Some training providers will provide a useful Job Placement Assistance program, to help you into your first commercial role. The honest truth is that it's not as difficult as you may be led to believe to find the right work - once you're trained and certified; the shortage of IT personnel in Britain looks after that.

Help and assistance with preparing a CV and getting interviews is sometimes offered (alternatively, check out one of our sites for help). Make sure you update that dusty old CV immediately - don't leave it till you pass the exams! A good number of junior support roles have been bagged by trainees who're still on their course and haven't got any qualifications yet. This will at the very least get your CV into the 'possible' pile and not the 'no' pile. Normally you'll get better results from a specialist locally based employment agency than you'll get from a training provider's centralised service, because they'll know the local area and commercial needs better.

In a nutshell, as long as you put the same commitment into securing a job as into studying, you're not going to hit many challenges. Some men and women strangely spend hundreds of hours on their training course and then just stop once they've passed their exams and appear to be under the impression that jobs will come to them.

Moving a step farther again, you might explore the 1st stage of professional certification: 'User' & Systems-Support. The Microsoft Certified Desktop Support Technician (MCDST) is a good quality certification if you're looking to offer software help for business users. A program of this nature normally requires around one hundred hrs of learning time.

Next, we enter the realms of full Professional IT accreditation. 'CompTIA' offer probably the most widely acknowledged entry level examinations (known as A+ and Network+) for hardware-support, networking & security. These exams will take care of the fundamentals of hardware & network-installation, trouble-shooting, administration, security & support. Study time is often predicted to be about 200 to 250 hrs to cover both, which can be reasonably accomplished within six months on a part time study basis.

A expert and specialised consultant (vs a salesperson) will cover in some detail your abilities and experience. This is vital for calculating your starting point for training. Sometimes, the training inception point for a trainee experienced in some areas will be vastly different to the student with no experience. Always consider starting with some basic PC skills training first. This can often make the learning curve a little less steep.

You can separate IT employment routes down in to a range of different groups - First is Networking & Support (including Security), the second is Programming and Software Development, the third is Databases & the fourth is Web Design. In each area there are specific abilities to get to grips with, and accreditations to attain. Each field offers a variety of qualification levels to build upon. The sheer quantity of qualifications on offer in these fields may be at first off-putting to a brand new trainee, but this is where a practical careers chat with an industry advisor can open up what is ideal for your personality, goals and learning style.

Potential trainees hoping to kick off a career in computers and technology often have no idea of which direction to follow, or which market to get certified in. Scanning a list of IT job-titles is a complete waste of time. The majority of us have no idea what our own family members do for a living - so we're in the dark as to the subtleties of a specific IT job. Generally, the way to deal with this issue in the best manner stems from a full discussion of several areas:

- Which type of person you reckon you are - what kind of jobs you find interesting, and conversely - what you hate to do.

- Do you hope to achieve a key dream - like working for yourself someday?

- What scale of importance is the salary - is it of prime importance, or is enjoying your job further up on your list of priorities?

- Understanding what the main career areas and sectors are - and what differentiates them.

- What effort, commitment and time you're prepared to commit obtaining your certification.

To be honest, it's obvious that the only real way to research these areas will be via a meeting with an experienced advisor that has years of experience in Information Technology (and more importantly it's commercial requirements.)

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