[SunRescue] Certs & Job hunting

[Michael S. Schiller]

Hi All:

Last year I decided to try and get a job in the IT field. I'm in an
interesting position, I'm 41 years old, and I've never worked in the IT
field before, nor do I have any real certifications. (I do have a few
BrainBench ones, but they're not worth the paper they're printed
on IMHO) Perhaps the area I live in has something to do with it (I live
in East Tennessee, near Knoxville), but after 6 months of sending out
resumes, searching the newspapers, etc. I gave up my search, and decided
to just sell  sparcstations on ebay. I've been using Unix in various
forms for years, I've installed Unix on many different machines, even
had Commodore's version of svr4 running on my A3000 back in like 91 or
whenever it was that it came out. I currently have about a half dozen
sparcs networked together at my home, and I'm in the process of adding a
SparcCenter 2000 to the list of machines here. Of course all this is
wonderful, but how do you explain all this to an interviewer that's
mostly looking for either a long list of degrees, or a long list of
fortune 500's on your resume? For 20 years I've worked in my family
business, had a few of my own, so business is nothing new to me, nor are
computers. I'm fairly sure if I'd been 18 years old, I would have gotten
a few of the jobs I went out for, seems when you're 18 these days they
accept that you don't have the degrees, or work experience, and might be
a real computer wiz, but I guess they can't see a 41 year old being one.
Oh well, I might not be making as much money doing this, but I got lots
of free time, don't need to wear fancy clothes, and don't have to answer
to anyone either!

-Mike

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