• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
Ethan Banks

Ethan Banks

@ecbanks

  • Blog
  • Book
  • Podcasts
  • RSS
  • Show Search
Hide Search

Podcast Guest: Can You Have A Successful IT Career Without A Degree?

Ethan Banks · 2 minutes to read
Published February 23, 2022 · Updated February 22, 2022

I was a guest on the February 22, 2022 episode of the So You Wanna Be In IT podcast.

Certifications

I chatted with hosts Pat & Dean about how my career got started. I’ve been around IT since the 90s, so my start was with Novell certification that became Microsoft certification that became Cisco certification. We talk about certs and the job opportunities I took advantage of driven by those certs.

Can You Have A Successful IT Career Without A Degree?

Along the way, we discussed whether or not someone can have a successful IT career without a college degree. Put another way, are IT certifications good enough? I think that yes, you can have a successful IT career without a degree, but that the question, “College degree. Yes or no?” deserves more analysis than a simple yes or no answer offers. Like anything, choosing not to attend university has tradeoffs. We discuss this at some length in the podcast.

What IT Roles Are In Demand In 2022?

The degree vs. certifications part of the discussion transitioned into my takes on IT careers in 2022–especially related to infrastructure. 2022 is an interesting time to be in IT. There are not nearly enough technologists available to fill roles, so there are opportunities for anyone who wants to educate themselves about…

  • Cybersecurity. The need here is endless and ever-changing.
  • The major public clouds (AWS, Azure, and GCP). Don’t think just IaaS, but also PaaS and SaaS.
  • DevOps. Working with infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is a rapidly iterating field, with tools such as Terraform and GitHub or GitLab being adopted as industry standards. Maybe “standards” is too strong of a word, but you could think of them as givens–foregone conclusions.

Of course, there’s still room for specialists in IT disciplines such as networking, because the modern IT stack is really an evolution of what we were doing 10+ years ago. IT professionals that know their fundamentals will be positioned to succeed with the modern stack, since the modern stack is largely an abstraction of fundamental constructs like TCP/IP.

Listen For More Details

Give the podcast episode a listen for more details and nuance. If you’re working on your long-term IT career plan, I think you’ll find some data points that might make their way onto your roadmap.

Filed Under: Life & CareerPublished on ethancbanks.com.

Have You Read…?

  1. What Does An ‘R’ Before A String Mean In Python?
  2. How To Pass API Query Parameters In A Curl Request
  3. Synology Running Out Of Space? Empty The Recycle Bin.
  4. Free Networking Lab Images From Arista, Cisco, nVidia (Cumulus)
  5. How To Create A Python Function You Can Call From Other Scripts
  6. How To Use Grep + Regex To Match Non-200 HTTP Status Codes In Apache Server Logs
  7. When Stretching Layer Two, Separate Your Fate
  8. How To: Simple Juniper SRX Rate-Limiting via Policer
  9. Using AppleScript To Size A Window To 16×9 On MacOS
  10. Auto-Adding Routes When Mac PPTP Connection Comes Up

MORE FREE STUFF!

Check out my IT Education Twitter Collection.
Curated tweets for IT professionals trying to up their game.

twitter mastodon linkedin instagram linkedin

Have a great day. You're doing an outstanding job. 👍

About · Privacy

Copyright © 2007–2023 Ethan Banks