Career

[rgreen50]

There are so many different fields in the IT industry. Does anyone have any suggestions or experiences on how they made their decision?

[ua549]

Happenstance. I selected the best opportunity available to me at that moment in the 1960's which was data communications and networking.

[SteveDavidson]

Find out what's available to you depending on your circumstances (travel/relocation options, experience, education), and out of those which will pay your bills, pick the one that sounds most likely to hold your long-term interest.

It's fairly easy to switch between IT fields, at least in the low and medium levels, if you're even moderately good at research and being able to read a manual. Plenty of people have careers which jump around from systems administration to DBA to field engineer to network wrangler and back. Even if you end up with an esoteric job on some obscure high-end system, it can be useful to keep your hand in with whatever the buzzword of the moment is, just in case things fall through.

[JPnyc]

I agree with Steve, basically I would say 50% of your decision should be based on what field attracts you the most, with the other 50% having an eye toward the market and how saturated the field is. It's wonderful, a godsend, to have a job that you like but that won't help you much if there are no job opportunities in that field.

And as already mentioned, if you are predisposed toward technical matters and absorb them easily, changing horses in mid-Gallup is really not that big a deal. For example once you understand procedural coding, it's a whole lot easier to learn new languages, than it is to learn your first one. It's really just a matter of looking up syntax and the names of functions/methods in that language.