I am wondering what kind of career moves I have available to me because I am over the bullshit of desktop support. I have been brushing up on my Linux skills, learning docker, and doing a whole bunch of networking-related things. At this point, I am 46 years old. Would it benefit me to go back to school to learn a skill to help me advance beyond this role? I just don’t know what to do. There are many options, none of them truly low cost and all of them involving a significant amount of risk.
I get that there is no avoiding risk when making a career change so late in life. I was looking at training for Java or Oracle and it isn’t cheap. Maybe given my experience I could teach A+ or Network+? I don’t know. I’ll welcome any ideas right now.
When I got burnt out I did a hard turn. I now manage a Turkey Farm and just do IT on the side. Most relaxing decision I’ve ever made
Users are definitely harder to train than turkeys
There’s not enough Linux admins. Come to the dark side. I make so much more money than I ever did doing desktop support.
The hard part is convincing somebody to hire me without formal production experience. I am in the classic Catch-22 situation: How do I get experience if nobody will give me the opportunity?
Go look on upwork for some gigs at your current hourly rate. Once you do one or two the interviews will go much smoother.
Highly recommend this Linux admin path for you. Knowing from personal exp the pay in support desk vs devops, you might 4x your pay inside 3 years.
QA work has a fairly low barrier of entry, and from there I’ve known a few people who moved from QA into Developer roles. So there’s that route.
With Docker and Linux you could check the opportunities in the field of IT operations.
The best advice I can give is to get away from a front line support role. If you stay in tech you could work your to engineering, sysadmin, data stuff, or project management. If you want to get away from tech go as far as you feel you can (because once people learn your good with computers…).
I’ve been in a support role for 25 years. I can stomach it no longer.
Then. Honestly. You need to do a radical shift. No matter what part of IT you are in you will still be doing some level of support.
I don’t think I mind the support aspect. I just want to work at higher level than I am currently at where I have more challenge and reward.
There’s a lot of good advice here. I just want to add that you absolutely do not need to go back to school. It’s a waste of money! I’m 100% self-taught, work in “DevOps” and not a single employer in the last 6 years has asked me about my education or credentials. I enjoy it and it pays well. You don’t have to do DevOps though. Lots of jobs in IT and employers are competing for skills.
How many employers have you gone through in 6 years?
3 (all contracts and by choice). But I did at least a dozen interviews in the same period and no one ever asked about any diplomas.
Ah the interview number makes sense with your post. At first glance it read like you had had a seriously large amount of jobs in that time which didn’t seem very desirable.
