Over the last three weeks, I gave you a full deep dive into my IT career history. I talked about my first job, my current job, and everything in between! I was as honest and thorough as I could be (probably more honest and thorough than I should have been), but now I’m going to look a little bit deeper and provide you with a few lessons that I’ve learned from navigating my IT career and the professional space. I figure that if I’ve devoted this much time to a career, I might as well try my best to help others who are looking into the same thing.

Last Friday, I released a post that was essentially the introductory post about my IT career. I talked about getting my start and the first couple of jobs that I had in this field, beginning with my first data center job all the way to leaving my third IT job, which was another data center in Kansas City. Today, I’ll be continuing the walkthrough of my history in IT with the next four jobs that I had, which are going to come with some… interesting stories, particularly a couple of the jobs. The most interesting of all of them is actually going to be the first job I’m talking about today: working for an insurance company’s data center. It was… something.

Today, I thought it would be fun to share my personal IT career journey and talk about how it started and how I got where I am. This is going to be split into two parts since there’s a lot to go through. My hope is that by being thorough and open about this, I can show others that it’s entirely possible to build a career in a field like IT and support yourself without the need for a degree that you don’t actually want or care about.