Hi Jason, I'd like to share some bumps and bruises with you, in hopes that you'll do quite well in the future. This is a little knowledge I've picked up in my time of working around shops good and bad, and some time in the Military. A few of the things I learned in the Military are good lessons that'll last me a lifetime. First, be honest. If you're trying to get into the field, it's difficult to start out (going from a 9mm to a keyboard was a hell of a transition as I learned). You may not have a lot of skills, but being honest about it is one thing that will earn you respect time and time again. You'll never have yourself in the position of having to deal with demons in the closet if you're honest upfront, and always. This includes the resume, and your interview. So they don't decide to hire you....so what? There's millions more fish in the sea, and you'll soon find a place that'll happily accept you and make your time productive and educational. Second, be respectful. Respect is a big portion of any job. If you're showing a potential employer a better than average amount of respect, it's likely that you're making a good impression, and you'll be remembered at the end of all the interviews. If you can show respect people, it's an indication that you'll make a good employee, and a good member of the team. Third, when you're looking at a prospective employer, ask for a chance to meet the staff, and talk to them a little bit. Starting in the field, and being new, you want to surround yourself with seasoned, skilled, knowledgable people. This will pay you back very quickly, as you'll see that the learning curve takes a very rapid and steep climb once you start. Some of the best training I've ever had was onsite, fighting fires. There's no substitute for trial by fire. Now, as for starting out, I've taken my knocks as a SysAdmin, and found that there's no such thing as JUST a SysAdmin. A SysAdmin is a jack of all trades, and has to be pretty damn good at the better part of them. In my opinion, it was a good experience due to the nature of the UNIX operating system, and being given the opportunity to learn the real internals of computing (I think the only thing better would have been Mainframing, and an Assembly Hacker). From there, I was able to learn a more than fair amount of knowledge about Systems, their idiocentricities, and securing them. Although this isn't exactly being a security engineer, you have to lay a foundation somewhere. Doing this will not only give you a competitive edge in the future, but will additionally give you a commodity worth it's weight in gold...knowledge. As per usual, I've been a little longwinded, so I'll close here. HTH, and mail me privately for more of my rambling. Hal Hal Flynn, ICS Inc. Senior Systems Analyst Defense Information Systems Agency flynnhat_private Commercial: 334-416-3233 DSN: 596-3233
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 15:26:47 PDT