Interested In A Tech Career?
The world of computers, the Internet, consumer electronics, and gadgets of all kinds have changed the world and continue to demand respectable wages for its workers and innovators alike. Although there's no guarantee of where you'll start after choosing a temporary job or career in tech, it's an investment in understanding the future and having a chance to move up as needed. Here's a few career paths and non-committal job types in the tech world that can take you out of the misery of an average career and into something that can modify almost every other industry.
Don't Know Computers? Learn Tech Support
One mistake that many job seekers make is underestimating their ability to learn and their eligibility to work. Technology represents a scary, high obstacle to people who aren't familiar with computers. By using entry level job requirements as a goal for computer jobs, you could start slow and work your way into a new career while learning what you thought was required to work in the first place.
Technical support is basically a mechanic for computers. They fix or troubleshoot problems ranging from virus infections to damaged hardware and help users add new programs and features to their computers. Don't worry if you don't have the skills to do those things right now, as learning the skills can happen within a year.
Many entry level technical support jobs include training, and they aren't always expecting a super geek or engineer-level expert to handle the phones for maybe $10-20 per hour. For some job opportunities, they just want someone who knows how to turn on a computer, open and close programs, and perform one vital task: use a search engine.
Although there are efficient ways to handle certain problems, the ability to search for an answer, apply a fix, and document what you did is the core of tech support. If you can do that, the bottom level of tech support jobs is wide open for you.
Working Your Way Up And In Many Directions
Once in a technical support job, you can learn more about your job and become qualified for other aspects of tech. Even though personal computers have been popular for a few decades, the Information Technology (IT) and Computer Science (CS) fields are both in their rapidly-changing infancy and spawning other disciplines.
As you learn how to troubleshoot computers, you learn more about how they work, what threats exist, how to defend against threats and how to make things better. You may enjoy repairing and maintaining computers as a system administrator, or a field support technician who visits clients for higher and higher-profile repairs.
If you notice that some programs don't work the way they should, or seem to have strange errors, you may learn how to look up the error codes and the programming behind these codes. This can lead to learning programming to either continue troubleshooting, start a career as a programmer, or become a quality control analyst to stop errors before they start.
Have you figured out how to get people's internet connections working? Great! Open your eyes to entire businesses with internet problems, the science of wireless internet and avoiding interference, or even handling the distribution of the internet as a networking professional for Internet Service Providers or businesses in need of dedicated networking staff.
If viruses and other forms of intrusion are your target, Information Security is a growing field as well. Head to nonprofit job search engines, such as Foundation List, to find your tech career future.