IT Career wanted - anyone no much of Computeach?

[Synbios]

Hi,

I am 24, currently work in Accountancy practice and hate it. I don't want to be an Accountant. I would like to work in IT and have recently been in contact with Computeach who assure me after I finish their MCDST course (which will cost £1700) their careers department will find me an IT job at around the 22k mark and I can go on to study further.

This seems all a bit too good to be true to be honest. I was even encouraged to quit my curent job (oh how I'd love to) to complete this course of theirs sooner!

I gather there are a lot of IT Professionals on this site and would greatly appreciate any advice on making the career change and also any opinions about Computeach.

Thanks

Chris

Edit: Argh, how do you change titles?

Edited by Synbios on Wednesday 11th August 19:38

Edited by Synbios on Wednesday 11th August 19:45

[TuxRacer]

I really wouldn't touch Computeach. My suggestions would be one of...

- Go back to uni and get a degree.
- Educate yourself, take on work for nothing to build up a CV/portfolio.
- Take some very specific courses in the part of the field you're interested in perhaps an SCJP (err, maybe OCJP now) for Java if you're interested in programming, for example.

[AJS-]

Have you considered being a Lion Tamer?

I don't know about Computeach specifically, but I suspect they would give some fairly generic training then place you in an entry level support role that you could get yourself, with a bit of chasing around, and save yourself £1,700 too.

[stigmundfreud]

The courses that promise ££ jobs, the only people that get any value are them. How can you pay your way into a skill with just 1700 quid? The jobs arent there, the ones that are will require you to demonstrate experience.Unless you want to be a help desk monkey earning minimum wage (which are at threat from outsourcing/off shoring)

Think of them like Red school of motoring

[bonsai]

Before you give those shysters £1,700 of your money (and ideally instead of), I'd recommend buying this http://www.amazon.co.uk/MCDST-Self-Paced-Training-... (or similar - there's a few different ones that cover the 2 MCDST certifications)

That will show you the course contents.

You need to be aware that you can get an MCDST with self stufy, at the cost of a book or two and the exam fees £88 each.

So about £200 or £1700 (and the false hope of a guaranteed job in IT) - your call.

One thing before you sign up though, try and find a testimony from a happy computeach student... that isn't a shill

[Puggit]

Back in 2000/2001 I was in a similar predicament and age.

I decided to such a course (with a now defunct company similar to comuteach) which cost me £1000. The premise was that the company would find me a role after the course (which was essentially desktop support). Whoever employed me after the course would put up the remainder of my training fees.

I was extremely lucky that Veritas were growing rapidly, and against the trend at the time (the dot.com bubble bursting). They approached the training company to help them expand quickly. I started work for them a few months later after another training course that they provided before employment commenced. I started on around £20k.

9 years later I'm earning 6 figures.

My advice? Do it yourself, as others have said above - I doubt you'd be as lucky as me.

[Synbios]

Thanks guys,

Puggit, that's impressive. Are you now working for yourself? That's my long term goal. My excel VBA is pretty handy, I'm thinking of freelancing - building simple, easy to use finance systems for small businesses to gain experience whilst I learn IT. I've built some good ones whilst working at the practice, I'm not sure if it has legs as a trade though.

[stigmundfreud]

wages can go up and down and as puggit said he got into a great firm at a great time. Likewise I was at the forefront of security at the end of 1999 and start of 2000. Career was skyrocketing but back then security was a hot potatoe with only a handful of us in the country doing what we did. Just the day before I was to start a silly wage job I was in a bad accident and out of service for 4 years careers never got back

Thing is back then there were a lot of niche's to cut your teeth in. Now the entire industry is awash with jobs that have no worth. By that I mean jobs for jobs sake, everthing that worked is now replaced with lumberous departments that are full of staff in self justified jobs. No more does one person do it all, now each person does a small bit and passes on. It appears to me that the industry is dead or rather it no longer rewards ingenuity and woe betide anyone to put their head above the parapit.

OK its not all like that but as the industry has "matured" as with anything that matures there is little scope for break through, risk or reward. I'm now looking to go part time to follow my other interests but like you I am quite good at excel vba. Self taught, I'm a trained coder from college days so wanted a challegn and taught myself. Good luck with that, its a valuable skill as it happens and transferable to many other platforms, if you can do Excel vba you can do vba.

The wonder jobs are no more, the higher than average wages are no more, the party is over. Other things to remember is that IT work is typically very unsociable hours and can be rather lonely if you dont get a team office based role - typically they pay less unless you are experienced in which case you need to take the slow game.

[Synbios]

Now I'm depressed Lol.

No I see what you're saying. To be honest chasing ££'s is the mistake which led me into Accountancy. I just wanna do something I enjoy, ideally as my own boss. No climbing corporate ladders, no office politics. Just worried my desperacy to get out of my current job will cause me to act rashly.

[Puggit]

Nope - I don't work for myself. I've crossed to the dark side, and work in a sales team - but doing technical sales (also known as presales)

[LandingSpot]

Office politics ain't that bad (obviously people dependant), and often by generally always wearing a smile (not that I know whether you do or not!), you can do a lot to neutralise it.

[stigmundfreud]

Then may I suggest you follow your VBA idea whilst still working? If I am completely honest the only thing that has prevented me from quitting my job (other than a depressed market!!) is the absolute fun I've had in developing an excel tool that has streamlined a certain complex process. The tool I have basically been given a brief aim for then thought fk it I can make it do all this much more. I was always a creative coder and when I see a goal I think right, well thats all well and good but lets see what could actually be done. Soon as the original spec was met I took a copy and have taken on the task, have learnt so much as a result and enjoyed every day and each day I think about better ways

Like you I want to enjoy myself, coding is something I utterly thrive upon but never could get my head around visual programming. It was only as a result of doing a simple excel book last year I decided to try my hand. Once you can code you can program any any language you just need to learn the new lay out.

If you are an accountant and can code some spreadsheets do it, but you have to think of testing, security, protection etc. Take it off line if you fancy having a chat about a little business venture with this shizzle! Accountancy is funnily enough something I had recently looked at as a career change, well, registered book keeping as I just want to do a little bit here and there

[Synbios]

I expect your VBA skills are superior to mine by some distance!! Mine are handy compared to other Accountants, not compared to an actual programmer, sorry for the exageration there. I'm definitely going to study VBA more before I feel confident enough to sell my work. Shoot me a pm if you still wanna discuss possibilities. And thanks for your help.

[stigmundfreud]

I would never call myself a programmer/coder - the last I did was 15 years ago in COBOL and VMSDCL. Old school but old 2nd and 3rd gen you had to learn a lot of optimal coding routines etc, visual makes it a lot easier to be sloppier but if you undertand basic principles you can do wonders. The key to a good programmer is not just the end code and meeting the requirements but in pseudo code, drawing the paths and code logic down in english to then conert to whatever laugnage you are using. Pseudo code is universal, its the underlying logic to your program

I'm only 8 months into doing vba and have a lot to learn but I know enough to know what I need to learn to do the tasks I cannot. Like today I needed to do something, knew logically what it was so researched how to do it and now its done. Thats the trick, you just need to know enough to know what you need to quickly learn to do the tasks

Crack on with it, if you think already you have an edge over others you come across thats good. Now you must have that idea in the back of your head lets talk business you get the idea I'll code it we make shed loads and you get to learn for free

its win win

[clonmult]

Puggit said:

Nope - I don't work for myself. I've crossed to the dark side, and work in a sales team - but doing technical sales (also known as presales)

Presales .... often wondered about that, but doubt I could ever do it.

I'd definitely go down the self training route though - computeach sound like they're making stuff up about guaranteed positions. The days of being able to guarantee a post in IT are probably long since gone (unless you've got a very specific skillset).

I've been relatively lucky over the last few years - was stuck in a development role that got converted to 1st line support, and whilst in that role had a chance to cross train to support the companies Service Desk tools (BMC Remedy). Its not the most lucrative job in the world, but I'm one of probably only a few hundred in the UK working on it, and even europe wide there are probably only a few thousand.

To make it in VBA (or related), you'll have to stand out though, as VBA developers are relatively common. As others have said, stick to your day job, and work at your coding/development/design skills on an evening, and with luck everything will go your way.

[SuBo Wrestler]

VBA coding especially with Excel is a skill you can take to pretty much any career, definately worth doing!

[TooLateForAName]

Huge amounts of IT work revolves around accounting systems.

Forget the computeach crap which is just going to push you into low value roles. You already know something about business processes and accounting rules. Try to get into projects where you can use your existing knowledge. Good money as a business analyst working with any of the big finance systems. SAP/Oracle/etc

[edc]

TooLateForAName said:

Huge amounts of IT work revolves around accounting systems.

Forget the computeach crap which is just going to push you into low value roles. You already know something about business processes and accounting rules. Try to get into projects where you can use your existing knowledge. Good money as a business analyst working with any of the big finance systems. SAP/Oracle/etc

Was going to post along similar lines. Used to work for a financial systems software house and we would often take on non-IT people who had business/technical skills to become consultants.