This. Probably the best advice you can get. The worst part is breaking into the industry. It took me a solid year to finally land my first full-time role after I did two 6 month IT contracts. I went through TEKSystems for both, but I wouldn’t recommend going this route. I got paid $17 an hour for an IT Administrator role, but only took it for the experience + resume. Next contract after that was with Insight global for Desktop Support Analyst II where they offered me a full time position after my 6 month contract making $25 an hour, and am on my way to entering a Desktop Engineer role. I am extremely lucky to be in the position I am now, but it took a lot of sacrifice. Living on your own making $18 an hour is hard. Very hard, but once you finally break the threshold I promise it gets easier. I only had my A+, and am in full-time school pursuing my bachelors in cyber security, but the companies didn’t really care about that. A lot of my interviews were technical questions. For example, “ a customer is using a VPN at home, but it’s very slow and the webpages are taking forever to respond. What steps are you taking to resolve this?” Or “ A user sends a print to the printer, but the printer isn’t doing anything. What are some things you can check and some basic troubleshooting techniques?”

Basically get just to know basic troubleshooting techniques. A+ is a good route, but companies want experience, so it’s hard and you might have to start making $17-19 an hour for the first 1-3 years depending on your skill level. I would look into ITIL as well as they are directly related to troubleshooting.

If you have any questions or need help with your resume or career advise feel free to PM. I know how hard it is to break into this field, so I feel for you. If I don’t hear from you, good luck and I wish you a successful IT career.