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How hard is it to get a Government/School Public Sector IT job ?
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No just something 9 to 5 ( 8 to 4 ) or ( 730 to 330) related where I can leave work at work. I don't mind occasional overtime but most of the time I want to be at home after work and come back the next day. As long as it pays the bills but it doesn't have to pay insanely high either. I thou the public sector fits this more thou. Im willing to get the right certs, a bachelors degree, and finding the right environment while mastering the job. Not sure which IT job fits this the most thou.
To expand upon this some, when you are first coming out of school, you don't really get to be picky about your job and hours. I do not to IT so I can't speak to that field, but more and more college grads are graduating and having trouble finding jobs. You're going to be competing with them, as well as people with experience, and they aren't going to be as picky about hours they work and being on call because they want that job. I wasn't picky at all as far as hours, or location, or even industry, and it still took me 2+ years to find a job in my field.
A help desk job will start you out just fine and is where a lot of people in IT start anyway.
Most IT is 9-5 most of the time, but you'll have releases on weekends occasionally or late support when something blows up. Even then, you usually log in from home and it's only a couple extra hours in that week.
Degree is not destiny. Just getting a degree won't get you a job, all that does is allow a hiring manager to keep from immediately shredding your resume. You have to be willing to show effort and enthusiasm in order to actually be hired. Your posts in here show a lack of both. This is a critique not because I don't think you have those qualities (everyone can have these qualities), but that right now the attitude you are reflecting in this thread indicates a lack of both. And as someone who hires people, it's pretty clear.
Drop the idea of what hours you want. Drop the idea of work vs home balance. Embrace the current (horrible) reality that employment in the US is tilted towards employers and their needs, not the worker. That doesn't make it right. That doesn't make it cool. But that is how it is. Until you have a lot of experience and a sterling reputation within your field you won't have much ability to dictate your hours or terms of employment. And saying "I'm only willing to work X hours and I want to leave the job at work" isn't going to get you past an interview, and definitely not a solid enough reputation in field over time to be able to actually to the the stage where such negotiation is plausible.
Sorry then if you rather hire someone that lives to work. I work to live I don't live to work.
I won't be a workaholic like the rest of the U.S
You can think what you want.
I sure won't talk like this in an Interview.
Im building my reputation now by gaining work experience while in school.
Just because I don't have kids or family doesn't mean I don't want work life balance.
I have family and friends I like to spend time with on the weekends.
We live in a country where most people have a smartphone that's connected to the internet. You'll have email and other communication apps on your phone, and you bet your ass people will send you tickets, questions, requests, etc. It'll happen. However you choose to handle that is up to you, but there is no white collar job out there right now (especially one that deals with technology in any capacity) where all communications and expectations cease once the clock hits 5.
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So what you do is turn off your smartphone pretty simple.
I'm sure if you asked people who are on their deathbeds in what they wish they would have done more, most would say spend time with family, friends, or travel. I don't think many would say they wished they spent more time working much less when people are off work.
I seen plenty of people saying they have a 9 to 5 job with decent money.
This is a crucial point. @Greninja, what you seem to be looking for might have been a lot more possible say, 20+ years ago... it was a lot easier to punch out at 5 and then "hide" from work because there was really no way to reach you unless your job wanted to call your home phone. (Doesn't mean you could get ahead that way, especially if you were disappearing every day at the stroke of 5 regardless of what work was going on, but you might have been able to coast for a while.) But of course, the ironic thing is that back then the type of work you're interested in (IT/computer help desk) didn't really exist.
Entry level position expectations won't mean you are a workaholic, but you will damn well be expected to present yourself as one if you want to get your foot in the door. You are too hung up on an idealistic image of what the workforce is. You will work what hours you are assigned at first. You will do work no one else wants to do, because you are the low man on the totem pole. You will frequently be assigned shifts that have nights and weekends. That's not every assignment, or even most weeks, but it is frequent and it does happen.
After a few years of working these shifts, especially if you work them with a lot of effort, enthusiasm, and willingness to grow your responsibilities, you might get the opportunity to move into better timeframes, payrates, and positions. Starting out you have next to nothing to offer an employer but your flexibility and effort. Once you have expertise and reputation you can cash those in for better workplace conditions.
As you can see from the listing, and as people are pointing out, if you are in this line of work, you are almost certainly going to be on a call rotation. It is a thing that comes with the job. If it is a good job, you won't get called often. If it is a bad job, you will. No one outside of the specific department you apply for will be able to tell you whether or not you are likely to get called. You will also have to occasionally do some work outside of business hours anyway for maintenance purposes.
You are also going to have to be a jack-of-all trades. If you look at the job posting above, you can see the variety of kinds of things that they will want you to be able to support -- mac, windows, servers, virtualization, software, hardware, desktop, etc etc, and all at multiple sites. The only explicitly desktop support jobs I've seen at the places I've worked are generally much lower paying than the ranges you're looking at and are often filled by students if you're in a university (like the job you currently have, most likely).
I definitely sympathize with the desire to go 9-5 and leave work at work. And there are jobs out there where, most of the time, you actually can just stop at the end of the day. But even if you luck into one of those:
- Sometimes there is a deadline, and that means you're gonna be on a laptop at 1 AM banging away on a report or whatever.
- Sometimes the servers stop working on the weekend and someone needs to go in and push the button because the doctors need to catch up on their notes.
- Sometimes you need to do an update so you schedule some downtime in the middle of the night, and so you spend the night doing maintenance (and probably you'll have to be back at work in the morning in case anything goes wrong).
Categorically saying NO EVENINGS/WEEKENDS is going to get a lot of doors closed in your face because people want someone they can depend on to help with those tasks.
I am presently 30 years old. I have a 9-5 job with decent money. After 6-10 years in field, assuming you aren't negative, lazy, or unwilling to grow your workplace network you probably will too. Almost all of my friends do as well. I'm pretty specialized in my field, and I have the ability to set my hours and make fairly decent conditions. I started out in my current field about 8 years ago and have worked much, much less pleasant hours to get where I am by busting my ass to make it here. Most folks with 9-5 jobs generally have done their time in the trenches to work their way into their positions or relied upon nepotism to get to their positions (which is always a fine and acceptable way to break into the workforce).
Given your questions here, and desire to go public sector, I'm assuming nepotism doesn't apply which means you don't have any easy legs up into the workforce. So more likely than not you will need to rely upon effort and enthusiasm to get your network by impressing folk rather than relying upon pre-existing connections through family or close friends in hiring positions. In the public sector you cannot get easy handouts from friends in hiring positions by law (unless you get an appointee position in which case you are a best bud or campaign doner of some county or state commissioner and certainly aren't working IT).
Get used to the idea you will have to sacrifice some of your personal time to get started.
As long as I can work 8 hours with the occasional overtime sure.
After that I don't want to be disturbed.
Is that so much to ask?
Helpdesk is one of the very few IT positions that tend to have strict clock-in/clock-out and can leave work at work.
If you're at any other level, be it management, project management, network or server or desktop or application support you're almost guaranteed to at the very least have to be part of an on-call rotation. Or have to perform some sort of upgrade or maintenance after business hours because it's a mission critical system that can't go down during the day.
What that looks like depends on who you work for. I work for a hospital system of 12k-ish employees and our PC techs typically were only on call 1 week out of every 2 months. But being a hospital you better believe they got called several times during that week.
Sure you can but that'll come off quite badly to your superiors and you'll be first on the chopping block come lay-off season. And layoffs fucking suck.
Here's how things work in the real world:
You'll likely have a 9-6, 8-5, 9-5 or something similar job. You will usually work those hours. You will get emails after hours that you will read to know what's going on. You can either ignore them and deal with them the next day, reply to them, and/or deal with them in whatever capacity you can/choose to.
Once in a while something will happen that will result in you working more than the standard hours. Something breaks, it's crunch time, you've won the shit lottery and 10 people have difficult problems that all need to be solved today. That's life. Shit happens.
Expecting to never ever have to deal with a situation that makes you exert yourself is not only unrealistic and entitled, it's actually counterproductive to your career development.
And you can give us your mumbo jumbo about how you don't want a career and you just want a job, but if you're in a field (specially a white collar field) for years, that's a career. And you need to get better at it to retain that career.
The world (especially the tech world) changes fast, and you need to grow and change with it.
I'm not really sure what you're looking for at this point. Seasoned veterans have all come in here and told you pretty much the same thing. You keep waving all of that advice off in hopes that maybe someone will come in here and tell you that the 9-5 IT job with 0 responsibility after hours totally exists and here are the exact steps you need to take to get it. That's not happening. It doesn't exist.
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Look at this another way. If someone is hiring a position, these days in most cities in the US the average number of applicants for a Bachelor's level job is about 70-120*. Thats people qualified, not counting people without basic certifications or lacking any sort of relevant knowledge for position. If I am looking at those 70 people, why would I choose the person who has a "I just want to work 8 hours and then go home and be ignored" over the person who says "I will take any hours you give me and be very happy and thankful for it!"
That's the choice employers have when it comes to minimum wage positions. Maybe if you move to someplace like Caribou, Maine where there simply aren't human beings with the skillset around you can get away with that, but even then you will likely have 2-3 people at least applying for IT and if they show more spunk than you I'd hire them first.
This isn't a matter of what is fair, or how employment should be. The entire system is fucked up for the working classes (both white and blue collar). But the system isn't going to change within the timeframe of your employment at the entry level, even in the best case scenario.
*As of October 2015, the range depends on fields, states, and markets.
And then they will find someone else to fill your job who doesn't turn off their phone pretty simple.
The job market, any job market, is competitive. When you won't do something, you may be competing against somebody who will.
Nobody owes you a job, any job, let alone your dream job where you get to do the exact thing that interests you for the exact hours you want and not a minute more for the exact amount of money you want. Your mentality reeks of entitlement, which is not a good quality in any job, and is even worse in a public sector position where your salary is being paid for out of the pockets of taxpayers.
At the entry level in the field you're interested in, yes, that is a lot to ask. That is what everybody has been telling you.
Man, you've never looked for jobs, have you
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Thanks
I'll look into Help Desk then
And find the right environment
No :?
Just echoing what everyone else says, a HelpDesk, Tier 1, usually has shifts and if your lucky, could get the 9-5 shift and be done with your job when your off the clock. but it does not pay 50K a year. It's half that.
You're going to have an even harder time, on top of that, if you're putting any stipulations on your work schedule.
You're going to have an even harder time, on top of that, if you're hyper focused on the type of job you want.
Basically, what it boils down to, is with all of those conditionals you're putting on your job search, it's going to take you multiple years to find a job. You have no experience, you have a really low availability, and you have a really focused career job goal (and you don't seem to want to work overtime). You could lie about the overtime thing, and then just be a real miser about working it, and then run the risk someone gets pissed and fires you. That's up to you.
What we're telling you is take a step back and really examine what it is you want. I understand you want a balanced work life, but no one's saying you're working 80 hour weeks or are on call 24/7/365. What they're saying is sometimes you are going to have to work overtime. Sometimes you'll have to do a job you don't want to do. Sometimes you'll have to interact with shitty people.
You may get a job offer that's midnight-8:00am. Are you not going to work that and hold out for the proverbial white elephant just because you want to do things with your friends sometimes?
I can tell you right now, as you get older, your friends and you will do less and less with each other, and so will you and your family. But the times you do do stuff with each other will be more meaningful and better. Don't hamstring yourself because you think you deserve something that no one's offering.
Apply yourself, get better, get better jobs, use your skills and abilities to determine how and when you work. That's how everyone does it, that's why I have a 9-5 job. I'm on call, but I've been called 4 times in 10 years. Guess what though, I also get paid to be on call.
You can totally have a job that's fulfilling and enjoyable that also allows you to have a social life and hobbies. If you like what you do, making an effort and doing occasional overtime isn't going to be difficult or prohibitive. You'll want to do it.
But getting there will take work and effort.
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Do you even pay attention that I am building experience and am in School. I mention it multiple times. Low availability ( okay sure ill never be a doctor, manager whatever I Understand)
(really focused career job goal) No im opening to always breaking into another profession thats mostly 9 to 5
I used to work a night shift, Im not going back there no matter how much you pay me or anyone in this world. I lost my insanity, I know whats its like working nights and weekends sure ill still work a very rare occasional night and weekend THATS IT thou I know what I want job that pays the bills thats it I don't have I only work because its a necessity evil that's it
I'll be an admin assistant, desktop tech, accountant or whatever as long as I got a good work life balance.
Do this and see how long you keep your job. It won't be very long.
IT support isn't a bad job I like it . and yes if its occasional overtime I'll do it
You just said you've never looked for jobs.
What advice do you even want? You're clearly hostile to any advice that's actually relevant to what you're asking here.
You're never going to find work life balance that pays what you're looking for, you're going to be stuck with jobs that pay $8-15 an hour because those are the only jobs that don't require skill. The kind of jobs where you can turn off, and once you clock out, the job doesn't exist anymore.
I mean at my current job no one expect Network and System admins carries a pager. ( i work with them)
I work with a Desktop Lead and he has no pager. Yea rare overtime but definately still seems like an interesting job.
Here's the thing, dude.
Whatever 'experience' you're getting through your classes, that's not experience in the eyes of employers. At all. That's the bare minimum that you need to have to even be considered.
The job that you have right now at your school, that's great! But it's considered an internship in the eyes of employers and while it shows that you have some experience and that you're a go-getter of sorts, it's worlds different from an actual full time job in an office environment.
Like....the things you say so clearly paint a picture of an entitled college kid who thinks that his college degree will get him the world and that's simply not true. A college degree with a part time job or an internship is the bare minimum you need to have to not have your resume thrown into the recycle bin. It most certainly doesn't entitle you to anything, let alone a job where you dictate the terms.
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Here's where he mentioned his job.
Here's the thing, you've gotten a front line job. $13 is the pay. Tier 1 everywhere else doesn't magically go up $24/hour somewhere else ($50,000/52 weeks a year / 40 hours a week). They are $13-18/hour.
What everyone in the thread is trying to say, is once you get some experience, you don't stay Tier 1. You move up. If you stay Tier 1, you get paid like Tier 1. If you don't like it, that's fine but others (like students) will jump at that pay.
Maybe you should look into retail? The hours are typically more steady and if you're in school you can work your way into a management position if you're looking for more responsibility as you age.
IT, and development too, is about meeting people's needs. It's a service industry. When it comes down to it, the people who succeed are the people who sacrifice to get things done for other people. That means working odd hours sometimes and being available for support when it's needed, and being able to make people believe you care enough to work hard when they're having a crisis.
If you can suck it up and fake that customer-service attitude for 5-10 years you can find a position that's senior enough to not deal with that as much, but you have to work to get there.
If things really go south I need to *know* that everyone I work with is willing to pull together and get things done even if it means working from home or coming in on a weekend, or just being available for a senior person when they're having a problem. Hopefully that doesn't happen often, but when it does...
Edit: The simple fact that you've managed to cheese off *real* IT managers is a forum thread should make you stop and think about what you're wanting to do here. Really--the people who would be your bosses are the people telling you you've got a horrible attitude. I hope can see that and learn something from it.
You are asking for advice. People are taking their own time to provide what guidance they can based on their own experiences and understanding. Nobody is telling you to take their advice, but if you want to argue about it, that's a D&D thread, not an H/A thread.
By the way if you ever put up for a position that I was hiring for and I saw the stuff you've posted on these forums, I would ignore your resume. You seem to have an unreasonably high estimation of your skills and value in the marketplace. Frankly, if you were actually as good as you think you are, you would already be able to research and know the answers to the questions you keep asking. Not to mention you would have more working knowledge of the fields in question, or a better grasp of context such as "maybe I shouldn't ask how to get a government job since there are literally thousands of governmental entities across the country I could work for in literally thousands of capacities and not all of them do the same thing".
You might think you're good at hiding it, but I guarantee you that even if you land a job, you can't hide your attitude forever. People will pick up on it, and it will impede your career in the long term. Consider toning down the entitlement a little bit. And by entitlement I mean making demands like "I don't want to work overtime" when you don't even know what job you're applying for and whether they even want you to work overtime. Focus more on putting yourself in a position to actually get a job and make demands, rather than the other way around.
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I think people here need to stop bullying the OP
There's nothing wrong with wanting a 9 to 5 job
I am an IT Field Service Technician for a School District and we work 7:00 to 3:30 M-F ( team of 25 technicians)
I think one of the reasons I never ever work overtime or are on call is because we are paid hourly and our company hates to pay us for overtime or on call rates.
It's very rare we ever work overtime.
We touch everything from Mac's, servers, desktops, outlook, email client etc.
My boss even look's down on it
I make like about 48K a year ( 23-24$ an hour ). I expect a raise as we have step towards how much we are paid. I'm currently in Step 1
On the bad side, the work can get boring and tedious sometimes.
Its possible to find a job like the OP's wants it may limit his career path but I think people who said it doesn't exist are pure workaholics it does it may not be as common but there are still plenty of 9 to 5 roles.
It may not pay 100K but thats not the goal of the OP.
Only people who respond to emergencies at our company are Net Op's, and anyone who's a System admin.
First of all Overtime is expensive and so is buying pager's and paying on call rates.
Plus nobody here likes to work weekends or nights.
It's not hard to get a role like this if you know your stuff and work hard to find these positions.
I started in a Tech Support company making 35K a year in a private software.
Never worked overtime ( Only one time and even then it was a party celebration for me)
Now as a Field Tech only overtime one time in my whole IT Career.
If you don't want to work weekends, nights, or be on call. I say get into some form of IT support, or Desktop Support Role.
Not every company requires these guys to be on call, some do some don't
It really depends on the company you work for, not the job.
Most government jobs have a strict 40 hour week. That's it.
Yes I do as a Computer Lab Assistant
Its a great job I like helping out users, yea some people may get pissed off but it's not that bad.
But I have the day shift.
1. He's created a series of threads asking for advice all basically hedging around the same topic...
2. Been oddly vague or evasive about what he actually wanted to know much of the time (including using the old "asking for a friend" chestnut)...
3. Seemed more interested in arguing and complaining about the advice he received not matching up with exactly what he wanted to hear than in actually learning anything from the counsel people are patiently taking time to offer him.
If you want to work in IT, here's a quick term for you to look up: IP check.
I hope you can find what you are looking for but be ready to work to get it. If i had a choice between two people and one is willing to be flexible while the other wants a strict schedule, the one i pick is obvious
If you don't want advice don't ask for it.