Despite innovations, disruptions, and rapid changes, IT is one industry that continues to survive and thrive

Contrary to popular misconceptions, the information technology sector is flourishing and will continue to employ skilled workers in large numbers. Factors like automation and new technologies only open new opportunities for your IT career path.

Technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and robotics, scientific advancements like space exploration and medical procedures, provide tremendous opportunities for IT experts.

For IT professionals in the US who are scared of outsourcing, fear not! Most of the outsourced jobs are mundane, repetitive jobs which will be automated sooner or later.

However, the innovative IT jobs are on the rise. In addition, there are numerous opportunities for someone who is a tech wizard.

If you’re interested in knowing what an IT professional’s career path looks like, keep reading….

It’s difficult but interesting

Working in the IT industry is not a cakewalk. But then, nor is it in any other industry!

If you have an affinity for technology and enjoy working on new complex challenges, the IT industry is for you.

You might have heard numerous stories of IT professionals who work day and night in their offices without even the time to go home just for a few hours.

It’s true. There are times when they have to slog and stretch. However, what most of the people ignore is the fact that a large number of people in this industry are highly passionate about their job. They enjoy their work more than anything else, which is the reason for their sustainability and growth despite the work pressure.

Working in the IT industry lets you apply your analytical mind, logic, and creativity.

If you want to become a successful IT professional, you must have passion, persistence and stamina.  If you do, success will be yours.

Career paths in the IT industry

Information technology is a vast industry with 100s of specialties. Some are discussed here:

Database Administrator

Big Data’s a revolution. Every enterprise generates massive volumes of data through its customer interactions, which is needed for analytics. This is where a DBA plays a key role.

Graphic Design

It’s where the creativity meets technology. If you’re a skilled artist, becoming a graphic designer is the right career for you.

Video Game Developer and Tester

Advancements in technology and graphic designing have made video games more sophisticated than ever. There’s tremendous scope as a games developer or tester.

Animator

Animators get to show their skills to a far greater extent now than ever. From animated movies to live action films, and advertisements and games, animation offers tremendous scope.

IT Security

The advancements in IT have also increased the threats. Viruses and malware are pretty common, and there’s always a requirement for more skilled IT security professionals to deal with the threats.

Programming and Coding

Coding shall never be out of the fashion. Most of the top entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg started out as coders. There’s immense scope in this field.

Project Manager

This comes as an advanced career path once you’ve moved up the ladder in the IT industry. As a project manager, you get to manage people and entire projects.

Conclusion

IT industry continues to offer significant scope for those who are willing to work hard and smart. Learn IT courses and programming languages online to move one step ahead towards building an exciting career in the IT industry.  If you’re looking to begin a new career, browse our course catalog and see how easy it is to get started in an IT career.

Average annual compensation for software developers and system engineers in the USA is around $104,500. A career in the IT sector not only offers a handsome salary and tremendous learning opportunities but it also provides a global exposure. The demand for digital tools and services is growing across all industries in the USA which is driving the growth in employment in Information Technology sector.  There is no better time than today to build a sound career in the IT industry!

Here are your 5 Steps to Landing a Job in the IT Industry

1.) Learn a Programming Language

To develop a career in the IT sector, you need to learn a programming language or a particular IT skill. Join an online course and gain mastery over any programming language or related skill set. Check out the applications and specialized software programs that are powered by the language you are learning. Try to work on as many real word projects as possible.  Practice rigorously, and build a robust portfolio. The portfolio will be extremely useful in showing your skills to potential employers.

2.) Get Certified

Not all programming languages have official certification exams. However, for some languages such as Java SE 8 programming, etc. you have the option to get certified by an authorized body. Taking advantage of certifications to advance your career in the IT sector is a smart move. Get certified by the appropriate widely recognized body. While the certification may not be entirely necessary, it will help you gain more credibility in your area of expertise and set you apart from other similarly qualified applicants.

3.) Write a Focused Resume

You need to invest significant time in developing a resume that represents your skills and accomplishments. Don’t copy the buzzwords from the internet. Prepare a short resume (1-2 pages) with all relevant details. It must be tailor-made for the job you are applying. This means it should have only the pertinent information related to the position you are applying for. By creating job customized resumes, you will increase your chances of getting that all important first interview.

4.) Expand your Network

Make an impressive LinkedIn profile and add relevant connections on a regular basis. Use a professional profile photo and complete the employment section with updated information. Use the right keywords that reflect your personality traits and professional skill sets. Engage with industry professionals and develop genuine relationships on the platform. Ask your classmates, current and former colleagues for a recommendation on LinkedIn. Remember that a majority of recruiters go through candidates’ LinkedIn profiles before calling them for the interview. Thus, an excellent LinkedIn profile can contribute significantly to your career’s success.

5.) Prepare for the Interview

An interview may last for 30 minutes or more. However, almost a third of interviewers know within the first 90 seconds whether they are going to hire you or not. That means, your first impression not only counts but impacts the selection process significantly. Thus, work on your personality and do everything that boosts your confidence. Pay close attention to your  outfit and personal hygiene. If the interview is on the phone, be aware of background noise and any speaking habits that hurt your credibility (“uhhh…”, “like…like…like”, speaking too fast, etc.)

Before appearing for the interview, brush-up your knowledge about the company and make sure to have a list of relevant questions pertaining to the job in question. During the interview, maintain a direct eye contact with the interviewer. Crack a smile when you are feeling less confident and speak assertively. Recruiters don’t hire people who are not sure about their expertise. Thus, stay positive and be confident during the entire interview process.

The Bottom Line…

Being prepared for the role you want and the company you’re interviewing for is crucial.   Be ready to work hard and become an expert in your field. Enroll for advanced online IT courses to keep your knowledge updated. Remember that to be successful in the technology industry, you need to learn new things continuously so that you can add value to the business from the start and all the way through your career.

Organizations often struggle with adopting and adapting ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000 simply because their IT professionals lack the necessary training. Each of these programs can be beneficial to the organization after completing IT classes online at Gogo Training.

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library)

The online IT courses offered in this career path at Gogo Training help prepare people for implementing best practices for the collection, management, and delivery of a firm’s IT infrastructure and IT services. Obtaining certification in ITIL is now an essential aspect of a career in the IT service management market segment.

ISO/IEC 20000

ISO/IEC 20000 defines the internationally accepted best practices for implementing an SMS (Service Management System). The objective of SMS is to help organizations focus on planning, reviewing, operating, and improving the delivery of services as a means to add value for your customers, while also helping the organization operate more efficiently and save money. Gogo Training is pleased to offer four courses in this career path.

How ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000 Work Together

The objective of ITIL is to help organizations improve customer satisfaction and IT services while reducing costs and incorporating the delivery of third party services for a more efficient running operation. ISO/IEC 20000 is considered the standard for best practices and company certifications in IT service management. As you can see, both ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000 share similar objectives.

However, one of the challenges most organizations face, when relying solely upon ITIL, is thinking it is too expensive and too hard to deploy, leading some people to say ITIL isn’t going to work. ITIL is essentially a large body of knowledge, and there must be a way to consolidate the information to make it beneficial for organizations.

This is where the SMS is vital. The SMS defines how to manage the activities and processesof the SMS and provides overall management framework that is missing in ITIL.

Further, the SMS helps businesses of all sizes incorporating Service Management principles to efficiently design, develop, and deploy the most appropriate solutions and services to support the needs of the business and its customers. ITIL provides greatly expanded information to assist the service manager as they plan their adopt and adapt journey. To enroll in ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000 classes, or for more information about other career paths, please feel free to contact a representative at Gogo Training by calling 877.546.4446 today!

Information Technology jobs are on the rise with shortages of available and qualified employees expected. As a result, IT jobs are available and waiting for you. Being qualitified for an IT job means you need the right skills and certifications. Having these skills and certifications will be critical to your success.

What are the best ways to get training?

There are many ways to get the skills you need including books, videos, and courses.  The most important things to consider when you are selecting a method of learining is how you learn and what method of learning is best for you.  For example, if you love to investigate and figure it out yourself, then a book or searching for videos would be fun for you.  If you are limited on time and what to make sure you get the most complete learning available, then you will want to take a course or a learning path made up of several courses.  Courses, built by good instructional designers, take you from start to finish.  They include hands-on exercises where you practice what you learn.  Practicing what you learn is the most important feature of any training as it allows you to master the skills you are learning.

If you like turn-key progarms that give you all the tools you need and make the very best use of your time, then you will want to consider The Technology Career Success Program.  The Technology Career Success Program gives you access to 24 Career Paths in Technology.  These paths were designed by experts and allow you to start at anypoint in the path.  If you are new to the technology you will start at the beginning.  If you have skills arleady, you can jump in at any point.  All courses come with detailed prerequisites so you know ecactly where to start.  The courses are all taught by experts who work and teach in their area of expertise.  They are online so you can learn anytime of the day or night and best of all, they are affordable.   Courses are all designed to allow you to implement the skills you are learning and will  prepare you to expand your employment opportunities.

Here are three examples of  IT areas  that can benefit your career:

1. Oracle– Oracle is the world leader in database development and management solutions, including CRM.
2. ITIL– Thousands of organizations around the world use Information Tecnology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), which consists of using best practices for the delivery of IT services and management of IT.
3. Programming– Progamming is a key skill.  There are a multitude of progarmming languages to learn and there is a critical shortage of skilled progarmmers in the world today.

What Are the Benefits of Obtaining Certification?

In addition to mastering a skill, there are many testing organizations that allow you to take a certification exam so you can say that you are certified in a particular field.  Having a certification can further enhance your marketability.  Most hiring professionals often make their hiring decisions based upon whether potential candidates have certification in key IT areas. For example, a hiring manager could have two potential candidates for a position, with equal job experience, but one is certified and the other is not. Since being certified has added credibility within various industries, the person with the certification would most likely be offered the job.

Another benefit of being certified is it allows you to demand higher salaries, compared to IT professionals without certifications. In cases where you are already employed, most employers will recognize your training and certification, and tend to reward you with higher compensation.

Certification also opens up potential career path development and other employment opportunities if you desire a change from your current position. Cloud-based employment and independent consulting IT services are two such careers you could pursue with the right certifications.

To learn more about IT certification programs, or to enroll in training today, call GogoTraining at 877.546.4446 to speak with a representative about advancing your career.

As most people know by now, the Linux operating system has been developed under the philosophy of Open Source software originally pioneered by the Free Software Foundation as “free software”. Nevertheless, many people don’t truly appreciate just what Open Source really is. In this blog post, I’ll offer my perceptions.

Quite simply, Open Source is based on the notion that software should be freely available: to use, to modify, to copy.  The idea has been around for some twenty years in the technical culture that built the Internet and the World Wide Web and in recent years has spread to the commercial world.

There are a number of misconceptions about the nature of Open Source software.  Perhaps the best way to explain what it is, is to start by talking about what it isn’t.

• Open Source is not shareware.  A precondition for the use of shareware is that you pay the copyright holder a fee.  Open source code is freely available and there is no obligation to pay for it.

• Open Source is not Public Domain.  Public domain code, by definition, is not copyrighted.  Open Source code is copyrighted by its author who has released it under the terms of an Open Source software license.  The copyright owner thus gives you the right to use the code provided you adhere to the terms of the license.

• Open Source is not necessarily free of charge.  Having said that there’s no obligation to pay for Open Source software doesn’t preclude you from charging a fee to package and distribute it.  A number of companies are in the specific business of selling packaged “distributions” of Linux.

Why would you pay someone for something you can get for free?  Presumably because everything is in one place and you can get some support from the vendor.  Of course the quality of support greatly depends on the vendor.

So “free” refers to freedom to use the code and not necessarily zero cost.  As someone said a number of years ago, “Think ‘free speech’, not ‘free beer’”.

Open Source code is:

• Subject to the terms of an Open Source license, in many cases the GNU Public License (see below).
• Subject to critical peer review.  As an Open Source programmer, your code is out there for everyone to see and the Open Source community tends to be a very critical group.  Open Source code is subject to extensive testing and peer review.  It’s a Darwinian process in which only the best code survives.  “Best” of course is a subjective term.  It may be the best technical solution but it may also be completely unreadable.
• Highly subversive.  The Open Source movement subverts the dominant paradigm, which says that intellectual property such as software must be jealously guarded so you can make a lot of money off of it.  In contrast, the Open Source philosophy is that software should be freely available to everyone for the maximum benefit of society.  Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, is particularly vocal in advocating that software should not have owners (see Appendix C).

In the early years of the Open Source movement, Microsoft and other proprietary software vendors saw it as a serious threat to their business model.  Microsoft representatives went so far as to characterize Open Source as “un-American”.  A Microsoft executive publicly stated in 2001 that “open source is an intellectual property destroyer. I can’t imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business.”

In recent years however, leading software vendors, including Microsoft, have embraced the Open Source movement. Many even give their programmers and engineers company time to contribute to the Open Source community.  And it’s not just charity, it’s good business!

So what is an Open Source license? Most End User License Agreements (EULA) for software are specifically designed to restrict what you are allowed to do with the software covered by the license.  Typical restrictions prevent you from making copies or otherwise redistributing it.  You are often admonished not to attempt to “reverse-engineer” the software.

By contrast, an Open Source license is intended to guarantee your rights to use, modify and copy the subject software as much as you’d like.  Along with the rights comes an obligation.  If you modify and subsequently distribute software covered by an Open Source license, you are obligated to make available the modified source code under the same terms.  The changes become a “derivative work” which is also subject to the terms of the license.  This allows other users to understand the software better and to make further changes if they wish.

Arguably the best-known, and most widely used, Open Source license is the GNU General Public License (GPL) first released by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in 1989.  The Linux kernel is licensed under the GPL.  But the GPL has a problem that makes it unworkable in many commercial situations.  Software that does nothing more than link to a library released under the GPL is considered a derivative work and is therefore subject to the terms of the GPL and must be made available in source code form. Software vendors who wish to maintain their applications as proprietary have a problem with that.

To get around this, and thus promote the development of Open Source libraries, the Free Software Foundation came up with the “Library GPL”.  The distinction is that a program linked to a library covered by the LGPL is not considered a derivative work and so there’s no requirement to distribute the source, although you must still make available the source to the library itself.

Subsequently, the LGPL became known as the “Lesser GPL” because it offers less freedom to the user.  So while the LGPL makes it possible to develop proprietary products using Open Source software, the FSF encourages developers to place their libraries under the GPL in the interest of maximizing openness.

At the other end of the scale is the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license, which predates the GPL by some 12 years.  It “suggests”, but does not require, that source code modifications be returned to the developer community and it specifically allows derived products to use other licenses, including proprietary ones.

Other licenses—and there are quite a few—fall somewhere between these two poles. The Mozilla Public License (MPL) for example, developed in 1998 when Netscape made its browser open-source, contains more requirements for derivative works than the BSD license, but fewer than the GPL or LGPL.  The Eclipse Public License (EPL) specifically allows “plug-ins” to remain proprietary, but still requires that modifications to Eclipse itself be Open Source. The Open Source Initiative (OSI), a non-profit group that certifies licenses meeting its definition of Open Source, currently lists 79 certified licenses on its website.

You may tempted to think that the GPL is just an academic exercise. Nobody takes it seriously, right? Wrong! There are people, the “GPL police” if you will, some of whom have way too much time on their hands, and they take the GPL very seriously. They will “out” anyone who doesn’t play by the rules and there are examples of vendors who have been taken to court as a result.

Bottom line; if you’re concerned about keeping your code proprietary, be very careful about where your models come from.  Don’t blindly copy large chunks of code that is identified as GPL Use the code as a model and write your own. If your product is going to incorporate Open Source code, you  may want to consult an attorney who specializes in intellectual property law related to Open Source.

Well, this has been a brief personal tour through the world of Open Source software. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of other resources out there on the web. Just google “open source software”.

This article by Doug Abbott is on Open Source Software.