Hello, and welcome to How to Get Started in IT. I'm Cherokee Boose, and today, well,
I'm talking about how I got started in IT. When I was young, I had aspirations of
becoming a journalist and working for some glamorous magazine maybe like in Anna
Wintour or something like that, but the reality of it was I ended up working for
a publishing company and our main product was a newspaper. And it
definitely wasn't as glamorous as I had envisioned. So between the hum of the
press, and the smell of the ink every day, I was reminded of a 2:00 p.m. deadline
that we had. And it was very monotonous. I had the same task every day and the only
challenge would be an occasional issue that would arise with maybe a
co-worker's computer or printer.
And that would kind of be the highlight of my day is really helping people with
those sorts of problems. And just going through day in day out without having
serious challenges, I had to finally ask myself, you know, could I continue to
do that and the answer was no. I couldn't sustain a career in that particular
field and also be happy or have that self-satisfaction if you will. And I took
a leap of faith, I enrolled in a tech school and luckily I had a really great
instructor and he encouraged all the students to immerse themselves in all
thing tech, and that's exactly what I did. I started at an internship for a
networking company I was just trying to learn as much as I could in a short
amount of time. I also picked up a job as a traveling computer and network repair
technician. And this was such a difference from what I had seen before
because not only was every day different, but literally every job was different,
right? And like I said it wasn't always easy, I had my fair share of problems. I
can remember this one woman who actually thought that America Online was the
Internet. (you've got mail) As you can imagine, there are gonna be challenges
but I was having problems thrown at me from every different angle and having to
solve them and it was challenging and that's exactly what I needed at that
point in my life. And again my instructor was such a great instructor, he also
encouraged us to not only focus on our technical skills, but also to really look
at improving our people skills. So what he would do is volunteer the students to
help out around the school repairing computers helping staff with any kind of
technical issues they had. He would also have us give presentations and one day
after a presentation that I had given in in the particular classroom, I didn't
realize how important a certain member of that audience was. But after the
presentation, she came up and introduced herself, and she was the director of the
school, and she asked me a question - she asked if I could teach night classes, develop
a curriculum and do that. I had never done that before but could you imagine?
This was, this was awesome, everything that I was working for was starting to
pay off, and so ever since then, I never really looked back. I made it a point to
do my best at creating that curriculum and making a course that really helped
individuals. And from that particular course, it was a success, I had a lot of
good feedback. And so another job opportunity spawned from that particular
night school class. So I guess the moral of my story would be if you put in the
hard work, and prepare yourself, getting yourself ready, you will be prepared and
ready for when those opportunities do present themselves because if you are
putting in the hard work and effort, they will present themselves. So, if you want
to share your story about how you got started in tech definitely do that in
the comments below, and if you want to learn more about, well, how to get started
in IT. Feel free to subscribe to the channel. See you next time.