Switching Career Into Linux- Should I?
 

Background is I'm a big user of Linux distros, etc but never attempted to get certified or even work in any computer field.
Ive been a cabinetmaker for 25yrs and the day-to-day wear on me at 46yrs old is getting unbearable, I have many health problems.

So, can I get a job in Linux if I get certified, etc?

I saw this this morning
https://www.ziyotek.com/

I believe I know alot already about linux but not in any formal way. I'm a hack&slash type user lol.

If in my position what would you do?
I just want to have a career without all the physical pain lol!
Thanks!

We all started somewhere, and if this is something you really enjoy / like, go for it!
Certifications may or may not help (all depends on job requirements); there are some exams that are all practical/lab based questions, and some that are multiple choice. I would not waste money on the multiple choice exams.

Assuming you don't have a case of Dunning-Kruger, I think you need to just get your foot in the door somehow. Any IT job would help. This will probably be the hardest part of getting into a Linux job.

My company has interview/hiring panels. I have been a part of them. I can only speak for myself, but I'm more interested in depth of understanding than X years experience with thing-a-ma-jig Y, a fancy degree, or an alphabet soup of certifications. Those things matter if their knowledge and skills truly reflect the credential. If credentials and skills don't line up, I lean more towards less credentialed, assuming the less credentialed persons skills reflect what they have. Unfortunately, some people have 1 year of experience 10 times, or 10 years experience doing the wrong thing. Some people go to college, understandably so, to get a piece of paper and don't seem to know as much as their degree implies. I'm sure you have heard of certified on paper people that memorized a bunch of stuff but don't understand it. I'd much rather work with someone that understands RFC 4511 than has 200 years of experience managing AD/389DS, where their "experience" was managing entries using GUIs. I can give the former person any LDAP related thing and they will figure it out, the latter maybe, maybe not.

Certifications can't hurt. I would see how far along the LPIC certifications you can get. The exams are reasonably priced. If you can get level 2 with no professional experience and none of those exam prep things that have you memorize questions and answers, I'd be impressed.

I would consider the CompTIA A+ route to get your foot in the door at a help desk. Do a good job there and impress the *nix admins enough to help you work with them or put in a good word for you.

Consider local conferences or see if there is any meetups or Linux users group.

Also consider some low level free-lancer work on something like upwork.

Those are the ways that I would also recommend.

If you can do anything online to further your own activities in such a way that it provides demonstration of the skills you are interested in working with, then do that too. It can be a public system or even a decent blog (running on a server you yourself manage whether self-hosted or on a VPS) that explains what you are working on.

I've mentioned before how word of mouth in City Hall made a IT support position available for me if I chose to take it. City wages. City Employee Insurance. Air conditioned office.

Just mentioning a local way of thinking. Gotta get the secretaries < hair dressers?> mentioning your skills. My wife has a circle of those friends. Funny how this stuff happens, after, I retire. Locale figures a lot into this. Like in my One horse town suffering a oil boom. Not a lot of computer savvy folks down here.

Mayberry Virginia sounds almost one horse to this poster.

If you want a pain-free career...stay where you are.

Admins are typically 24/7/365 kind of jobs; do you have that now? Want to be getting out of bed at dark-O-thirty AM because some guy decided to click a banner ad and infected your network with ransomware? Enjoy making solid decisions, only to have them rejected by managers...then having those same managers blame you when what you warned them about happens? Then yes...being an admin is the job for you.

Also, know that you're going to be kneeling, crawling under desks, going up ladders into ceilings for wiring, moving heavy servers around, etc., etc. You're not going to sit in a chair, especially with an entry-level position. Can't suggest what path you should take...that's up to you, but the realities of an admin job can be harsh.

If you have the interest jobs can be had in lots of varying fields pertaining to Linux - programming, sysadmin, networking, security. Remote work is possible as well. Degrees and certs are much less important than they were 20 years ago. Nowadays if you can show your work publicly as others have stated with self-started projects, self-managed servers or github repos, those will show your aptitude far more than a cert or diploma.

I also agree that a good way to dip your toe in the water is to try remote consulting on the side while keeping your current job. I did that for the first few years and it gave me a bit of experience I could put on a resume, eventually leading to a full-time job switch. That was 20 years ago and I have stayed in IT ever since, eventually settling down as a Linux sysadmin.

thinknix's short list of IT areas shows the variety of positions that are available. TB0ne's comments about admin/support jobs are valid, but it is certainly possible to work in IT and have a real 9 to 5 workday with no on-call responsibilities at all.

Consider what areas you are most comfortable with...feel most competent in. It's not necessary to even know anything about networking, for example, to be an accomplished, well paid, programmer...and vice versa. I spent all of my career as a "programmer/analyst." I made computers do what people needed them to do. For most of that time I had no specific knowledge about how computers talked to each other or what happened under the covers when coding a read of data from a file (or database).

I only got interested in admin work when I began operating a web hosting company...and even then it's an aside to web-based application development and website design and implementation -- still "programming" ;)

I agree with the others. Get your foot in the door however you can.

Good luck!

OK awesome thank all of you for your responses.
My biggest problem is that I live in Gordonsville, Va. The nearest locations are Charlottesville, Fredericksburg, Richmond and even farther the Northern Va area so I'm pretty far away from most places except Charlottesville, the rest are 50+ miles away.

Is there a job service thing for IT/computer jobs on the net?

50 miles? Easy commute. One can spend 2 hours each way commuting in Los Angeles or other big cities.

I’m sure there are several places to search for jobs on the ‘net...DuckDuckGo is your friend there.

In your area, you are close to the University of Virginia and Mary Baldwin University. I wonder if you could get a non-tech job at one of those schools? I know colleges often let employees take classes for free.

We had a government minister here in the UK who caused a bit of an animated discussion by telling jobseekers to "get on their bike" to go and find a job.

I wouldn't necessarily advocate cycling 50 miles, but if you want that particular training enough, it's not an exceptional distance. Perhaps someone else doing the course comes from the same area as you and you could car share? Or you could car share with someone who works near the training provider or lives near you. Is there a bus that goes there? There are always solutions...

I hate to belabour the point but I once travelled in the centre of Australia where the distances between settlements are huge. One guy once drove 4 hours to have a meal with me before driving home again. I hope my dinner conservation was worth the journey, but what it did do was provide me with some perspective on what I thought were reasonable distances to travel "there and back again".

Of course, you might decide that you don't fancy that particular training course, but the point remains for any other possibilities you may encounter. Barriers are there to be surmounted.

Wishing you all the best with your career change!

Thanks again guys
I got laid off this week so that's why I'm asking

Jobs are not easy to find here, there isnt much infrastructure but the country life has it's perks.

I've been working skilled labor jobs my whole life (cabinetry, auto mechanic, builder of various things, etc) and for a run down I have had 8 concussions, many broken bones, near mishaps with machinery, basically I'm lucky my brain is intact and I have all ten digits lol.

I write short stories too but getting published these days is a process.

I have much experience in Linux but not in networking, etc.
At best I'm a Modifier, always been good at modifying things, efficiency, you know.

No real training with computers/Linux, all self taught.

I'm tired of the daily grind with carrying cabinets, all the dirty work, etc.

My dream is to be a writer but I need a real vocation outside of cabinetry/auto so I love Linux, I love modifying things and doing "R&D".
As you can tell from my sourceforge website I'm pretty good at making distros work Live, configuring and hacking things to do what i want.

But, as far as having real world experience with net stuff, IT stuff, nada.
I know there are free courses out there for IT stuff so I'll be looking into that.

Basically I need to make a minimum of $18/hr just to stay afloat :(
Ain't easy finding such high paying jobs near me...

Thanks for all your advice :)

Sorry to hear that, linus72. You stick in there!

You want to write huh? I have an idea.

You have a common goal-- a career change. Start a blog and document your journey. Slap a few ads and affiliate links on there. Getting advice from us "experts" certainly helps, but it is hard for someone in your position to relate to someone like me. Experts tend to take a lot of things they know for granted. What seems obvious to me with formal training and over a decade of experience isn't to a newbie. The story of an autodidact cabinet maker breaking into IT working with *nix hosts...that is inspiring and has value.

I am in the process of writing an article on my site about the process of starting a blog from a newbie's perspective. There are tons of things on the net about this, but from the few blogging 101 posts that I have read, they tend to leave out certain aspects of it like registering your business, privacy policies, only use the whois query tool to check for domain availability, etc, that I had a hard time with when I was setting up my site. I would have loved to have what I am writing at the moment. The "expert" bloggers took some of things things for granted.

Why not start a blog about some of the skilled trades? You could make money through affiliate sales on tools, materials, etc. I believe places like Home Depot have affiliate marketing programs. Basically, you post links to stuff on their site, if someone buys something from them while the cookie is active, you get a commission.