How to Start a Career in It With No Experience

Many people know everything there is to know about a subject, but they never went to school to learn it. Perhaps they worked and didn’t have time for school. Maybe they were so fascinated by the subject that they simply soaked up every available bit of knowledge regarding it.

Now, these experts want to know how to start a career in IT with no experience. Actually, knowing how to get into the IT field is one of the easiest tech jobs to get into. No degree? No problem. No experience? No problem.

If you’d like to know our 17 tips for those wishing to know how to get a job in tech with no experience, then you can trust us to help. In this in-depth, step-by-step tutorial, you’ll learn how to start a career in tech using what you know with a little help from us.

17 Tips For Getting Into IT With Zero Experience

1. Apply Your Experience To The IT Industry

The first step is connection. How can you match your knowledge to a company needing it? The answer is to find out what any company’s IT department looks like. Go on YouTube, listen to podcasts, and read blogs detailing a day in the life, so to speak.

Knowing this, and knowing you speak their language, you can walk into one of those companies and walk out with entry-level IT jobs no experience.

2. Use Skills You Already Have

Getting a job in IT with no experience is a little easier when you recognize that the skills you already have are appealing to employers.

3. Computer Skills

This covers a lot of territory from unsticking a frozen screen to speaking HTML to adding memory (RAM) to the computer. It covers knowing computer languages. If you know how to install a motherboard, you’re in.

4. Communication

People persons do very well in IT. It takes some skill, after all, to make a frustrated and/or frightened person understand the problem and the answer to the problem. All that, while there’s a line of customers out the door and around the building.

5. Creativity

This is something no college can teach you, but you’ll use it every day. Thinking outside the box along with creativity is what got us Google and iPhones, after all.

6. Problem-solving

If you won’t let a problem go like a five-year-old, then you’ll probably have no trouble getting a job in IT with no experience.

7. Attention to detail

Want to know how to get into IT without a degree? Employers love people who pay attention enough to detail to find Waldo, so to speak. Can you trace a hacker? Do you know how to examine the code to find the program hijacking your money? This is how to get into IT field.

8. Earn Industry Certifications

How to get a job in tech with no experience involves giving employers the idea that you have some grounding in IT. This is accomplished with certifications. Let an employer see that you’re certified in, say, cybersecurity, and your office is all ready for you.

How to get IT certifications? They can come from a brick-and-mortar classroom or online. You’ll have to pay for the course for the most part, but some courses online are free with certifications. Many IT people are hired by the certifications on their resume or their LinkedIn page. Look into these:

9. Degrees In Any Subject, In General, Are An Asset

No one said how to get into IT without a degree has to mean a degree in computers. Most HR managers just see the letters of the degree without putting that together with the job. Let’s say your BA is in World History, but you know a lot about operating systems.

It’s up to you to explain operating systems and how to network them to HR. While the BA in World History is impressive, HR will be more impressed that you know anything at all about IT and how to make it work.

Add your knowledge of how to get IT certifications to your degree, and you’re well on your way to a career in IT.

10. Be Prepared To Start At The Bottom

Entry-level IT jobs with no experience [sic] often come with training in that position. Some are even unpaid, voluntary work. That’s okay, it gets your foot in the IT door.

It’s also a way to snag the easiest tech jobs to get into. While you’re practicing how to start a career in IT with no experience, add these entry-level job titles to your resume:

Help desk consultant
IT professional
Network specialist
Systems authority
Computer support pro
Database analyst

11. Network

Everyone needs to know you’re learning how to start a career in IT with no experience. Word of mouth has gotten people jobs when Indeed.com couldn’t.

Lots of people snag a business card from a dedicated wall at the grocery store, gas station, some restaurants, and even a few pharmacies.

Pass the word at church, in the doctor’s waiting room, picking up the kids at school, and at soccer games.

12. Learn Tech Skills And Gain Experience

A couple of ways how to start a new career with no experience is to offer yourself up to a mentor. Many upper management members and even company owners will give you tutelage if you hire one for free.

You just have to promise to dedicate at least (fill in the blank) years after you’re trained. Internships do the same thing.

13. Crossover

Let’s say you’re working as a typesetter, and the computer goes down. IT comes along to fix the problem. You watch every little move he makes.

If you do this often enough, you’ll have a good idea of how to start a new career with no experience.

Ask the powers that be if you can spend a few hours per week in IT learning about it. We discussed above interning as well as using an IT person as a mentor. Either way, you’ll be well on your way to knowing how to start a career in IT with no experience.

14. How To Start A Career In IT With No Experience: Easiest Tech Jobs To Get Into

Computer Technician

You’d be surprised how many people can’t even turn on a computer, much less find their way into Word. Computer technicians analyze problems, then fix them.

Graphic Designer

Graphic designers develop layouts and designs for advertising, magazines, brochures, reports, and other applications requiring design.

Multimedia Artist

Anime. Video games. Interactive training. A multimedia artist develops visual effects for anything from movies and television to social media, podcasts, and even textiles.

Computer Programmer

Software developers design software for computers to use, but the computer needs instructions on how to use it. If you can write those instructions and test them, then you’ll be a step up on how to start a career in IT with no experience.

Digital Marketing Manager

Knowing how to develop strategies that promote a brand or a company, devise a persuasive message, and get it out to the public in various media such as social networks, blogs and website content, email marketing, and strategic use of Google Ads makes you a digital marketing manager.

UX Designer

I, personally, leave a website with those cartoon zip marks when they hit me with (a) too many pop-ups, (b) difficult navigation, and (c) the website takes all day to load. It’s called a user experience or UX. Brands and companies pay a lot for UX designers that can save their customers the troubles that I listed above and then some.

Content Marketing Manager

Marketing has been a science for a long time now. You can’t walk into a grocery store, for example, without being enticed to buy the product next to the one for which you came into the store to buy. Online is even worse. You’re hit with ads left, right, and center.

Content marketing is about persuading your viewer or shopper to buy what you want them to buy. Some of the metrics used by content marketers are personal stories involving the product or service. Another is using funny stories or jokes that might not have anything to do with the product. Because the content was funny, the shopper has endorphins (the happy hormone) coursing through her brain, so she buys the product.

If you want to convince an HR manager you know how to start a career in IT with no experience, give him examples of projects in which you did an outstanding job on content marketing.

15. How To Get Into IT Without A Degree

There are steps to getting into IT without a degree. The first is to research your heart out.

Let’s say your field of interest is software development. Someone is having trouble making a program work, so you sit down and write the software that enables the program to work.

You might have a gift for it, but you should still research how to write software. Google offers lessons. In fact, if you Google developing software, you’ll come up with millions of sites that teach it. Couple this with getting certified, and you’ll have both feet in the IT door.

16. Surround Yourself With Experts – Find A Mentor

We live in a big society. We may be professionals at the office, but at home, we offer our expertise to anyone willing to pay for it. For example, you’ll find a mentor online at MasterClass in dozens of different disciplines.

You can find IT, mentors, on social media, at industry events, and at professional meetings (you know the kind that meet in hotel business rooms.)

17. Self-Educate

If you don’t have stacks of books on your particular IT subject on the living room floor, kitchen counters, bathroom vanity, bedside table, under the couch, and on the media shelves beside the TV, then you’re missing the point.

Whether it’s vehicle maintenance, growing your own food, cooking, home maintenance, or IT, you must keep learning. It’s the only way you’ll master how to start a career in IT with no experience.

Do You Know How IT Began?

Information technology has been used since 3,000 BCE. IT has been tracked through four ages: premechanical, mechanical, electromechanical, and electronic. It’s the electronic age in which we’re presently engaged.

Premechanical

The premechanical age used pictorials such as petroglyphs and hieroglyphics with which to communicate. Then scrolls written on animal skins took over the communications, even to the binding of such parchments into a book-like medium. A numbering system recognizable today was established during this time. IT was on its way.

Mechanical

Between 1450 and 1840 CE came the mechanical age. Numbers were accounted for using the most rudimentary of computers: the abacus. Then came the slide ruler, an analog computer used for multiplying and dividing. Add to this Blaise Pascal’s Pascaline, which turned out to be the first calculator.

Electromechanical

Between 1840 and 1940 CE, communications, as we know it today, began to develop. Here we find Morse code, the telegraph, telephone, radio, and the very first computer. Developed in 1944 for use in the Manhattan Project, the Harvard Mark 1 weighed in at five (five) tons. These innovations used electromechanical relays rather than electric switches.

Electronic

It was in the early 20th century that professionals from all over the world devised their version of a computer. Some used punch cards. All were analog. For example, At MIT in 1931, Vannevar Bush invented and built the Differential Analyzer or the first mechanical analog computer.

Fast forward to 1968 in San Francisco. The Fall Joint Computer Conference is treated to a demo of Douglas Engelbart’s new computer with a mouse and a graphic user interface. The demo introduced a suddenly interested populace to computers that weren’t just for government and academics anymore.

The pioneers of the computer and IT world were the first to find out how to start a career in IT with no experience. The years from then until now have seen the invention of the computer chip, computer languages, the Internet, Apple, and other innovations.

Final Thoughts

Getting a job or beginning a career with no experience is like the old joke “you have to be 18 to get a job and have 20 years of experience.” One of the ways to get around how to start a career in IT with no experience is to use what you do know as a wedge to get in the door.

Research extensively your field of knowledge. Get certified in it. Use mentoring and internships to learn more. Hone your people and problem-solving skills. This tutorial has given you pointers to use, so get out there and be an IT expert!