Skills/expertise used in IT from previous careers.

[jrbarnett]

IT is often a second or subsequent career for people. Moving in from other professions brings in existing knowledge and experience to their IT work that somebody who has always worked in IT (such as myself) may not have. I'm not just talking of transferable skills.

As an example, business knowledge of a specific market sector that you then used to write software or run consultancy services that operate within that sector.

For those people who have moved into IT from a previous career my questions are:

1. What did you do then? (if you don't mind saying).
2. What do you do now? (again if you don't mind divulging this).
3. What skills/expertise did that work bring with you that has benefitted your IT career? How?

John

 

[Welshbird]

I was a violin teacher.
Then a pharmacy technician.

Now I analyse data.

These are just NOT related at all......

Fee

The question should be [red]Is it worth trying to do?[/red] not [blue] Can it be done?[/blue]

 

[BJ9]

I was an office manager, now I'm a network administrator/help desk.

The skills that doing something else first brought for me was the ability to understand where the user is coming from. I can relate to what they are saying and am able to put computer/network terms into a language they can easily understand. I can help them learn what the system does and why it does it "that way".

It makes me extremely popular with the users.

It's also beneficial to be able to translate what the system can and cannot do in business terms to upper management.

BJ

 

[barbola]

I was always interested in solving problems with a computer. In my first job as a credit clerk 20 years ago I played around with a spreadsheet program and eventually moved to the payroll dept and ended up transferring all their hand-written ledger information to spreadsheets.

I moved to a similar position at another organization, and became involved in alot of ad-hoc reporting from the database and drained the IT people of some of their knowledge. I also got fully involved in converting from a payroll service to an in-house program.

In the job I'm in now as a Systems Administrator, I still work very closely with accounting and payroll, and I also do all the setup and training of the Accounting system and developing procedures, as well as developing applications for internal use. The company has grown over 300% since I started 7 years ago, so the demands for better systems and reporting is always needed.

I would like to do some applications development on the side once my schedule permits.

 

[KenCunningham]

I started off as a generalist Civil Servant, general admin and middle management stuff. Had little to no exposure to computers for the first eight years then started playing with speardsheets (20/20 anyone?) for budget control purposes.

Then it sort of mushroomed into system admin on Primes and eventually the unix/Ingres/Oracle stuff that I do now. There doesn't seem to have been much of a planned progression, more being in the right (and sometimes the wrong!) place at the time.

 

[LadySlinger]

I was originally in school for secondary music education.
The skills that I still remember from this is thinking things through before performing them. I.e. playing a stringed instrument obviously requires a lot of finger movement. Thinking through on how you're moving your fingers and what seems to be the most logical fashion to use them.
I really wanted to keep my creative side, by going into Web Design, but I just never got my foot in the door.

Also during college I had a lot of customer service type jobs. By doing these jobs I learned how to treat others when I'm taking care of a problem.

Now I'm an I.T. Manager.

 

[xmsre]

I guess mine was the typical swords to plowshares kind of story. A military career then transition to IT after retiring there.

 

[macleod1021]

I've been all over the board. I started out programming in high school, then went to the military working in warehouse support. After that I played with hardware for a few years. Got burned out, became an EMT. Now I'm back to programming I had a bunch of small jobs previously like bookkeeper, fast food restaurant manager, factory worker, bagger at krogers . I think all of them help to understand from a user perspective what they want and expect.

 

[lionelhill]

KenCunningham,

your skills in 20-20 are not wasted! It was the first spreadsheet I used, too. A couple of years ago, a brain-cell must have suddenly flipped, and in Excel I typed a 20-20 keyboard command (you know, they used to start with a "/" and go on several letters). The egg-timer appeared. The hard-disk trundled away. And after a few seconds, a little message box appeared: "you seem to have typed in a Lotus123 key command. Would you like to activate recognition of Lotus123 commands?" (of course lotus123 and 20-20 shared many commands).

Now that's what I call good program planning: Excel's a bit of a star like that.

 

[blutekhnd]

I worked as a sales associate in retail, manager in fast food, and as a vault teller and item processing supervisor in a bank. I use a bunch of the skills I learned in the other fields.

1. Customer relations
2. People management (including managing my superiors)
3. Time and project management

As a coincidence, I currently work in the IT department of a bank, so my knowledge of banking and accounting practices has been invaluable. When other departments have trouble figuring out an issue, even those not remotely IT, they call us as a last resort, and I have been able to solve their problems. (Knock on wood)

 

[KenCunningham]

Hi Lionel - what an excellent story. I also remember how easy it was to delete a whole 20-20 sheet!!

 

[eyeswideclosed]

Radar tech, hardware engineer, network engineer, now programmer. Problem with programming is often nobody knows what you did, could be great, wonderfully creative, or garbage, no one knows, or cares, except you.