How to Learn IT Skills

IT is, not surprisingly, a hard field to figure out. It is not just hard for a beginning looking to find out about the field, it is hard for seasoned professionals with lots of experience and access to resources. IT is big, IT is varied and IT is hard to identify until you are well into it - from the outside, it's very hard to even know who is and is not an IT professional as people in several related fields including bench, management and procurement often identify themselves as IT and even more people are often lumped under IT by organizations, especially small ones.

As someone, especially a student, outside of IT it can be daunting just to find someone truly in the field to ask basic questions of. Going to teachers, parents, random adults and even professors will often lead to almost random results. If you are a student, you will often lack even the resources that you might have if you were working even an entry level job somewhere that could call into the helpdesk and ask someone how to get into IT! And if you do manage to find an IT person to interview, there is a good chance that they will be rather entry level and may be looking for many of the same answers that you are seeking.

Finding mentors is a subject all of its own. But learning IT can be done in relative isolation. While hard to find, IT is a field often anxious to help those seeking to join its ranks, generally friendly, often passionate about what it does, one that is dedicated to self education and education in general and one of the most prolific in resources - if you know where to find them.

So where do we go to learn our craft?

Books A lot of people, especially those not in IT, like to think that books are antiquated and that even when they are good that they are outdated too quickly to be useful. This is not the case. Contrary to popular believe IT is not the fast moving target that people like to imagine that it is and, in fact, the rate at which things change is slowing as the industry matures. Books are great for learning fundamental concepts and almost everything that you really need to understand in IT is actually the basics - if you really know how things work, you rarely need that much more information to understand the specifics of an implementation. Sitting down with some excellent books and reading what industry leaders have said over the years can move you forward very quickly.

I often point out that nearly everything that I know about IT I learned in a few years of heavy reading two decades ago. When you learn the fundamentals, the basics, they really don't go out of date. You need some new information from time to time, but it really is not that much. When you know how things work and what terms really mean you rarely need very much specific information to be very functional.

Reading for the industry is not something that will every go away. Books are digital today making them much easier to manage. A digital library is essential to good IT learning. And many IT books are available free online either as a download, a web page dedicated to them or even built right in communities like MangoLassi!

Home Labs Building and maintaining a home lab, as well as reading lots of books, are the two most essential, yet the two most overlooked resources for getting into IT. Books build knowledge, labs build experience (and portfolios.) There is really nothing that you can learn on the job that you cannot learn first at home. And learning at home, on your own, discourages leaning on someone else to do certain parts that you may not understand, to overlook something thinking that someone else would do it, to not have the crutch of having some or most of the environment built for you. You can do anything and everything. And take theory and put it into practice.

There is basically no limits to what you can learn in a home lab. Only the customer service portions of IT are truly out of reach in that scenario. What you do at home can easily become the most important experience that you can have.

Blogs and Magazines These can be a bit hard to pin down. Good ones come and go but some of the best persist for a very long time. These resources are better for keeping up with the latest in what is happening in the industry and less, far less, about learning basics. Can be a great way to learn about the latest trends, topics and products.

Professional Communities You already found one, that's how you are reading this now. Communities like MangoLassi can be one of the best possible resources that you will find. Communities like this are perfect for asking for advice, getting peer reviews of your ideas, connecting with other professionals, getting access to vendors, documenting your education, projects and progress. Ask questions, try to answer questions. Meet people.

Conferences and Local User Groups Get out and meet people face to face. Watch presentations. Give presentations when you can!

Certifications The IT field tends to talk about certification a lot and for good reason. Lacking many gauges of skills and experience, industry certifications become increasingly important. Today, certifications are not nearly what they were twenty years ago, but they are still important for showing effort and dedication as well as providing a predictable and often complete learning path for self study - which can be instrumental in helping learners avoid missing major topical areas which is a risk when learning on their own.

University Of course it goes without saying that there are traditional university programs for IT education. This can be a useful path, but it is important to understand how universities work and how they are meant to work and make sure that you are looking at good schools, programs, degree paths and types and have set expectations properly.

Vendors IT is a field built heavily on vendors, and while it is important to be cautious in how vendors are engages because they have an agenda to push (sales of their products and services) they also create the products that as IT professionals we use to do our jobs. So vendor training and resources are often some of the most important "specific" knowledge that we get in IT. Most vendors are very happy to provide educational resources as the better their products are known, the more sales they are able to make.

This article is part of a series of Foundational IT Knowledge - SAM IT Basics.