Help me be an IT wizard.

October 23, 2009 6:36 AM

I will need to change careers, but I have a bit of time to plan this out. What should my next computer- or education-related job be?

About me, I’m American, living overseas in Tokyo. I have a wife and baby girl. I’m teaching English at a private high school/jr high, and enjoy the work very much. What I would like to do is move back to the U.S. and teach English at an American jr. high or high school. The catch is I don’t have a teaching certificate, and would need to take classes to get that. In addition, states are slashing budgets left and right, and even experienced teachers are being laid off and having a hard time finding work. If you have any advice in this area, please let me know.

So…the other arena I’d like to see about gaining skills/experience is computers and programming. If you ask me “what job?”, well, that’s kind of my question for you. What kinds of IT jobs are out there? What can I do all by myself with my iMac at home to gain skills and even make money (I’m thinking Web-based work, perhaps). I don’t know programming languages, but I’m fairly autodidactic given half a chance, and think I could teach myself; again, I have at least a year, probably more like 3 or 4 years before I make the switch. I am fairly computer savvy, though when it comes to typing code I guess I hit a wall.

My second question, then: what are some wise ways to spend the next couple of years teaching myself IT / Web / Programming skills? How to build up a portfolio of sorts during that time as well?

posted by anonymous to education (4 comments total)

Googling "distance learning CELTA" turns up quite a few possibilities.

Frankly, if you haven't been interested enough in web technologies to be building websites for fun already, you will have difficulty competing in the web-based market unless you have a special selling point. One obvious one is your bilingualism in Japanese but I am not sure how to capitalize on that.
posted by Idcoytco at 10:00 AM on October 23

One possibility which occurs to me: you might look into some of the open source "learning management" systems out there. I'm thinking of things like moodle or sakai. There are several levels on which you could gain familiarity with these. You could learn how they work and try to get a job with a university doing outreach or training. Or, if you're serious about the programming thing, you could actually get into the guts of the systems and get hired doing integration or customization work. These are not simple systems, but given sufficient time I don't see why you couldn't use them as a platform for building some level of expertise. This is one of the prime social benefits of open source software: it's all there for people to dig their teeth into.

There really is a specialized ecosystem built up around these products. Schools (universities in particular) like open source software -- not just because it's cheap up front but because they often have at least the minimal technical expertise in house to do the implementation/integration. Then again, there are a few (smallish) companies who specialize in helping schools implement these sorts of systems, and you might be able to get hired by one of them.
posted by lex mercatoria at 11:40 AM on October 23

If you decide you want to teach after all, you can go through an alternative certification program as long as you already have a bachelor's degree. It does cost about $3500 but you can usually do the program concurrent with an internship (first year of teaching). Some companies will even allow you to make monthly payments on the program through a payroll deduction. This is the case in Texas anyway, YMMV in other states. These programs are usually done online.
posted by tamitang at 12:47 PM on October 23

Echoing Idcoyto - now is not a good time to enter the IT/programming field. Outsourcing is reducing the number of jobs in the US, and the bad economy means that many experienced people are on the market competing for few available jobs.

lex mercatoria does have a good idea about learning an LMS. I'm not in the education field, but I did some work with Moodle a few years ago, and it seemed to be gaining in popularity. If you learn about PHP and a relational database like MySQL, you should be able to understand Moodle well enough to learn how to set it up and customize it for a K-12 school. If you do want to pursue web development, this would be a pretty good niche market for you, especially since you have the education background. Many commercial training companies and corporations use LMS systems for corporate training.

My impression of sakai is that it is a very complex system best suited for large universities.
posted by kenliu at 4:37 PM on October 23