Sunshine

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Forgive me for burbling on about the weather again. This last week in Britain, particularly in the south east of England has been brilliant. Warm sunny days of up to 26 degrees. Blue skies. Ah bliss!

 

I spent many years in Australia, so I probably find the British climate more trying than most. To have weather like this here is awesome. If this is global warming let’s have some more of it!

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Age

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Is age any barrier to an IT career? It looks like a young person’s world from the outside, but is that true?

It’s true only in the sense that the IT world is full of people of all ages. If you go to one of the new start ups, you are more likely to find young people – that’s their bag.

Go into the corporate world and it’s a very different story. In a large IT department you will find people of all ages, from those just out of school / college right through to folk who would be well past their sell-by date in many other industries.

In fact, in the ranks of managers, project managers and business analysts you are likely to find the full spectrum of ages. Certainly old age is no barrier if you have a bit of common sense and some experience – it even helps to give you a bit of “gravitas”.

A lot of the reason for this we have touched on before. The IT industry is so desperate for good people that they will accept people of all ages to fill the slot.

Naturally you will sometimes come up against ageist organisations, but just ignore them and move on – there are plenty that aren’t. I particularly avoid jobs which advertise stuff like “we are a young, dynamic company looking for hungry people”. All that means to me is “we want young gullible people who will work very hard for not much $”

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Consider the following success stories for more mature people:

Winston Churchill didn’t become Prime Minister until well into his 60s.

Geoffrey Chaucer who wrote The Canterbury Tales did so between the ages of 54 and 61.

American writer Charles Bukowski got his first novel published at the age of 49 – before then he worked a ton of dead end jobs!

Ronald Reagan became the Governor of California at 61 – and you already know he was an actor before!

Colonel ‘KFC’ Sanders didn’t start frying those chickens successfully until he was 65.

Susan Boyle came from nowhere to be a world wide singing sensation at the age of 48.

It makes switching careers at any age into IT seem fairly normal – don’t you think? So don’t be put off. Anyone with a bit of determination and a willingness to learn can get into that top 10% income bracket at almost any age.

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Testing

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One huge area of growth in the IT world in recent years is in testing.

Many people, even IT professionals, don’t really understand what testing is and who does it. Those people smart enough to get into testing find that they can quickly earn similar money to a programmer, and test mangers can command project manager levels of remuneration. That’s serious money!

So what is testing? It’s actually not much more than systematically exercising a computer system to ensure that it does what it is supposed to do.

Years ago testing was mostly handled by programmers. In recent years the realisation has dawned that this wasn’t a very good idea, as programmers tend to assume that their creations work, rather than prove that they do.

So what qualifications do you need to be a tester? Surprisingly, like many jobs in IT, there really aren’t many generally recognised qualifications, other than the usual “previous experience”.

Most people drift into it from other jobs such as training, general clerical, analysis, support etc. What is really nice is there is not that much to learn.

Most of what you need to know about the theory of testing can be learned in a few hours. The rest is just experience and practice.

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If you are interested in exploring whether you could work in IT Testing, or if you simply want to know what it’s all about, Jack’s Guides can help.

How to get a job in testing is discussed at length in our e-book “Jack’s Guide to Lots More Money” available at http://www.jacksguides.com/itjobs.html

“Jack’s Guide to Effective Software Testing” tells you all you need to know about IT testing, why we do it, how we do it and all the theory you need to know. Check it out at
 http://www.jacksguides.com/testing-jobs.html

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If you are ready to make the leap into a much better paid job or contract, and be perfectly positioned as the recession eases, see our website at www.jacksguides.com