Same story as the others. After leaving active service, I landed my first job through word of mouth and the second by walking in, saying, "Hi, I'm <name>, I think I'm qualified to work here. Mind if I leave a resume?" That alone tells an employer you've got initiative, purpose, basic manners, the ability to click print, and can handle face-to-face interaction without a mommy. That’s already 90% of what they're looking for. Also, if you're IT: get certs even if you have a degree. It's harder to flunk a college class than it is to pass most exams.
Yeah, so We have realized that employees come in "active" and "passive" types. I intend no shade to either type as people, and we have great employees, who are great people, who come in both varieties. But they are very different from a hiring perspective. Passive employees will do the task in front of them, and if they don't know how to do the task, they will stop. they will tell you they cannot do it. And they will wait for instruction. They can be lovely people, they can have incredible empathy for those around them, they can be witty conversationalists with impeccable skill at whatever it is you hired them for, but they will error out the minute they are faced with something unexpected. Active employees can be given a general lay of the land and left to run. They will encounter hardships and they will google their way around them. They will come to a place they're not comfortable making decisions and they will give you the relevant information so that you can. They will march their way through an issue until a solution is beyond their ability to puzzle their way out and in the meantime they will focus on some other problem from some other direction. We welcome passive employees but they can be exasperating. They will do Their Job and any deviance from Their Job causes a run-time error. We've had passive employees sit stunned for half an hour over their inability to unclog a toilet. We've had passive employees panic that the computer went down the minute they unplugged the router to plug in their space heater. We've had passive employees lock up over not receiving instructions on the difference between Google Docs and Microsoft Word. We welcome active employees but we also know we only have them until they find something better to do. But as long as we have them they open horizons. They broaden possibilities. They solve problems we didn't know we had because we aren't doing their jobs. And we definitely favor active employees over passive ones because fuckin' hell we didn't get into this to boss people around, we just needed the physical office in order to increase reimbursement. In my opinion, anyway, demonstrating that you are active rather than passive is the first, biggest thing you can do to interest me in finding you a position. And that definitely starts with coming at me in a way other than clicking "quick apply" on Indeed. Even if you're NOT. My wife ended up being a software architect in charge of benefits programs for 10,000-person companies because her accountant resume mentioned she'd taken a course in MS Access at Egghead Software one Sunday afternoon. It was a three hour overview but it was enough for the department head of a completely different department to bring her in for a job she didn't apply for. If I saw a 3CX certification on a receptionist applicant I would hire her sight unseen because then I wouldn't have to deal with fucking 3CX. And the only reason I deal with fucking 3CX is there's nobody else to do it.Also, if you're IT: get certs even if you have a degree. It's harder to flunk a college class than it is to pass most exams.
That's a tricky one. No doubt, as you classify, I'm the active type. But, if I ever had a boss-or at least a direct lead-who actually did their job (kept techs insulated from the non-techs, had the guts to say "no" to management or client), I'd never leave. I imagine babysitting the passive types gets old fast. Are they at least self-aware enough to appreciate the work, or do you get the worst of both worlds: helpless and entitled? How much time do you need to teach MS Access? If you walk in without understanding Venn diagrams, three hours won't help. If you do, that's plenty of time to cover syntax, templating, and data types. And if you followed that conditional, congrats-you're basically a database engineer already. For entry-level certs, I usually recommend CompTIA's. They're industry-recognized, fairly platform-independent, and if you can go from a pile of parts to a working SOHO setup, you'll pass ez-pz. Given your Zork-a-thon, I'm guessing you already know this, but hey-someone else might need the tip. I'm so sorry.we only have them until they find something better to do
MS Access at Egghead Software one Sunday afternoon
3CX
The boss that plucked my wife's resume off the accountant pile holds as her mantra that all employees should leave her employ better people than they came in. More education, more skills, more attractive to other employers. It's a contract - they give you their time, you give them your money and that contract is open-ended. If your employee has grown beyond your needs its in both your interests for them to leave and find something more suitable, singing your praises to everyone they encounter. We're still friends. My wife married her boss to her current husband 20-odd years ago. We watched the Superbowl at their house. It's a winning strategy - recognize that everyone is people but work is just a bunch of tasks. My IT experience is autodidactic AF. I took comp sci so long ago that they taught us Turbo Pascal and Fortran and I sucked bawlz at both. "Man who hack at root soon kill tree" is tattooed on the inside of my forehead. But I needed what turns out to be some seriously complex performance out of a phone system and back in 2016 you could still reasonably roll your own on 3CX. We've just completed a 3-day semiannual audit for our professional certification and apparently we blew the auditor away with our phone system. "If you sold this, midwives would line up outside your door to buy it," she said. Yeah, but then I have to deal with 3CX on behalf of other people.
Seems a bit too humane for most, though I'd prefer to work at a smaller, more specialized place after graduation. My former boss only confirmed what my resume already said: that yes, I worked there between the listed dates. I started clueless about tech, was expected to figure things out on the fly despite lacking any training. I had to get my skills up to using websites like freecodecamp.com, and ended up as one of the go-to troubleshooters. If you can turn it into a design document with an implementation procedure, it might just become another product that some entry-level losers get stuck dealing with. Shit. That'd probably be me.The boss [...] recognize that everyone is people but work is just a bunch of tasks.
My IT experience is autodidactic AF.
but then I have to deal with 3CX on behalf of other people.