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How to Build a Career in IT

One Career That Pays Well, Research Says

By Tobias GillotPublished 5 years ago 3 min read
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Working in IT can be immensely rewarding. It’s a challenging way to solve new problems every day, and it can lead to significant earnings for those who have the smarts and the work ethic to make their professional dreams a reality.

Of course, succeeding in IT is about more than just being smart. To get where you want to be in IT, you’ll need to know what sort of path leads to a career in this area. You’ll need to know what to study in school, and how to demonstrate your knowledge to potential employers. We’re here to help. Here’s how to build a career in IT.

Make computers your passion.

If you’re going to be successful in IT, you’ll need more than the minimum school and certifications. You’ll need to do more than just punch the time clock. What you’ll need is a real passion for computers, and the kind of understanding of technological systems that can only come from the hands-on experience of a dedicated hobbyist.

If you’re going to be the best IT professional that you can be, you need to spend your free time tinkering with computers. Take up building them in your spare time, or just mess around with coding or related topics. It’ll help you when you go pro.

Read up

You’ll do lots of studying in school if you want to become an IT professional, but you can do a lot of things in your free time. Read the books and read the blogs. A good IT support blog will give you great insights into the world of professional IT, while blogs on technology and computer-related topics will keep you on top of the latest technologies—the sort of technologies that, as a trained and certified IT professional, you’ll be expected to be able to keep running as they should.

Get a college degree in IT or a related field.

IT professionals tend to be pretty educated folks. So if you’re going to make it in this business, you had better become pretty educated yourself. A bachelor’s degree in IT or a related field is a good starting point, but don’t feel that you have to stop there. In fact, a master’s degree is the preferred level of education for an IT professional, experts say.

The more educated you get, the more competitive you will be as a candidate for the top IT professional jobs in your area and beyond. The classes you take as an undergraduate or a graduate student will teach you the principles and techniques that you’ll need to solve the biggest problems you face, and the degrees that you earn will signal to your employers and potential employers that you’ve learned these important things. It’s hard to understate the importance of a great education to the future of an IT professional, so study hard.

Get voluntary certifications.

Once you graduate and start working IT, you’ll no longer be in school. But that doesn’t mean that you’ll be done learning. With the way that technology keeps changing, you’ll always have to be learning new things to master your job and its responsibilities. When you’re an IT professional, you’re a lifelong learner.

And you can and should communicate your proficiency with these new skills, and your familiarity with these new techniques to your employer and potential future employers. You can do that by taking certification exams and programs, and getting post-graduate certifications that demonstrate your knowledge and ability in certain areas. Some are basic entry-level certifications, while others are more specific and challenging ones, that make a big difference for established IT pros.

Getting these sorts of non-degree certifications can really increase your earning power and employability. So be sure to invest in yourself, and build your resume through certifications, even after you’ve begun your career as an IT professional.

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