What's an IT profession that is realistically possible to self-study for and become proficient enough in to get employed within a year? - eviltoast

By employed I mean get a job in the industry either offline or online. Ideally something that would highly likely remain in-demand in the near future.

  • viking@infosec.pub
    38·
    9 months ago

    Entry level networking technician. You can get a bunch of useful Cisco certifications for free on their website. Try to get yourself an old switch from ebay to practice setting up a small network, vlans etc., and you’ve got a solid start.

    • Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works
      28·
      9 months ago

      Try to get yourself an old switch from ebay to practice setting up a small network, vlans etc., and you’ve got a solid start.

      This is what (older) millenials had to do when they wanted to play video games with their friends, no broadband internet, we moved the computer, set up a lan. Good old time. But this is how 20-25 years latter, I have basic knowledge of network, and look at puzzled Gen Z kids when I tell them to set their IP adress and ping the hardware

        • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          9 months ago

          My entire devops career started with writing stupid E2 programs in GMOD and hosting a private Minecraft server (IIRC it was Bukkit or something similar). This is the real pride and accomplishment.

        • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          9 months ago

          I work in cybersecurity now, though I spent about 15 years in Systems Administration. I credit my career to my father buying a computer and letting me tinker with it. There were two factors that taught me a ton about computers:

          1. Creating boot disks for games (this was back in the heyday of MS-DOS).
          2. Realizing “oh shit, I had better fix this before dad gets home.”

          Nothing teaches how to work on computers quite like working on a computer. And much of that “working” is actually figuring out how to un-fuck the computer you just fucked up.

          • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            1·
            9 months ago

            The last part is a gem I will forever love.
            Nothing quite like the oh fuck.

            The job equivalent for the customer is us saying “That’s unusual” :)

      • Meowing Thing@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        9 months ago

        Your comment made me really nostalgic for the days of setting up pan parties, configuring hamachi servers, etc. Good old days

    • CMDR_Horn@lemmy.ml
      3·
      9 months ago

      I see this as also a very future proof career. Even if businesses move the vast majority of their infrastructure to the cloud they’ll still have an on premises network presence.

      • viking@infosec.pub
        1·
        9 months ago

        I didn’t use any video resources back when I got into it, so really couldn’t tell, sorry. But I’m sure there will be some networking 101 courses on youtube.