ExperienceRequirements #ITCareer #TechJourney #LearnOnTheJob
The Reality of IT Experience Requirements
You’ve just transitioned from a help desk role to a more advanced desktop support position. Congratulations! 🌟 However, you’ve had a revelation that many in the tech world can relate to: experience requirements can seem unnecessary and even frustrating. This article will delve into why these requirements exist and provide insights into the journey of getting past them.
Why Experience Requirements Exist
In the world of IT, experience requirements are prevalent. But why?
- Risk Mitigation: Companies want to ensure that candidates can hit the ground running, reducing training time and potential errors.
- Consistency: Experienced individuals are seen as more likely to maintain consistent performance levels.
- Cultural Fit: Employers believe that those with specific experiences are better prepared to fit into their organizational culture.
However, this approach does have its downsides.
The Learning Curve: Easier Than It Looks
In your journey from help desk to desktop support, you’ve encountered tools like O365, imaging, and Intune. Initially, these requirements seemed like insurmountable barriers. But once you started using them, they turned out to be more intuitive than you’d thought.
- O365 Administration: Many tools are designed to be user-friendly, with plenty of documentation available.
- Imaging: Once you understand the basics, it’s often a repetitive and straightforward process.
- Intune: Microsoft’s management tool is highly intuitive, making device management a breeze.
It begs the question: why were these skills deemed so critical?
Barriers to Entry: A Double-Edged Sword
While experience requirements intend to filter out underqualified candidates, they also:
- Limit Opportunities: Great candidates are often turned away due to lack of specific experience, despite having the potential to learn quickly.
- Stifle Diversity: The IT field needs diverse perspectives; high barriers can be detrimental to this goal.
- Induce Frustration: Talented individuals feel disheartened, leading to disenchantment with the industry.
Rethinking Recruitment Strategies
Given the drawbacks of rigid experience requirements, what can companies do differently?
- Focus on Potential: Assess candidates based on their ability to learn and adapt quickly.
- Offer Training: Invest in training programs to bring new hires up to speed.
- Mentorship Programs: Pairing less experienced employees with seasoned professionals can bridge the knowledge gap.
Your Personal Growth: An Inspiration
Though the experience requirements felt like a hurdle, your path demonstrates that learning on the job is often the best teacher. Here’s how to leverage your experiences:
- Showcase Adaptability: Highlight your journey and ability to quickly master new skills in interviews.
- Network: Connect with other IT professionals who can offer advice and referrals.
- Stay Informed: Keep up with industry trends to anticipate what skills will be in demand.
Conclusion: Experience Isn’t Everything
Your story underlines a crucial truth in the IT world: while experience is valuable, it’s not the sole determinant of success. The ability to learn and adapt is equally, if not more, important. As companies begin to recognize this, the path for talented individuals like you will hopefully become less obstructed.
Got thoughts or a similar experience? Share in the comments! Let’s reshape the narrative around IT experience requirements together. 🚀
That’s why the best thing to do is find 5-10 jobs you’re interested in, sort out the key requirements, focus on those, learn those things, put them in a resume and apply.
“Ignore requirements, apply anyway”
Degree requirements for the entry level or help desk/desktop support jobs kills me. Makes hiring a nightmare when HR is throwing all the resumes in the trash because they don’t have any degree, even though you don’t need one to do the work.
Yup, welcome to IT, people treat it like some foreign black magic where you need 20 years of experience and a blood sacrifice to maybe be good enough. Reality is at least to start with it’s super easy.
I was able to move to a system technician role because i was in school to become an engineer and they thought that was big enough credit for it.
Job itself? i could have done it half assed when i was 17, nothing exactly rocket science about resetting passwords and installing preconfigured images on laptops, or plugging things in.
These days I’m doing work more along the lines of what i actually study for, as a system specialist at a bigger MSP.
I think what you’re learning is that often experience requirements are not the reason you are denied for a job. They’re easy to latch on to, but often not an actual good explanation of the reason you didn’t get picked.
Yeah, apply anyway or just do projects that involve them and say you have experience on the resume. I will say however that it entirely depends on person. You might find things pretty self explanatory but they might also hire someone that has to be told the same thing 10 times
This can be true to an extent, but if you were walking into the same role with zero experience you wouldn’t have the same context for the actions you are taking.
All of those would have been easy to enable yourself on and opened even more doors. Congrats on the move.
The important part in IT is not the “WHAT” you do (because as you say, any monkey can follow a bulleted list of instructions).
The important part in IT is the “WHY” (WHY and what is the context of the steps you’re about to take).
Context is always key. A certain set of instructions (step by step) may seem logical to follow,.. but do they apply to the situation in front of you ?.. They may not always.
Course, you don’t get that experience if you don’t have access to the tools. Any good IT dept should have some strategy or plan to teach younger people,. because eventually the older people are going to retire or leave.
Of course it’s true the lowest level of IT can be trained in a relatively short period of time if you are at all tech savvy, but why hire you who knows nothing when there could be 20 better candidates. Heck it could be your resume is horrible, so many people on here go on and on about their “perfect” resume and it just contains 100 buzzwords with no relevance.
You should probably change this mindset though if you are wanting to go into a higher tiered position, as you will need to know more and more with less hand holding.
Most people find that even if they lack this type of experience, they can interview well and get the job. The majority of teams just want someone who will fit in with them and be willing to learn. They’re not actually declining someone for a job because they’re not experienced with imaging, they’re saying that’s the reason because it’s a lot nicer than “we didn’t like you”
True.
Also, one job maybe going away, but the idea is to have a staring point for skills which will help you with your next job search.
There’s 2 good reasons for experience requirements.
1st is to reduce the amount of time training and onboarding. Not just your time, but also the person training or supervising you.
2nd is to gauge your ability to learn newer and higher level materials.
For entry-level positions, the 1st matters more. If they’re paying you, they want you to be able to jump in ASAP and be productive. As you move up, the 2nd reason starts to matter as things stop being so self-explanatory.
Yeah. You are all fine until there is an actual tech emergency. Then you shit your pants and call a consultant
Maybe you can easily learn it, but there are a lot of idiots out there that can’t. I’ve worked with people that can’t work through a simple checklist, are awful when it comes to low-level decision making, would struggle to troubleshoot their way out of a plastic bag, and probably couldn’t recollect what they had for breakfast that morning, so good luck figuring out what they actually changed before they escalated the ticket to you.
Hell, I had one helpdesk guy get red in the face arguing that he had informed me that a particular user issue occurred on Citrix, not a laptop. The issue started on a Wednesday. It was now the following Monday. I had been on holiday the week that the issue occurred. I was 800 miles away from him, my work laptop, and my work phone. We hadn’t spoken. This was the first time I had heard of the issue. This guy thought he had the skills to be a ‘Senior Workplace Specialist’.
So now imagine you’re a company. You take someone with no experience in the areas you want them to have experience in, spend months trying to train them, find they cannot grasp it, and then you have to let them go. You’ve wasted hundreds of man hours and thousands on salaries and you’ve gotten nothing for it. You’re right back to square one, having to hire someone again.
The alternative is that you don’t take the risk and you don’t hire the person with no experience in the areas you want them to have experience in. Yes, your IT teams are down a person. Yes, your existing staff are now overworked. Yes, this presents an operational risk. But that extra salary you might be spending on someone that doesn’t work out isn’t being spent. You get to pocket it, while you wait for an ideal candidate. And, when you find the ideal candidate, you don’t have to spend time training them because they already know what they need to know.
After 22 years in IT as an employee anyway, I completely agree. Some things definitely experience helps, but an intelligent person can definitely self learn.
Its one of the main reasons I have considered getting out of the field like the interviews in IT are so bad these days that its ridiculous. I have been employed constantly for like 14 years in various tech jobs mostly in smaller companies and have a lot of knowledge on a bunch of random shit. These people probably think I’m a “paper tiger” cuz I can’t remember the exact click path or powershell for AD since I’ve been primarily entra ID and Intune for 3 years now. I have failed intervews for saying that Entra ID is a service and is not a normal domain controller it doesn’t use gpos. They told me that its just a domain controller in a VM and you can add ram which is flat out wrong. This is the problem with IT you cannot get a job without extensive experience and certs and degrees and all this shit but even if you are up on things and learning MD102 level knowledge about the modern desktop shit you can get thrown out of the process by IT guys who are 10 years behind who don’t know the new shit and think you are lying. On top of this they all want degrees which I have but at least 20% or more of the older guys doing the hiring process do not like you having a degree. You basically cannot win in this field. I can teach a monkey how to add ram in Hyper-v but I failed an interview before for not being able to tell them how to do it off the top of my head they really expect you just to know the steps from memory. I can find it when I need it which is like once a year.
> They’re seriously denying people because they don’t have experience in things that can be easily learned?
You’d be amazed at how many idiots are out there.
I’ve been turned down for positions because I had plenty of experience with ticketing systems, but with the one the company used.
It’s like saying “I don’t care if you’ve driven a Chevy for 20 years, we need someone with experience driving a Toyota”
You are scratching the surface. For entry level jobs that may be true, maybe even for some easier intermediate position but at a certain level the company would have to spent a lot of resources and time to get you where they want/need you to be so it’s just “better” to go with someone that has experience with the sofware/tools/language,…
At least you possibly dodged a bullet. If their hiring practice is like that, then it seems logical to conclude their culture and workload might suck.
If you take someone with a CCIE, even if they were pretty much just a paper cert in terms of experience, and then you have them manage AD, that org is doing it wrong.
If they have 100 candidates applying for 1 position, they need some guidelines in place that help sort through those candidates quickly. While it may not be necessary to already know those specific things in order to figure out the job, they can quickly get rid of the candidates that DON’T already know those things in order to more quickly find the right fit for the job.
This isn’t unique to IT, and unless it’s a bigger company with decent training, then why would a company hire with no experience. I’d say majority of people suck at training others, or just flat out don’t want to. Plus, you’re probably intelligent, a fast learner and study on your own; not everybody can honestly say that about themselves.
In some cases as others have said – its more of an aptitutde/training issue. It will never be advertised as that, because everyone will say they can learn a role. True, almost all jobs can be trained. 2 critical factors in that:
1. Can the trainee pick-this up with nominal effort?
2. Does the trainer have the stamina to train to the level needed so the trainee can be on their own, *in addition to doing their normal job*?
I’ve been on a team (more of the business side) where the trainers were not patient, one bit. Taught me a BIG lesson about sticking to what I know and sometimes you can be a good employee, but not all roles will be a good fit for you.
> I realize how self explanatory it is.
Take that to heart and realize the low skill ceiling of that position. Learn what you can, move on to something where the requirements have more value regardless of how it is written in the job req.