This is a good and tricky question. It is tricky because I don't know what parts of IT you like or dislike. If you want to do IT rather than be a developer, there are two main branches you should consider, network engineering/administration, and database administration.

There are a lot of network administrators, but there are always more needed.

Databases are exploding. They are the new growth area and anyone involved in IT has to get more into them. Pay for good DBAs is excellent.

No matter which way you go, you need to learn one or more scripting language, and SQL.

More than that, it's hard to say. My best advice is to get real world experience as soon as you can. The way computers tend to be taught in school and the way things happen in the real world can be very different. The way I was taught about databases in school made it sound like the most boring thing on the face of the earth, and yet in the first job I had where I was doing database work, I found that solving people's problems with a database was actually very cool.

Hope that helps.
Dave

Well Nice...i'm in the same boat as you. as far as education the first thing you want to do is take the A+ Certification test.

> I'm 18 years old and have grown up on computers.
...
> I'll be attending Santa Barbara City College this coming Spring
...
> How neccessary is it for me to learn programming languages to
> survive in this field, assuming my goal is not to be a programmer?

1. Diversify. If you've used mostly MS-Windows, make sure you get some Mac & UNIX/Linux under your belt; if you distrust anything that isn't FLOSS, be sure you can resolve problems under commercial OS'es, and if you're proud of how much better Mac/Aqua is than the rest of the known universe, recall that most jobs are *non*Mac (only a few even "include" Macintosh).

2. Diversify. Take a class (or classes) in networking (CCNA-prepwork is a great foundation, albeit Cisco-centric). Intro-to-DBA (Oracle, MS-SQL-Server, or other) is another good class. A programming class or two, possibly including an Assembler class, will deepen and broaden your grasp of the field: when you've programmed with libraries/subroutines/etc, then dumps and traces and the like, sometimes even ordinary error-messages, are much more useful system debugging tools!

3. Concentrate. Once you've gone wide, it's time to bring it back home; figure out where you'll most enjoy yourself. Sure, consider if the market is "saturated" but also recall that you'll be spending most of your LIFE at work: if you're doing something kinda sucky for most of your life, that extra $10/hour or so (for being in a less-saturated market) may just not be worth so much suckitude in so much of your life. Also recall that you're more likely to excel in a field where you really love what you do, and even "saturated" markets reward excellence...


- Steve

The training that has been best for me was 6 courses in formal logic (philosophy department) I took at UCSB back in the 70's. All the technical details aside, the mental agility I learned from those rigorous courses has enabled me to handle any problem thrown at me. Give me some reasonably decent documentation and I'll be able to work out what needs to be done. Hand me code in any language, along with some idea of what it was supposed to do and how it is currently broke and I can fix it. I may have to stumble around on weird and user hostile syntax, but I understand logic, and that's probably the very best basic skill you need to hone to a razor's edge.

The other thing to work on is manual dexterity. You say "what?" I read a report from the owner of software company one time where he said he finally would only hire programmers if they fixed cars or some similar activity as a hobby (most musical instruments also qualified). The connection is obvious, though often overlooked. If you know how to solve problems in the real world, complex problems like taking an engine apart and fixing it and putting it back together so it works, then your mind is much more likely to be able to handle the world of software. What this guy had discovered was that a dude with a master's in software engineering might be able to pass every test thrown at him or her, but throw a real world problem with no "book" answer and they would fumble and stumble. But a guy with a bachelor's in software or network engineering who also tinkered with cars, this guy is used to grabbing the available tools and trying to make them work.

As for languages, the worst of them all is the most popular. Well, not worst,but C and it's many derivative only sell because of marketing, not because the language is good. What a lot of techies love to forget is that a programming language is supposed to communicate between people, not between people and the computer -- there's a thing called a compiler that handles translating the human readable commands to machine language. The computer language is there as a record of how the problem was solved so that when the problem changes, some other person can read the code and modify it. If you're going to be dealing with networks, you will be dealing with dozens of mini-languages, often only accessible through point and click sequences. Yes, you should learn about programming languages and what they can do, but unless you really enjoy it, don't bother digging deep until you are on a job where you need to know it. And then your thorough background in formal logic will rescue you, hopefully,

Have fun, :-)