today and like a lot of businesses like Active Directory is pretty much used everywhere and then maybe Azure like Azure AD or any concepts within Azure or AWS because that's pretty much like a lot of businesses use that and then you can take for example like Active Directory and kind of like create some content around it like maybe a blog post or like a cheap YouTube video or something and kind of showcase your skills like set up the environment like create some users use PowerShell or something like this and like take that and then publish it like on your LinkedIn or like your YouTube or blog or whatever and then you can put it on your resume as well and that kind of becomes like experience because it it works really well because if the employer wants to you can put links on your resume by the way because it's it's 2021 and they can go and look at it and it's kind of like tangible tangible evidence as to like how how good you are like show them to be worked with this specific technology so it's a really good way to kind of generate experience for yourself if you don't have experience yet so I would I would highly recommend to anyone do that it's like super powerful and it's really underutilized especially getting your first job I I totally agree I think that's like kind of an out-of-the-box way of doing it and you know when it comes to applying to certain jobs a lot of the time the best thing that you can do is kind of stand out a little bit you know what a lot of people try to do I think and I think this is true for some things it's good to not stand out in certain areas for some things but when it comes to like showcasing your skills and projects and that sort of thing I think it's a great idea to stand out so you know some things I've seen people do is make videos like like record a video of themselves kind of pitching themselves to companies for instance kind of it kind of just demonstrates to the company that you are someone who thinks outside of the box you're able to not only showcase the skill but do it in a very creative way and you know what that tells me for instance if I'm a hiring manager or a business owner is that you're going to be very flexible and you're going to be able to learn stuff on the fly that kind of demonstrates that to me would you agree with that absolutely I would absolutely agree with that absolutely your video pros oh okay it fixed it fixed itself again sorry guys if you if you saw that I don't know what I'm going to get out or not I'm having some internet issues here it's raining outside so thank you again for your patience Josh appreciate that yeah I know no no problem we're having a good time yeah okay very important question this is a personal finance channel after all and I always like to say this guys money is not everything but it is important you know you don't want to be doing stuff for free so and this is a personal finance channel this is what a lot of the people came for so what kind of a pay it's getting into the IT field both right off the bat and then maybe you know a few years down the line so this is great question it kind of depends on where you live a little bit a little bit but for the most part it getting into the field you can you can expect maybe around between like 40 to 55K for like a help best for a help best job and maybe much more than that and metropolitan areas but just starting off it'll probably probably be somewhere around or something like this and you'll you'll kind of notice as you as you go through your career this is just my opinion so kind of take it with a grain of salt like the more you have the more you have to do things that are like creative so for example like if you're somebody who follows process for example and just does stuff for the business like help desk and like closing tickets your salary salary will be like a little bit lower than somebody who like like somebody who writes procedures for like the help desk people to do or somebody who like designs the network versus somebody who just like fixes like an out of like a simple outage or something like this it depends so kind of the more you get it you transition into like defining process and like designing stuff and like the more you get closer to like dealing with people like organizing like projects in that kind of stuff here pay like tends to go up a little bit and also the more you change jobs the how can I say like this isn't a hard rule but generally the more you change jobs the faster your salary will go up so for example for me I made a sorry to I'm not trying to like shill my videos but I made a video that like outlines my whole like career and my salary progression and if you if you look at that there was like one period of time where I I worked at the same job for about seven years or something and my salary to 52 K to 54 K to 57 K to like 60 K like every year and it's like it's pretty it's pretty slow but when you if you make an effort to like upgrade your skills and like change jobs it'll be more something like 50 K to like you know 65 K to like 77 K to like 90 K it will like it'll it tends to jump like quite a bit so the more you get to like the closer another kind of rule of thumb is like the closer you get to the business of things the more your salary goes up so for example I'm like a I don't like my job right now but I'm a program manager like cybersecurity program manager and I have some technical aspects but my job kind of involves a lot of orchestrating of other humans and making sure the the business I guess is compliant so it tends to have like a higher salary of my salary and I was like I guess just depends on like what you want to do if you want to do like hard technical stuff and you don't want to like interface with people like that that much it it may possibly be lower than if you work with management and like business and stuff but starting out 50k and then kind of the upper end without getting into like C sweet pay it's going to be like maybe like 150K and then to breach 150K you have to do some like engineer something like this or like a CTO or or something like this or you know work in San Francisco I suppose but I hope that can answer was like kind of all over the place but hopefully it gives like a sense of what the pay is like Yeah that's a great answer I would say just generally one thing I've heard in the tech field you know moving to Silicon Valley you're going to have a lot of opportunity high pay there tech computer science et cetera there's some other places that are kind of in the middle they're not necessarily maybe as expensive as Silicon Valley but they still have decently high pay and again from what I've heard New York Seattle maybe Austin would be some some other decent options there for you know getting some experience and getting up to that high pay grade and then maybe later on down the line after you've gotten that experience you can kind of move wherever you want would you say that's kind of a good idea Yeah definitely definitely agree with with everything you said there got it all right well awesome interview thank you again so much where can the audience find you Josh so I have a YouTube channel just it's just Josh Matacor it's my name I'm also on LinkedIn Josh Matacor you can like you know just connect with me there or follow me or whatever you want to do I also have an Instagram but I don't really check out that much so you can just like hit me up on LinkedIn or something and I I respond to everyone my channel is like not big enough to where I can't respond to everyone yet so if you hit me up I'll probably respond to you but yeah it it was a really nice being here thank you so much for like having me on this interview I'm quite honored your channel is very cool actually I'm sure people are probably going to ask questions down in the comments as well and if you would like to you can definitely respond to those down in the comments I'll try to respond but one thing I always sell people is you know on this channel I kind of give you general information just to give you an idea of where to look but job-specific information the best thing you can do is to reach out to people who are currently in the job you're going for they can tell you whether it's going to be worth it for you to get a degree or not whether you know you just need a certification whether you need to you know a bachelor's degree a master's degree they're the ones that will be able to tell you all those things and give you all those answers because maybe it was worth it 20 years ago but it's not worth it now there's there's just a lot of things that change so I always recommend you do that and a good way to do that is LinkedIn it's always a good idea and then I always say try to get a couple different opinions you know get a second opinion you might run into somebody who's overly optimistic about a career and then you might run into somebody who is pessimistic about a career so you probably want to get a couple of them is just to get a balanced outlook on that so again thank you so much much Josh for you again next time yeah for sure thank you thanks for having me appreciate it all right take care you too