Been thinking about undertaking an IT/Computing course for a while now. Partly to broaden my knowledge base but also with an eye on a future career (change). Have a general interest in PCs and have built one recently and want to further understand software and possibly learn programming. Generally interested in having a better understanding of the computer world but also want to learn about something that may be commercially useful. I know this sounds quite vague but can anyone suggest a posible course such as an OU degree or something on-line.
cheers

De web is where it’s at – I’d say PHP/MySQL/HTML/CSS are the things to learn.

De web is where it’s at – I’d say PHP/MySQL/HTML/CSS are the things to learn.

Educate me – what does this mean – programming code??

I’d say that web programming is a reasonably safe bet to find career prospects, personally I don’t enjoy it. Those are indeed languages that you can learn, I’d say to learn HTML5 for prospects going forwards.

I’m more interested in complicated algorithms, designs etc… for non-web software. For stuff like that I’d say you’d want a course teaching something like c++ or java that covers design principles and design methodologies. Generally just a software engineering course, I think that one of those would give you a fairly rounded base that you could then further specialize from.

NOT hardware! Unless you want little more than minimum wage and are prepared to drop your private life (and sleep) for the company’s benefit!

I would go for C#, have a look in your area for jobs requiring C# on job serve.

my it skills have become a bit niche 😥

software testing seems to be where the money is – 2 mates earning 6 figure salaries in this area

cheers for all the responses so far.
Can anyone recommend a specific course which I could look at as an example or even recommend one?
cheers

PHP/MySQL/HTML/CSS

He ain’t wrong, good CSS and PHP now pulling more than good .net per day

Think we is paying £275-400 per day for these boys

Anyone can teach themselves basic programming, thats quite easy. Go through a ‘teach yourself X’ book no problem. Java or C# would give good foundation, these force concepts that PHP/Python/Ruby do not require you to use. Give yourself a hobby project and do it. Do this before starting further study. You might hate it.

Can you find something in development based on non comercial experience alone? I doubt it, its not the 90s any more! Maybe if you ask for next to no money

Most people I know have a degree in computing of some flavour or another or failing that maths or physics. Its not needed because you will learn how to do the job, its needed to prove you might be able to do it. Doesn’t really matter if OU or not. If you already have an engineering based degree you might be lucky.

testing can be pretty lucrative considering the lack of expertise you need to do it…

If you want to learn to program I would recommend learning C from Kernighan and Ritchie to start with, working through the examples and exercises:

– it won’t take long as there are only 32 keywords
– it provides a good foundation to all the C based languages, like C#, Java, C++
– you get a better feel for how a program executes and manages memory, so things that cain seem mysterious to some, like using value types for speed rather than reference types, or pinning objects, in C# will seem obvious instead.
– you will hopefully pick up your style from K&R and progress from there, maybe to Stroustrups ‘learn to program’ book

Never, ever read a book by Herbert Schildt.

Plenty of Oracle jobs going, or so it seems. Get into SQL and PL/SQL and you cant go far wrong IMO.

Plenty of Oracle jobs going, or so it seems. Get into SQL and PL/SQL and you cant go far wrong IMO.

What he said.

Databases in general. DBA or SQl development. Oracle is the market leader but Microsoft is a good bet too. It’s nice and established and you don’t have to learn new languages every couple of years.

Go into Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing. We are going to need a newbie and about 6 months time

Oracle DBA +1, seems to be plenty of jobs around and the contractors we’ve got are on mega bucks. I’m a Linux/Network sysadmin. I’d say find something you enjoy first before shelling out for a course.

If you are looking at the support side a RHCE/CCNA/NP will get you a foot in the door/interview more than a CS degree.

If you fancy Uni, then a computer science degree should give you a general underpinning in all aspects of computing and networking etc. You could then get a flavour of where you fancy specialising. Either that or dont go to uni, and do some self study or web courses to see what you enjoy. Then maybe do some kind of certification course to get some qualifications. I did a Cisco CCNA course at a week long boot camp, but cost the company about 3 grand.

I think personally from the places I have worked recently, you need to be careful when it comes to what to choose, as most development I know of is being done by offshore outfits in India. Indeed the place I work at the moment has shipped in an office building full of Indian developers, with only a few key people in managerial roles being native brits.

I would say though that DB stuff is where its at, but your mind has to work in a particular way to enjoy it. So look at http://www.sqlcourse.com there are tutorials about various aspects of DB work….

Oracle is the devils own work, Microsoft SQL Server databases are where its at 🙂

Oh and i second BI and data warehousing, its a booming sector (well we are doing well..)

I’d also recommend Oracle skills are worth considering. I’ve been an Oracle specialised pretty much since leaving uni 20+ years ago and it’s worked out well. Usually there have been plenty of jobs available and decent travel opportunities for working overseas as well.

Even with the market as it is at the moment there are a fair number of opportunities about – in fact I’m recruiting for a couple of Oracle E-Business Suite roles in my team at the moment (apps DBA and a functional consultant).

There are lots of people recommending learning particular languages or training in very specific technologies up there.

Personally, I’d not recommend that. In the short term, being a pure single technology specialist may be financially rewarding, but technologies go out of fashion/get outsourced, and as a specialist, you’re buggered.

I’d recommend a computer science degree. If you do a good one, you should come out of it able to do most of the jobs that people are recommending you train specifically for above, but you should also be better prepared for whatever the interesting technology is in the future. It takes longer, but is more interesting – if you’re interested in computers,a cs degree will be a fun thing to do, whereas training up in one specific technology on a course can be pretty bland and uninteresting.

Also, most of the specific training courses are for soul destroying things like database development, which it is hard to believe anyone can find interesting after a year or so.

For example, with my cs degree, I’ve been paid to do web development, databases (oracle,sql server etc), music software and hardware, gis (map stuff), and right now I’m doing a lot of stuff to do with interactive art and theme park rides. Thanks to being a generalist, I’ve been able to switch to a new and interesting area every couple of years, which I couldn’t do if I was just a database expert or whatever.

I’ve heard good things about the ou computer science course from a student’s perspective. I don’t know how respected it is in industry.

If you have lots of spare time mind, it is worth playing around with programming languages – personally I’d recommend python as a beginner language, it is very quick to get into, yet powerful enough for 99% of programming tasks nowadays. There are things like c, c#, java etc, which are lovely and all that but have a lot of needless complexity for a first language. The best students on a computer science course are always the sort who program for fun in their spare time.

Joe

. Do this before starting further study. You might hate it.

A really good point actually, and why I wouldn’t recommend a very specific qualification – why waste time changing career purely for money, when you can find something rewarding that also pays money. Some of the jobs people are recommending above will be soul destroying if you don’t absolutely love databases or web programming or whatever.

Interesting post and interesting answers.

I was able to go from sales to support (helpdesk, first/second line stuff) because a) I knew stuff about office software (personal study) and hardware setup and b) I got a couple of lucky breaks and then to programming.

From there I learnt HTML (thank you Laura Lemay!), JavaScript, VB5, SQL Server, Classic ASP / VBScript, PHP, MySql, ASP.Net / C# and a few other things, pretty much in that order, through home study. jQuery won’t hurt your chances, either (not something that I know too much about – I just know enough about it to know that I should know more!)

I’ve had good breaks, bad breaks, good times and bad times – earned £215 per day at the end of the year before last and then unemployed pretty much all of last year. I’m programming for HP now and pretty happy there after a rocky start (and STILL learning new stuff every day – goes with the territory!)

PHP and MySql are free to download (or they were last time I did), Visual Web Developer and SQL Server Express and SQL Server Management Studio are also free to download (and you can learn enough from them to get right up to speed with ASP.Net WebForms and MVC).

At least with web development you can prove what you can do by way of creating some websites – my contention is that for support roles you can’t actually demonstrate what you can do until you are lucky enough to get a job.

For programming stuff, check out the Wrox and Apress websites for their excellent range of books.

I’ve taken advantage of stuff that’s free to download – if you’re starting out I wouldn’t pay for software as you might shell out a lot of dosh on something that might not be very useful.

There’s my take on the subject (and a potted history of my so-called career!).

Good luck and hope this helps!!!

Brilliant stuff folks!! Thanks to everyone who’s posted answers. I want to do this mainly from an interest point of view, but also because I can see technology becoming even more important in the future, and with it potential career opportunities in the future….

HTML knowledge is all well and good, but you may also need to be able to actually design websites that look good and work well. Harder than it looks.

All good advice above, if you’re headed for the IT world.

But if you want to do something a bit different and interesting though, get into CUDA and OpenCL.

I’d second joemarshall’s advice – I did an engineering degree, and now work in IT, and one of the things I miss is not having been taught the basic fundamentals of computing. I’ve done fine without them, but there have been times when it would have been very useful to have a more detailed knowledge of how (for example) network protocols differ, how a compiler works, whatever…

As I said, though, it’s not strictly necessary. If you love programming, enjoy tinkering with computers, and have a reasonable head on you, you should be able to do without.

You could also do a lot worse than to pick the number one language on the Tiobe survey, there’s a link on this geeky thread from a day or two back:

http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/where-are-all-the-c-programmers

Web designer programmer?
Software or systems engineer?
It infrasrtructure?

enterprise content manager / filenet

These days you’re probably better off doing a business degree than computing. Pure programming is so easy to off-shore that I wouldn’t want to rely on it as a career choice but generally business analysis, systems integration, architecture etc. are still done on-shore.

There’s still a demand for technical skills like MS server, Citrix XenApp, VMware vSphere along with more specialist stuff like SANs as alternatives for an IT career outside of programming.

That said if everything goes cloud based then more SMEs won’t have IT infrastructure in a few years so not sure how good career prospects there are either (and my team is already part offshore…)

These days you’re probably better off doing a business degree than computing

My area is Economics, would just like to find out more about computing/IT …

Oracle is the devils own work, Microsoft SQL Server databases are where its at

pfffftttt.

Oracle is ok – their courses are £££ though and to get qualified you need to know your stuff. That said one of my team just got back from a course – was the only non-contractor there and apparently the median wage was £1K a day for 11g DBA!

Plenty of work about too – it took us ages to get someone for our last hire – a candidates market by all accounts…

For interest ComputerSci courses are good and will give you a decent gounding of knowledge.

For work, unix, network (particularly Cisco), Oracle DBA’s etc are all in demand and hard to recruit.

As for people saying it easy to offshore development, they clearly haven’t had to support it much.

Incidental hijack, any Cambridge based C# developers with PL/SQL skills looking for a job, we are hiring 🙂

For example, with my cs degree, I’ve been paid to do web development, databases (oracle,sql server etc), music software and hardware, gis (map stuff), and right now I’m doing a lot of stuff to do with interactive art and theme park rides. Thanks to being a generalist, I’ve been able to switch to a new and interesting area every couple of years, which I couldn’t do if I was just a database expert or whatever.

I don’t disagree on starting with a computer science degree (which is also what I did) but I’d have thought continually changing specialisations would have quite an impact on salary.

Oracle is ok – their courses are £££ though and to get qualified you need to know your stuff. That said one of my team just got back from a course – was the only non-contractor there and apparently the median wage was £1K a day for 11g DBA!

I’ve employed a fair number of contractors (got a few working for me at the moment as it happens) and would be more likely to be paying agencies around £600 per day for an experienced DBA, which means the DBA’s themselves would be on about £500 per day. There will be a few very, very good contract DBA’s with specialist skills who might command £1K+ per day, but it’ll be pretty rare.

Often in IT, you will have 2 paths to choose (for most of your career).

Software Development (including web dev)…..or…… system support (network admin; systems admin; user support, etc).

I opted for the latter, although I do some programming when required (well, scripting…)

Have a look at the Microsoft qualifications – they are still the benchmark today in the industry. They do both software dev, and system support qualifications.

For the record, I don’t have a degree – but I do have quite a few (up to date..) industry certifications.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking a degree will boost your career far beyond those without – as what they teach you on the course, has no relation to real world events (as the material is so old). IT support is very much a practical, hands on, vocational industry. A degree doesn’t teach you how to troubleshoot…. a certification will confirm your skillset.

I don’t disagree on starting with a computer science degree (which is also what I did) but I’d have thought continually changing specialisations would have quite an impact on salary.

The trick is to learn enough about something in the last job so that you can get a job in it next time. Like I came across databases in one job, so next job required sql skills, and that was on my cv by then.

What did bugger up my salary was moving into university based research – pay is still 10k down from five years ago. It is great, really interesting stuff,a lot of a chance to do independent work, but you certainly don’t do it for the pay! Moving to derbyshire helped too – living costs for nice 3 bed house with mortgage and a kid are not massively different to the costs of living in a one bed rented flat in london without the kid, so salary is less important to me.