You’re lucky I’m bored at work. Since I have some free time for the next hour so, I might be able to provide some prospective for you since I graduated with a degree in CSIS and have been working in the industry for over a year now. This will be long, so bare with me.
First, you have to figure out exactly what it is you want to do. Do you want to work the helpdesk? Work with routers and switches? Do Systems Administration work? Work with Databases?
Depending on what you want to do, the route to getting a job in that field is different.
Helpdesk:
This is where almost everyone who didn’t go to a prestigious school / have internship experience starts out. All helpdesk positions are not created equal. You have your bottom tier helpdesk jobs which are call centers jobs. Your day to day will be extremely fast paced where you are required to complete as many tickets as possible. You'll be working mostly with remote users and most of them will have bad attitudes. Your boss will constantly be on your *** about your productivity, and being more productive then average actually hurts you, because you get lumped with more work / escalated calls because you stand out. Some may say that’s a good thing because your boss sees you as a person they can come to whenever there are problems, but **** that. If you’re working at a call center you don't want to be promoted. You want to work just hard enough to blend in and accumulate good references while you study for more advanced certs.
All helpdesk positions are not this bad. If you're lucky, you may get a job at a company where you work the helpdesk, but you also get to play around with hardware and directly interact with users. This is what you want for a first job because there will be tons of opportunities for you to learn on the job.
As far as education goes, if your goal is to work on the helpdesk, then certs are the way to go. Study for your A+, Net+, and ITIL if possible. The A+ and Net+ are your base certs. You'll need them for any position in IT as they will provide you with the basic knowledge of computers that you will need to survive in the industry.
Network Engineering / Working with routers and switches:
Your chances of getting into this field without experience are pretty much nil. Experience is the name of the game when it comes to these types of positions. Whether you have a degree will not really help you during the hiring process if you do not have prior hands on experience. Realistically, you start at the helpdesk then move up to these types of positions. People who jump into these types of positions with only a degree are people who built labs at home and have played around with the hardware until they mastered it. You’re probably not at that level yet. So your best bet is to complete your A+ and Net+, get a job on a helpdesk, then begin studying for your CCNA. I don't really link vendor specific certs, but one of the great things about the CCNA is how in depth they go over the TCP/IP protocol stack. That knowledge will be good to know in any positions especially where you're trouble shooting internet related issues. Besides the CCNA, you'll need to seriously think about creating your own lab to test out what you learn in your Net+ and CCNA studies. Buy some used hardware off ebay for cheap and learn how to create your own server. Create your own personal domain for all the computers in your house with services like DHCP and DNS included. This will teach you tons of new things as you will need to actively troubleshoot as you go. Once you’re comfortable with that start adding some cisco switches and routers to your lab and start playing around with creating vlans and setting up route tables for your home network. If you want to end up in a networking position, you have to know this stuff like the back of your hand. It will be incredibly easy to pick you apart in an interview if you do not know your stuff.
Systems Administration:
A lot of the information from networking engineering also carries of here. I won’t duplicate what I’ve already said, so heres what you need to know. The certs you need: The basics (A+ and Net+) and a MCITP and/or linux+. You can throw in the CCNA too. The MCITP will teach you the ins and outs of administrating windows based servers and the linux+ will give you some familiarity with linux which is HUGE. I emphasize huge because if you know linux well, it is very easy to get a job that pays 6 figures. Once you get familiar with linux, you want to focus on learning bash scripting and the sed and awk commands. You’ll want to get into the habit of implementing all the things you learn from these certs on the machines in your lab. This will help you remember the things you learn.
Database Admin:
This is the only position where I would recommend that you get a degree in order to enter the industry. This does not mean that you can’t learn this on your own, but the concepts that relate to database like SQL, indexes, and unions are very difficult to master on your own without the right tools at hand. Databases and programming are probably the only things I learned in college that I probably would have had trouble learning on my own.
let me know if you have questions.
