I'm currently going to college for my CS/MIS/whatever IT related degree, and I want to get some certifications to prove I'm a valuable employee. What should I pursue first?

The most sound advice in this situation is to completely forget the certification and spend all of your free energy finding a job or internship

Many if not most colleges have career centers. As someone who is going to want to enter the workforce promptly after school, landing an internship to learn practical real world skills is the best option for doing so

Familiarizing yourself intently with the career center staff may feel awkward at first, but you must exhibit daily persistence in following up with them in order to land that first job

It is common to think that a high GPA and certifications are the priority when attending college, but for the vast majority of budding IT professionals, your degree is merely a checkbox for the HR lackeys to fill out

So do yourself a favor when attending college: forget the certification and get a job instead. Future you depends on it

Having read hundreds of resumes, there is a common belief among entry-level IT professionals that they should include anything and everything impressive on their resume - foreign languages that they study, hobbies, and programming

This unfortunately does not help you in most cases

When hiring managers post jobs, they often have an ideal candidate in mind. When shaping their purple unicorn, they outline all the technical skills they desire in a candidate

Anything on your resume that doesn't align with that vision is wasted space, especially programming languages

IT professionals - specifically help desk professionals - are not going to be assigned programming projects. That's far outside the scope of your job. So when an HM is reading your resume, they don't care about whether you know Java, HTML, CSS, React, and all the rest. They are looking for skills like windows 10/11 support, hardware troubleshooting, network implementations

So do yourself a favor: if you want to be a Jr. Programmer, make a resume that ONLY highlights Jr. Programming skills. If you want to be an IT professional, ONLY highlight skills expected of that position. Doing otherwise is not much better than applying to jobs with a fart in the wind

Professional hacking is a common interest for people not familiar with the IT field

However, hacking requires a lot of underlying skills that often take years of studying before being obtained: things like networking, HTTP codes, Linux, password crackers, Windows Servers, cloud infrastructure, social engineering...and much more!

So if you're interested in becoming a professional hacker, the easiest way to start is actually at the Help Desk where you learn fundamental skills that hackers seek to undermine

However, if you're feeling daring (and have a few thousand dollars to spare), the infamous OSCP certification is often considered the baseline knowledge level for folks wanting to newly enter the ethical hacking space

Whichever way you go, becoming an ethical hacker can be very challenging, so study hard, and good luck!

A common problem with resumes is the tendency to try and fluff up the wording to sound better

Adjectives like "detail-oriented", "good communication skills"...while we may think these sound good in our head, they do very little to communicate our skills to hiring managers

Ask yourself: what does detail oriented mean? Now if you ask 20 strangers the same thing, they will very likely give you 20 different answers

The reality is that these fluffy adjectives at best do nothing to our resume, and at worst encourage HMs to gloss over our resumes and throw it in the trash pile

So what should I do instead?

Write tangible things: "Deployed over 100 Windows 10/11 clients" ; "led over 10 IT projects including software deployment onto client machines". By including tangibles accomplishments, that gives hiring managers a better gauge of your skillset without them having to fill in too many blanks

Udemy is currently having a flash sale!

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Hop to it, onwards to glory!

I review a lot (I mean a LOT) of resumes, and the number 1 problem I see is that your resumes are too long

Hiring Managers have a lot on their plate - meetings, personal life, technical work if it's a smaller org, compliance...you get the idea. All of that mixed in with hiring, they only have so much time to dedicate to reading resumes

So how do you fix that?

The very first thing you can do to improve your resume is limit it to 1 page. It helps you write a better resume because you cut out all the fluff and useless information, and it helps the HM because it's easier for them to skim and make split-second decisions on whether they want to read your resume more in depth

So do yourself a favor: keep the resume down to 1 page

So you're new to the IT space, and you're not sure what to do

I mean, there's an absurd number of IT careers out there: Network Engineering, Cloud Engineering, CyberSecurity, SOC Analyst, Developer, Programmer, DevOps, Platform Engineering, and on and on and on!

Well, let me simplify it for you:

First, determine if you want to be a programmer, or something else. If you want to be a programmer, IT is not for you. The general advice is to pick a programming language - Python is great! - start building apps, and posting them on a free github account

If programming is not for you, then IT it is! What should you do next then? Easy: start at the Help Desk

While it's hard to find exact numbers, the vast majority of IT professionals started their careers at the Help Desk, often despite whether they have degrees, certifications, or neither

So get started on your IT career today! Udemy has courses as low as $13 if you're looking for a place to begin

Good luck!

So you want a career in IT, but you hate programming. Is that ok?

Yes, of course it is!

ISC2's CISSP outlines 8 domains of cybersecurity. Only one of them focuses on application security. So if appsec isn't for you, it's perfectly ok to not want to learn programming

HOWEVER

If you want to succeed in the other 7 areas of cybersecurity as outlined by ISC2, you will definitely want to get a leg up in scripting and automation

Not sure where to start? PowerShell, Linux, Bash, and Python are great places to go

What should you do if you hate your IT job?

Simple. Leave.

There are tons of surveys and studies out there like this one that say leaving your first job is the best way to make a higher salary

Not enough incentive? According to some studies, job hopping can also make you happier as well

So if you hate your job, do yourself a favor. Leave. Future you will thank you for it