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My impression on DBA salaries (I know a few Oracle DBA's) is that 6 figures would generally be a senior level position - 7+ years. Depends on the market of course - 6 figures would be attainable earlier in DC than in Atlanta, in general.
I just spit out my glass of water. You want to make 80K with a quick education? Don't we all!
Look into polysomnography since your track record shows you don't stick to things long term. Not 80K but you'll make maybe $50K with limited time and experience. There's a quick, easy school in Atlanta:
I've been in IT for 16 years and was having trouble finding a new gig; I applied for several BA roles with a tailored resume and cover letter. I could do a BA's job standing on my head.
Nothing but crickets.
I have no idea how these people worm their way into these roles.
They worm their way in by presenting exceptionally well, being articulate in both written and verbal communication. A healthy dose of project management skills is excellent for a BA. I've worked closely with several BA's with ...to toss out yet another acronym...MBAs. Helps, a lot, to understand the "business" part of "business analysis." The mole-people are great for strictly-IC roles, but I personally want my BAs to be approachable, friendly, and curious. And willing to dig in and do the heavy-lifting on the data, too.
And too, for some roles it helps to be fairly technical in various frameworks around the SDLC to be a good BA. Depends, though.
I've hired a half-dozen BAs past eight years, jr. to mid-level, and interviewed 3x or more that many. All have had depth in experience, but with varied backgrounds. Many have been older, in turns out, because I appreciated the steady demeanor and maturity to listen to clients or peers, and tenacity to get a job done. Some were MBAs, others engineers, one a Ph.D., and another a stats-major. The last guy made outstanding analysis reports of what was really going on in an organization, via designing statistically-valid sampling and control methods for our national userbase. For example.
And yes, per other replies, fluency in Excel was (is) mandatory. I like people familiar with arrays and lookup tables, e.g., to see if candidates actually know what they're talking about with practical experience in true "analysis," not just gathering data. Access can be nice-to-have if working with actuarial data. Sharepoint skills are increasingly nice to have, to organize findings in a way others can use.
The banks around here seem to hire BAs, ditto insurance companies. I've worked with both; seems legit.
I'm skeptical OP has narrowed it down enough to focus on the "what," based on comments, but to be fair that's the point of the thread. My "opinion" is, for IT in-general, in order of importance: 1) CS degree 2) experience 3) certs. Some get by without 1) or 3), but I'm a big fan of having an edge to get through the job search gatekeepers, the recruiters and/or HR. Screeners sometimes eliminate the non-degreed and non-certified; again, not always. Sometimes.
I think DBA or BA is a good role for the OP. SQL is not a hard language to learn, at least not SELECT, FROM, WHERE as one poster commented is what he mostly does. Keep in mind that is VEEERY basic SQL. It can get a lot more complicated with various types of joins (inner, outer, cross, left, right, etc.), case when statements, etc. SELECT FROM WHERE is usually where a BA is limited to, but I've seen a lot of BA's who think they are DBA's or programmers because they filter data in spreadsheets all day. SSRS is where you build actual business intelligence reports, and usually if you are doing SSRS you are doing much more complex queries like stored procedures, multiple joins and case when statements in a single query. Most of my queries are far beyond SELECT FROM WHERE and are 4-8 pages of code. Those are entry level, but a good place to start.
Being a DBA is not as easy as it looks. Sure, backup and recovery looks easy when you do it via the GUI for a single database. Now do that for hundreds of instances and thousands of databases via script. Try to solve a dead lock. Dive into security. Manager performance, etc. DBA's don't manage a single 30mb database. They manage hundredds and in some cases thousands of 100+gb databases. I have over 200 myself, though I wear multiple hats.
Without getting into the software side, your options are extremely limited.
I worked help desk for a few years and have a bachelor's (not IT) and eight certs (A+ , N+, Sec+, CASP, ITIL V3, CCENT, CCNA, CCNA-Sec). None of those certs helped me get the job I currently have, nor did they help me advance within IT infrastructure. All they led to were more calls for help desk work.
Infrastructure is a slowly dying field. Between virtualization and the cloud, many companies are outsourcing what were formerly in house servers, networking equipment, storage, and personnel. Big vendors like Rackspace are filling that void. If you don't want to do any programming, you're left with security (and you need to know some coding for most roles) and the pure infrastructure, mostly sys/netadmin work, that's going the way of the dinosaur.
I now work for a software company that makes a product for big financial institutions. We are hiring for roles that start at $50k in Indy, nearly $80k in Boston suburbs. We're looking for people with light SQL experience (the basic statements noted in this thread) with a technical or finance degree and some minor level of experience. We can barely find anyone who can pass our analytical (not programming - but intelligence) test. You'd also be advised to get a good niche, like FIX protocol support that is used by major investment firms.
Analyst jobs are about to explode for marketers too as "big data" heads to marketing. Marketers are collecting tons and tons of data on prospects, web visitors and so on and are increasingly responsible for better reporting.
Analyst jobs are about to explode for marketers too as "big data" heads to marketing. Marketers are collecting tons and tons of data on prospects, web visitors and so on and are increasingly responsible for better reporting.
I got out of coding long ago and moved to Release Engineering and Applications Development Support. Let the young guys fight over the deadlines and stress of coding and you just do the coordination and facilitation.
Considering my age (33), I feel that this is my last shot at a decent salary (ruled out Nursing, Law, Medicine, etc. due to time, cost). I don't have the luxury of returning to a brick-and-mortar college/FT because I have bills to pay. In my state (GA), it takes forever to get to the good stuff (your major courses) because the curriculum is bloated with lib arts/gen reqs., and I am in a hurry to get somewhat stable employment (first earning goal is a mere $35,000). What discouraged me from pursuing IT is that the field is so broad, and I feel like you can never get up to speed on what employers need, or have ENOUGH skills to be employable. When I see jobs it's like Job A at Company S - must be proficient in 2,5,6,11, and have 5-7 yrs. experience doing H,V, R, and T (Y variety). No one has ALL of the skills that each job requests. It's not a field where you can say I want to be a X and obtain G, H, and K training to be come a X. I've been accepted to Western Governor's University, but for the IT Management degree (I really want an IT degree and am in the processing of appealing). I understand that I can come back and earn a second degree in IT but that costs more money and time. Would I be okay with supplementing the IT Mgmt degree with a load of self-studied certifications, or am I better off with the IT degree?
No, they don't. But as they say, you don't need to run faster than the bear, just faster than the other people that are also running from the bear. The key is being better 'qualified' than the other candidates.
Unfortunately - my personal opinion is that IT is a very hierarchal field. Especially on the operations side. You'll seldom find a senior engineer (be it software, network, security,etc) without having done their time. Most network engineers I know at some point did helpdesk or NOC work. I don't know of too many that just came out of college and got a gig managing routers/switches and firewalls. So if you want to go up that path, you'll need to take that low paying grunt work. And not only that - unless you luck into an opportunity to advance, you'll need to do a lot of legwork yourself (ask questions, hang with the folks that have jobs that you want, volunteer to help out during off-hours implementation/maintenance windows etc.).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Emigrations
Without getting into the software side, your options are extremely limited.
I worked help desk for a few years and have a bachelor's (not IT) and eight certs (A+ , N+, Sec+, CASP, ITIL V3, CCENT, CCNA, CCNA-Sec). None of those certs helped me get the job I currently have, nor did they help me advance within IT infrastructure. All they led to were more calls for help desk work.
Infrastructure is a slowly dying field. Between virtualization and the cloud, many companies are outsourcing what were formerly in house servers, networking equipment, storage, and personnel. Big vendors like Rackspace are filling that void. If you don't want to do any programming, you're left with security (and you need to know some coding for most roles) and the pure infrastructure, mostly sys/netadmin work, that's going the way of the dinosaur.
I now work for a software company that makes a product for big financial institutions. We are hiring for roles that start at $50k in Indy, nearly $80k in Boston suburbs. We're looking for people with light SQL experience (the basic statements noted in this thread) with a technical or finance degree and some minor level of experience. We can barely find anyone who can pass our analytical (not programming - but intelligence) test. You'd also be advised to get a good niche, like FIX protocol support that is used by major investment firms.
Most of these certs are meant to 'validate' your knowledge/skills, not substitute for them. If I got a candidate that listed all those certs (I'd first of all would chuckle because it can be seen as simply padding the cert section. No reason to list S+ with CASP or CCENT with CCNA), I would expect to 2+ years of experience in managing/implementing networks, security controls, as well as writing policies and procedures (and 3-4+ years of overall experience). If the experience don't back-up the certs - the red flag of being a "paper <certification>" comes up. And from my perspective, that is actually worse than not having a cert.
And while I do agree that new trends makes outsourcing more viable. I certainly don't think these skills are going the way of the dinosaur. I see them as actually becoming more valued. The reason for that is because they'll need highly skilled people in those positions to managed the service providers (<X>aaS) that will support all the outsourcing customers. There will be less of them, but those that qualify will most likely be very highly compensated.
I now work for a software company that makes a product for big financial institutions. We are hiring for roles that start at $50k in Indy, nearly $80k in Boston suburbs. We're looking for people with light SQL experience (the basic statements noted in this thread) with a technical or finance degree and some minor level of experience. We can barely find anyone who can pass our analytical (not programming - but intelligence) test. You'd also be advised to get a good niche, like FIX protocol support that is used by major investment firms.
Thank you for sharing your personal experience.
The finance and banking industry is always looking to fill basic SQL jobs for $50k-80k. The advance SQL guys move on to database development or BI reporting, after a few years. There's constantly new job openings created by people leaving for more money.
I can't believe the salaries out there for a simple select statement to create these reports.
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