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You’re early 20’s is the first stage of full independence or building towards. You might have left university, seeking an IT job, looking for a place to stay, fulfilling a career etc etc

I left university in early 2011 and studying IT for 3 years. If I had someone to tell me what I needed or should have known during my early stages of my IT career, I would have wanted to hear the following. If you’re seeking a tech / IT career pathway. Trust me you’ll want to grasp the following.

• You will need to continue to learn after you leave the classroom
  • Probably heard of this one right?
  • It’s true. The classroom is such a limited space to learn you really only grasp 1% of the real workforce.
  • You go on a discovery of people, processes, procedures, politics, ways of working. Nothing educational institutions teach.
    • Learning institutions teach books, tutorials, lectures, classes, right and wrong answer etc.
      • There is some value in delivering this at a young age, but having these be taught right up until the early stages of your career, actually doesn’t show you the real workforce world.
  • I always proactively think to myself, when there’s something new to learn , where are the existing examples, where can see/hear so I actually know what I’m learning. After all you can’t do what you can’t see?
• Learn systems. IT systems, process systems, delivery systems etc
  • Everything is a system
    • You get up in the morning, drink water, go to the bathroom, have a shower, get dressed, grab you’re belongings, buy coffee, tap your pass on the scanner to enter the building, you go to your desk, drop your belongings, turn on your lap top etc etc etc.
    • What I’ve described above is a personal system
    • After you turn your laptop, you open monitoring and altering dashboards, check alerts, attention these alerts, speak to the affected stakeholders of these alerts, close the alerts, write report on why the alerts triggered overnight, speak to the developers that will fix or better the alerts etc etc etc
    • What I’ve described above is a process/technical system
  • Understand that no matter how small or big you’re task is, it’s part of a system
  • Once that task fails, other parts of the systems fail
    • Using my process/technical system as an example, what happens if the IT user didn’t address the alerts? What would happen to the system? Applications and programs will become inaccessible, other users won’t be able to login, reports and data won’t be delivered etc. These are the consequences of parts of the system failing.
  • When entering the workforce for the first time, master your immediate surrounding of the systems you manage/support, and then in time build extra 10% of knowledge outside your system
• Nothing stands still
  • It was 2016 where I got my first role promotion. I was promoted from a L1 Helpdesk/support role to a L2 application support role.
    • Boy was I a fish out of water :/
  • After spending 5 years on the help desk, taking calls, closing tickets, getting high call closure rates, solving l1 customer issues like showing customers how to produce reports from the reporting system; how to place online payments; how to build their front end of their online shop, I entered an environment which was completely foreign to me.
    • Linux, servers, scripts; rsync, automation; bmt control-m, vendors/3rd party systems, support, projects, feedback, managing customers and stakeholders expectations below and above etc
      • Quite a bit of mumbo jumbo right?
  • I went from kick a** mode closing 10’s of calls and emails a day to, oh……. s**t what’s all of this?
    • Oh yeah I remember seeing that dark screen in university for that operation systems class; oh that long sentence was actually a script; oh what’s this ssh key, public and private key business? (Me reminiscing of the past)
    • Oh and pardon the language 🙂
  • I felt strange, weird, almost left behind, and what was worst I had other people around me in the same position getting promoted into this L2 role but they had an idea (skills, knowledge) on the L2 role?
    • I was thinking to myself….. why didn’t anyone show this to me? 🙁
    • There was also people younger than me just entering the L1 role for the first time as their job, so now I had to also transfer
      • Some of them even knew the content on my screen, and what was worst they asked me, ‘what’s that?’. I was not able to answer.
  • Luckliy I pulled through. I realised this was my new role, I needed to reset, absorb the new systems/tools/processes around me, document these experiences, and build from there.
  • Ultimately I managed to conformably understand what my new role required of me.
    • I did struggle at the start and even a bit to the middle, but the journey did open my eyes, that nothing ever stood still.
• People don’t know what they don’t know (you need to know what you want to know)
  • The world of tech, IT users get lost in acronyms, words, terms, processes, systems, other users etc etc
    • Similar to a car, when you turn on the car all you know that the key, goes into the key slot / ignition, turn the key, hear the car to start, put the car into drive / first gear, pump the gas and away you go.
    • You don’t know about the intricate actions of the motor, gearbox, engine etc
    • This is similar to the tech world
    • You will only know you’re part at first. The person next door to you will be the same, the person over the room will be the same, heck even the middle managers and Snr managers will be in the same.
      • Each of the parties mentioned are only looking towards one way
• Ask for working examples
  • Never been presented with a new system? Lots of diagrams, circles, boxes, database icons, arrows etc etc?
  • Don’t think you need to learn and understand these new systems straight away
    • It’s not possible
  • I would get the guru or the person that knows the system end to end (fingers crossed), and get them to show you in detail how the system talks, connects and communicates
    • E.g. Show me a log of how I know this service talks to this service, how do I know a successful API call, what is the expected output of this service during success and failure etc etc
  • Don’t go straight into problem solving mode, go into asking how does this work mode
    • Be sure to document keywords, draw yourself sections of the system for it to make sense to you

Summary

• Learning continues past the classroom
• Learn systems
• Nothing stands still
• People don’t know what they don’t know
• Ask for working examples