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Don't Panic in Quest for IT Knowledge and Skills

By Ed Tittel June 26, 2012 1:30 PM
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IT training and certification expert Ed Tittel advises a reader good in computer skills but with a limited IT education.

Don't Panic!Dear Ed:

Here is something along the lines of: “What do I do if I'm ‘good with computers’ but have limited or no real education background in IT and am thrown into a situation where I'm the guy in charge?” for you to chew on.

My situation is this: I do have a background and education in IT, but I never intended on actually having a career in this area until I was randomly told to be the IT guy. I work in a small company and we don't have the time or money to outsource IT, so I found myself occupying that position by something like fiat or acclamation.

Well, now the company has grown quite a bit. I presently find myself constantly learning and searching for answers. In these searches I see a lot of people with even less experience trying to get help as well.

Do you start with reading and learning from all kinds of books? Trial and (hopefully not too disastrous) error? What is the best approach for me to take to make the best of this situation when hiring others is mostly out of the question?

Thanks in advance for any insight or advice you might care to dispense. I could use it!

Mike


Dear Mike:

There’s something about your story that makes me think of the advice from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by the inimitable Douglas Adams – namely “Don’t Panic!” You would probably also do well, just like Ford Prefect, to keep a towel with you at all times, too. But actually, joking aside, it sounds like you’re making a pretty good go of it, and doing the very best that you can in a demanding and occasionally tricky situation.

So first let me say “Congratulations! Keep up the good work.”

As you’ve searched for answers, you certainly developed a workable response. If by “ready and learning” you also mean using Internet search as well as digging between the covers of the many good books you can find on most conceivable IT tools, topics, and technologies nowadays, you’re doing what pretty much everybody in the field does. A certain amount of “trial and error” is necessary for everybody in IT these days, but it’s incredibly important to conduct such trials on test systems well-isolated from the production systems and networks that your growing business needs to be working to keep itself going (and getting bigger all the time).

My advice on trial and error, in fact, is to look for the results of other people’s trials – and errors – first and foremost, before conducting any such experiments yourself (don’t worry, you’ll still have to do this from time to time anyway because as big as the collective universe of experience documented on the Internet is, you will still need to know things that NOBODY else has tried or documented).

Whenever I hit snags or am troubleshooting and not making headway, the first thing I do is search the Internet to see if anybody else has experienced my problem. If they’ve experienced the problem, they may also have fixed it, or at least found some kind of workaround. I’d have to say that this approach helps me get around 50-60 percent of all the tough problems I face. And if it works for me (and lots of others, to judge by the large number of forum and social networking posts you can mine for such information) it should also work for you.

There’s one more thing I’d urge you to consider in your quest for knowledge, skills, and competence. Certification: that is, if you can find an IT certification that covers your areas of key activity and competence, you should probably read the books at a minimum, and perhaps even consider taking classes and exams to earn the credentials involved. These kinds of programs are designed to keep people current on new tools and technologies, and to make sure they stress best practices, analyses, and troubleshooting that’s relevant to real-world, on-the-job needs and situations. So I’ll encourage you to look for such things in your primary areas of work responsibility. And do feel free to pepper me with questions on this kind of stuff, if the dozens of articles and how-to pieces I’ve written for Tom’s IT Pro in this part of the IT biz don’t do it for you.

Best of luck in your upcoming career planning and development; I think if you just keep at it, you’re going to be OK!

Ed

Ed Tittel is a 30-year-plus veteran of the computing industry, who’s worked as a programmer, a technical manager, a classroom instructor, a network consultant and a technical evangelist for companies that include Burroughs, Schlumberger, Novell, IBM/Tivoli and NetQoS. He has written and blogged for numerous publications, including Tom's Hardware, and is the author of over 140 computing books with a special emphasis on information security, Web markup languages and development tools, and Windows operating systems.

E-mail Ed at etittel@tomsitpro.com with your request for IT certification or career info, or your ideas for future blogs. If your e-mail leads him to a blog topic, he’ll have the Tom’s staff send you your very own Tom’s IT Pro t-shirt! Be the envy of your friends and colleagues, and help him help you with your IT career! If you do have a request for Ed, please read his How to Help Me Help You blog posting, and answer as many of the questions this post contains as are applicable to your situation and inquiry. Thanks in advance for helping make his job easier that way!

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