Where can I ask about career or education in IT?

Stackoverflow and their sister site does not permit its rules to post questions on this topic. I would like to know from experts what training courses they recommend or sources with useful information for training.

Since you metioned StackOverflow, I'm guessing you're looking at programming-related careers? (Software Engineering?)

There are a lot of different ways to pick up the skills you need; a lot of it depends where you are in your life right now (particularly where you feel you are with your technical and problem-solving skills -- do you have any kind of programming knowledge or STEM background?), and where you'd like to be.

A lot of people commit themselves to studying a Computing-related degree at university, or some other Higher qualification such as an HND. People who already have a degree background in another subject can often pick up the skills on a postgrad course/Masters. (If you're going to take a course, then it's highly recommended to find something with a 12-month industrial placement as well)

There are other alternatives by either self-teaching from books and online books/courses/tutorials, as well as picking up 'shorter' courses at a college, and maybe some certification from Microsoft (C#) or Oracle (Java and SQL). Even looking for junior/entry-level jobs, although those types of jobs expect people to be technically competent up to the same level as a university graduate.

Another alternative is to enter into a Higher (level 4-6) apprenticeship where you'd work as a junior software engineer for 3-4 years and pick up a degree qualification at the same time.

Realistically, whatever path you take, you should be expecting to need an absolute minimum of at least 1000 hours of good, solid, focused study on some of the core programmind and problem-solving skills; using at least one high-level programming language, becoming confident in some popular programming tools, and to pick up some of the other core topics - particularly databases and data modelling, but also software design, UI design, web development. -- This is pretty much a minimum to get anywhere near the kinds of skill level that an employer would expect when hiring someone into a junior job.


If you'd like to start out and get an introduction to programming, then the Java programming language is a good place to start -- there's a lot of important core concepts that you can pick up from gaining competency with Java - it's quite a big language with a lot to learn, and a lot of important concepts underlying them, but a lot of transferrable skills too.


Have a look at these sites where you can pick up a lot of skills for free:

Sites like Coursera, EdX and Udacity have some really good free stuff from a lot of really good American universities with great computer science courses like Harvard, MIT, University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, UBC. There's also free courses from top tech companies like Microsoft, Google and Cisco too.

Paid-for (but still high quality) sites:

Thank you so much! You're the best.
But actually I am interested in pentesting or maybe system administration.

In which case, some of the stuff above still applies, although things like Java and Web development obviously aren't really too important in pentesting/infosec or system administration. There are still options with regards to applying to courses and higher apprenticeships focused on Cyber Security or IT Infrastructure/DevOps which are definitely worth exploring (Perhaps consider contacting an apprenticeship provider such as QA if this idea appeals to you)

A higher (Degree/HND) CompSci-related course could still be useful, or maybe a more specialised course in Networking, possibly something which leads to Cisco and Oracle certification. Here's a list of all the UK universities who offer at least CCNA-level certification as part of their courses, and many also include CCNP (which is the follow-on) - https://www.netacad.com/web/uk/education/

If you do decide to pick up an HND/Degree, then I'd strongly recommend choosing a course with a 12-month industrial placement because this is a great way to put yourself ahead in those kinds of careers.

Cisco certification is very highly respected and worthwhile. There's also some decent certification from MIcrosoft as well for securing Microsoft systems. You can even find some introductory Linux courses online too (Linux is important for anyone wishing to work in IT infrastructure or Cloud systems).

CompTIA certification is also very worthwhile too: https://certification.comptia.org/

In addition to that, Cloud Platforms are hugely important these days, so the Microsoft Azure certification as well as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Certification are valuable to have.

Lastly, for any IT career, Databases and SQL are important because nearly every business out there will probably have large amounts of data stored in a database somewhere, so anyone working in IT can benefit from being able to understand how to work with that data and those systems. You don't really need certification for that (Oracle's SQL certification is great though), otherwise databases are something which you can self-teach or get on most computing/compsci courses.

Sites like Edx, Coursera and Udacity certainly have a lot of relevant material there in areas like security, devops, networking and databases, and particularly for Amazon/Microsoft Azure cloud services - realistically there's a lot you could teach yourself without really needing to spend anything other than your own valuable time.

But also, It's probably worth doing some general introductory programming; the skills in computational thinking and problem solving are pretty important to a lot of IT jobs -- even if you're not writing software, you'll probably still be involved in automation scripting sometimes - nothing too advanced of course, but you'd generally benefit having the basic concepts of programming. If you are interested in self-teaching at all, try some of the free introductory Computer Science stuff from Harvard or MIT. (It might be worth working on learning Python because that's a far more human-friendly language which frequently crops up in all kinds of IT infrastructure/devops careers - it's a great automation scripting language)

Winterscoming has explained very, very well in those two posts.

You can learn programming languages and also use these projects as part of your portfolio to get a developer job:

-Udacity (check out there nanodegree's in full stack web developer, data science, android development etc)
-Treehouse
-Udemy
-Free code camp
-Code academy
-Pluralsight (top content and projects)
-Lynda

For networking you can start with the n+ and get yourself a your own lab for home and fiddle around with the cables then shoot for the ccna.

For IT support, you take the a+, microsoft certifications which will give you a good grounding.

Also IT security is on the way up and there could be courses on the internet related to this.

Good luck