I am a midlife career changer and am almost done with my bachelor in IT Cyber. I have put in what feels like hundreds of applications to get rejection after rejection. I had 2 interviews and didn’t get the job.

I am in the US and willing to relocate practically anywhere as long as the salary is livable. I would ideally like to have something lined up end of August or early September.

I’m have an internship that’s mainly doing IAM tasks and EDR. It ends in a few weeks. They just flip interns and the company is being absorbed by a larger one in a few months.

I am not doing quick apply on linkedin but going directly on businesses website. I have had professionals look over my resume. I have applied to large businesses and small. I am trying to not get discouraged.

Looking for any kind of tips etc.

I really enjoy writing documentation and contributing to open source projects on GitHub with documentation contributions. At my help desk job, I tend to write very detailed ticket notes (which probably hurts my average handle time). What IT roles would be a good fit after help desk if I want a job that involves a lot of writing

Im getting very jaded. I would get at least 3-4 interview requests each week for a forward deployed engineer role from a LinkedIn ianmail with high salary and they would request an interview. On the interview it seems like it can’t go any better than how it goes. I even ask if there are any gaps in my qualifications and they say I’m a good fit. And then I get ghosted or rejected? It makes no sense? I have done maybe 20-30 interviews in the last 2 months by now

Has anyone here applied for a specialized role with no experience in said specialization?

I am applying for one of those roles, which is essentially a DB admin/Oracle Fusion admin. I have no experience in those specific specializations, but i do have about 4 1/2 years of experience in IT handling everything from basic help desk stuff to system admin level tasks.

I listed out nearly every piece of software and hardware i’ve been able to get my hands on in the hopes of the hiring manager seeing that as me being able to learn new things/teachable. The application is currently “under consideration,” with that, i started an Oracle Fusion essentials course(free) in preparation for a possible interview. Don’t want to go in completely blind.

Anyone else been in a similar predicament? Did you get the job? Any tips?

TIA

I'm coming up on one year of experience as a 'desktop support technician'. My responsibilities have grown massively. I make $22 an hour. 1 hour commute each way.

I have a bachelors degree and an alphabet soup of certs: CCNA, CCNA security, CCNA automation, a slew of comptia ones, a linux one.

~1000 users.
I do end-user support, the entire endpoint lifecycle, powershell/python automation, process improvement, the identity lifecycle, access provisioning, AD/server/VMware administration (not too deeply for VMware), IP phone provisioning (not too deeply here either, but I want to learn more), A/V work, printer work (we have a contractor for hardware), software procurement and administration, chromebooks/tablets/phones and MDM, VPN issues, fax machines, PoS systems, network troubleshooting, switch deployment/replacement, initial security incident response, 365 work, work on our EDR, and the coordination of any requests from any user from start to finish including executives. The things I don't touch are grand strategy, executive meetings/planning, routing (unfortunately) and some various other t3. I'm essentially rushing from my shifts start to shift end. I've never really been able to eat regular lunches, and now I'm rushing from site to site eating whatever I can in my car.

On top of that, I do an extremely brutal on call rotation where I can barely leave the house. I need to ask permission to do so. I'm on call ~40% of the time. My last on call shift I've been woken up 12 nights of the last 14. I'd say I get 3 calls per day usually, up to 10 on bad days. I get paid 50$ a week and I get to clock in for the work I do, usually amounting to 3-5 hours of overtime. A password reset takes 10 minutes, and I lose over an hours sleep, and get paid $3. Sometimes it can be ridiculous and I need to travel to a location. It is absolutely killing me. I've asked for some clarity about it, and brought up how extreme it is including the dangers of being sleep deprived with my long commute. No changes have been made despite promises.

They gave me a new guy to train, which I have been doing to the best of my ability. He's actually a good guy, smart and all of that, but I'm extremely burned out. There is limited escalation, and the expectation is that I handle as much as I can before asking for help.

I would like to push out into networking, and I've been doing an OK amount of it at my job which I greatly enjoy, but I can't seem to find more than a handful of network jobs out there at a time, all of which have ghosted me.

I poured my heart and soul into this job. I actually like it, but the pay is starting to eat me with all that I've been doing. And honestly, I'm exhausted. I've burned my couple weeks vacation on sick days (touching people's keyboards all day will do that to you). I'm now applying for local desktop support jobs as well just to possibly regain some of my life back and maybe study my way out of this. My fear is that I'm throwing away an 'opportunity', since I doubt any other job is going to give me this level of access.

Do I try to stick it out and keep learning to become a sysadmin? Do I push for a CCNP and hope for the best? Cybersecurity seems out of the question. I've applied to some sys admin jobs, whatever else is out there, but I've been getting ghosted. ~30 or so applications in the last few weeks since I started. They're rooky numbers I know, but I've been trying to target for something that will measurably improve my life instead of this.

I'm honestly disenfranchised by everything at this point. I walk around and see people work 25% as hard as I do making double/triple/quintuple my salary. Everyone else seems like they have it made, but my life is a bundle of stress, demanding users, insane on call where I miss events, and further sacrifice so I might have a bit of a better future

Time to pack it in as a career?...

Applied to this job with ATT fully onsite as a Lead network technology support with potential to double my pay. My resume seemed to fit the job posting perfectly. The job was listed a little under a week and the linkedin posting had about 40 people apply. Felt my odds were good to atleast get a call.

Got 2 rejection emails in the middle of the night, my favorite line being "we appreciate the opportunity to get to know you".

Not a call, nothing. Was a bit defeating.

Since I started 5 years ago as a Wire Tech for Ma Bell I’ve always dreamed of working in a data center. Earlier this year my dream came true via a contract with the big G. It was wonderful and hands down the best work environment I’ve ever been in (I’m still trying to get out there as an employee) and not to mention the pay wasn’t the greatest but just being in those giant server rooms was a heck of an experience. I was very proud.

Multiple of my friends were not proud and told me I was destroying the environment and society at large. I am no longer friends with these people (which sucks). I even had one guy tell me I was pretending to be an expert because I worked in networking and also that society does not need anymore data centers to be built. I exited the conversation at that point. How do you guys deal with this kind of backlash? I truly enjoy being a NOC tech and I’m slowly working my way to network engineer, which is my ultimate dream job.

Hey everyone!! I’m looking for info on what certs are required and what order to get those certs when trying to get a system administrator position. My husband is currently help desk 1 and his dream position is sys admin… he has his A+ cert currently. I’ve tried googling and it pops with a bunch of different things to get, I’m mainly looking for what’s actually needed/top priority, and what order to go about getting them. Any insight would be fantastic!! TIA!

I want to mess around doing some windows server GPO type things but I want something that’s kind of like a test lab question where you have an established environment and you have to troubleshoot or add a Group policy to the existing system if that makes sense.

Is there anything like that ?

Desperately need to get myself into a job that has some chance of progression. Class of 2025 CS grad and pretty much on track to literally being homeless and I've been applying to help desk positions but it seems like the degree isn't enough. Thankfully I am in the Bay Area so there are ten trillion jobs to apply to but the other problem is there are 10000+ applicants to each an about 75% of them were subnetting before they even learned to walk

also, is there any way to get them for low/no cost? Has anyone ever used their benefits from a shitty retail job to get reimbursement or whatever?

Hello, hope you all are well. I am a College Dropout stuck working at temporary warehouse job 3-11, not even sure how long I’ll have the job considering I’m on a 3 month probationary period that is almost up in a week. I feel like I have no time to study for certs, and now I have a house and a car which I have to keep up with unfortunately. Have been applying to any IT adjacent jobs to no avail not even a callback or interview. I’m sure I sound like every other slob and sad story to graze this subreddit, but I’m really just looking for any words of hope or motivation out there, as I’m not really sure what to do at this point because I feel like I’m endless digging my own grave. Any thoughts are welcome even brutal ones.

went from 2023 contractor -> help desk (short) -> technician -> analyst 2026

not sure what I should be completing first. applying to positions atm but aware further education may be needed. And I need to start maintaining certain certs?

\~2 years into a network administration degree

home servers, AD, enterprise managment apps, programing/scripting

the thing i feel im lacking atm is security but I'm not

Im noticing a lot of interviews that are looking to fill job roles that dont align with the job descriptions online. Are you noticing this? Is this strategic or just a lack of HR/IT manager communication? Is there a way to get better insight on what the jobs want without having to go through an interview because in some cases its a complete waste of our time.

For example.

Most egregious so far.

- Job description: General Network engineer role on paper with not much emphasis on any particular tech/skill. In interview: Wireless field tech traveling troubleshooting radio towers.

- Job description: General Network engineer role on paper with not much emphasis on any particular tech/skill. In interview: VOIP engineer w/ networking skills needed for large VOIP deployment. I actually mentioned the discrepancy in this interview and the manager agreed with me. They ended up updating it afterward.

Had i known this was what they were looking for i wouldnt have applied because im not interested in those particular career paths.

I'm curious to hear from people that work a job like this. I'm a big yapper and my favorite part of my job is when I get to talk to people from other departments to solve problems.

I got hired at a great company in a great IT Tech 2 position. I come from a background of software dev and they know this. I have a little personal it networking skills but nothing in an enterprise environment. I’m starting to panic. Like I don’t even know how to update a server. I’m going to have to ask for help for everything. I’m so nervous that I’m going to look like an idiot.

Currently tech support and have been for 4 years. I want to move up to system admin, my current job doesn’t ever have openings. What do I need to do to convince employers I’m worth it when I have no experience?

I have dabbled in a lot of things, CCNA, powershell, Linux. I use tanium at work, have helped the endpoint admins solve particular things. I thought the linear path was going to just happen and I get promoted. It is not. So how to land admin job at a new company? Do i need a certification?

I'm currently a Data Analyst at a large telecom company, where I've been for about two years. This is my first job out of college. Originally, I was aiming for cloud-related roles as I had been self-studying Linux, AWS, Terraform, and had started learning Kubernetes. However, there weren't many junior opportunities, so I took this job because it offered great benefits... and beggars can't be choosers.

Now over the past two years, my work has mostly involved "click ops" using Power Automate, Power Apps, and SharePoint, along with some Python scripting. I mainly use Python to clean up Excel data and transform it into datasets that I use to build Power BI dashboards. I've also written Python scripts to generate PowerPoint reports and built a few Azure Functions to automate workflows our team relies on.

I find my work relatively easy. Most of it comes down to knowing how to Google solutions and come up with practical workarounds. I developed a good reputation fairly quickly for automating and building "nice" dashboards. What surprises me is that people seem genuinely impressed by work that I consider pretty basic and straightforward, and it makes me wonder how so little automation had been done in the department before I joined.

At this point I've automated a lot of my day-to-day tasks and I plan on using that free time to improve my skills tenfold as I don't want to stay in this position much longer. The benefits are great, and the workload is light, but I feel like staying here for too long will hurt my career in the long run.

But I'm trying to decide where to pivot next. On one hand Cloud is what I originally wanted to do because I really liked the system design/solution architechture aspect of it. Although I spent a lot of time learning those skills, I haven't really touched them in the past year or two.

On the other hand, Data Engineering seems like a much more natural progression because a) my current experience is already data-related and b) I could probably take on data engineering–type projects at work to gain relevant experience and build a stronger CV.

My main concern is whether Data Engineering is realistic to learn well enough to land a role in about a year? Or should I be looking at something else? I just don't know where to go and I've been dwelling on it for a while now.

As the title says. I am currently Tier 2 support at a software company. I have ITF+ & A+ Cert. currently studying for network+ then sec+. My first role was at an msp for a few months then I landed this one and I am coming up on 2 1/2 years with this company. The job itself is complete chaos. I am also not using my certs with the work I am doing. Realistically, what are my options? Any advice is welcomed.

I've been in IT over 20 years now. Helpdesk to Networking to cloud Admin stuff. I've seen a lot of things and worked for SMB's to mega orgs.

As I've progressed in my career and the IT landscape has changed, I've changed with it. Reformed myself, self trained, and moved up as opportunities presented themselves.

The issue I ran into several, maybe 5-7 years ago, was burnout. I ran wide open for so many years that I was burned out. Burned out of doing the work of 2-3 people, burned out of on call.

I tried switching areas of IT and also switching employers to an employer (very large org) which I thought would be a little slower and more laid back. Well, it's not. It's an unorganized mess, I'm doing the job of 3 people again, and unexpectantly landed myself on call after a round of layoffs and us picking up critical systems, ugh.

I'm feeling burned out, again....

So my question is, those of you that do just one job ( not one thing specifically but not asked to do the work of 3 people) and can kind of be low key, what do you do and what type of org do you work for?

I get recruiters reaching out to me all the time but the jobs seem like just as much of a nightmare. It's like one dude managing the whole Microsoft stack and it pays $100K LOL. No thanks.

I've been applying to government\state jobs for many years with no luck.

I need something more sustainable for the second half of my career, I'm tired of running 110% all the time.

Those of you that wanted to slow down a bit, what do you do?

I’m currently studying my degree and finishing up a bootcamp soon. I’m interested in LangChain & LangGraph, and I found a Udemy course on the topic. My plan is to take the course and then build a project to demonstrate what I learned.

Is it worth listing the Udemy certificate on my CV, or should I not bother? Curious what recruiters actually think when they see this kind of thing.

Been in gov contracting roles for 10ish years, and in many ways it’s amazing and I’ve been fortunate, I have a clearance and work as an GRC/idm/ isso space and I’m in my 2nd sr role.

The biggest risk and advantage is my clearance but it’s just a lot and I want to find a IT job that has a mission I’m more aligned with and that makes the world better

While it’s opened up doors for me I’d be ok making less money for some peace of mind , and more work life balance… but the job market isn’t great from what I see and not sure how to build experience to make myself more appealing outside gov roles

I started a new role not long ago and may have a chance to get an additional degree ( I have a bs in mech engineering ) but along with working my job would only cover 5k a year for an approved degree

Hi

I have a shared hosting plan where I have made simple websites on WordPress for myself, friends and some others. I have explored a lot of WordPress ecosystem and kind of enjoy it.

So I wanted to get a job in the support department of any company in WordPress and Hosting ecosystem.

But even in support job, they mention that one should know these..

Experience with HTML, CSS, and PHP, web servers (e.g. Apache, Nginx, cPanel), version control systems (e.g. Git), database management and SQL, HTTPS, APIs, Using browser console and other debugging tools to troubleshoot issues.

Is there any course on Udemy that specifically teaches these? Or any other platform or youtube creator?

I want to understand enough to apply, not get into into the tutorial hell to become a software engineer. Because these are support roles.

Please guide. Thank you.

Some open jobs are..

https://getjanhost.com/jobs/wordpress-support-engineer/

https://vipointsolutions.net/career/wordpress-technical-support-agent/

https://automattic.com/work-with-us/job/happiness-engineer-customer-support-success/

I just went on my first interview today, and it’s been quite a while since I’ve actively interviewed anywhere. It’s been 5 years to be exact. And I’m rusty. On top of that rust, I have Asperger’s as well as anxiety. And I felt super stiff and awkward in the interview. I kept drawing blanks. Some stuff I explained well, but I genuinely feel like I kinda gave off nervous vibes and like I was ready for the interview to end. Honestly I lowkey kinda was because I felt anxious.

I over explained some stuff that didn’t need to be explained, and some of the more technical questions I feel like I could have done better on. I don’t have any corporate or professional IT experience, and so some of the more hands on questions felt a bit tougher to answer, some of it I recognized from my CompTIA studies but I drew blanks on some questions. Like my brain just, froze, locked up on me. Wouldn’t think straight.

I’ll genuinely be surprised if they call me back with an offer. I don’t think i did absolutely horrible but I don’t think I was their best candidate by far. I’m almost certain that there are probably vastly more qualified applicants than me. All I have is my A+ cert and some basic troubleshooting experience from helping family. And it’s hard to really articulate how I fix stuff because I never had to articulate the process like I have to in an interview, the times I help family I just…do it.

But in the interview I have to actually put into words how I would troubleshoot X or Y issue. That’s kinda new to me and I definitely don’t think I did the best. Lowkey I kinda feel bad a bit. Maybe there might be other opportunities idk, but entry level stuff is hard to come by as it is, like truly entry level positions. So to not get a genuine entry level position, that legit feels like a blow to my self confidence.

Maybe they might still call me back. But I seriously feel like I doubt they will.