Our Information Technology course helps people start entry-level careers in IT support without any experience or degree required.
The course is taught by Josh Madakor who worked his way up from IT support to currently working for Microsoft. He knows more about breaking into the IT field than anyone else, as he's been teaching people for years how to do it through his YouTube channel, which has nearly 70,000 followers. He has partnered with us to create the most in-depth course ever built on how to start a career in IT. You learn everything you need to go from knowing nothing to landing your first position.
IT is an amazing career path for someone who doesn't want to work in tech sales but still wants to be in the technology industry on a very high-paying career path. There's also no coding involved.
Josh has kept the course at $0.00 additional costs with one semi-possible caveat which he mentions in the course.
Every lab in the course is done in Azure (Microsoft's cloud platform) which requires a credit card to sign up. When signing up, everyone gets $200 worth of free Azure credits to use, which is more than enough to finish the course (by a lot). The caveat is, the credits will expire in 1 month. If the student takes longer than a month to do the labs, they can either:
- Create a new Azure tenant with a different credit card and email to get an additional free $200 of credits, or
- Continue using their existing subscription on a pay-as-you-go basis
If they opt for pay-as-you-go, assuming they continuously clean up their cloud resources as advised, they shouldn't spend over $20 to do all the labs.
He covers this in Lab 1, Part 2.
The high-level exam objectives for the CourseCareers IT certificate exam are very closely aligned with the lessons you will go through and include the following topics:
- Cloud Computing Basics
- Computing Components
- Help Desk Core Fundamentals
- Networking Basics
- Operating System Basics
The IT Course also offers the following hands-on labs, ALL of which are completed in Microsoft Azure--a cloud platform, affording you hands-on cloud experience as well:
- Azure Crash Course (Cloud Platform)
- Azure Virtual Machines
- Ticketing Systems (osTicket)
- Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)
- Active Directory (Deployment and Configuration)
- Domain Naming Systems (DNS)
- Network File Shares and Permissions
Traditional certifications (CompTIA, etc.) tend to be very broad and theoretical with a lack of depth and practical application. Whereas the CourseCareers IT Course is intentionally more narrow but goes relatively deep into the topics. Most topics covered in the lecture portion have a practical component in the labs section that will result in you gaining usable skills and a better understanding of the technology.
You won't be able to pass CompTIA exams by going through CourseCareers, but you will have a lot more context when learning about many of the topics you'll find in those exams. Likewise, passing CompTIA exams doesn't translate to any kind of practical hands-on experience. That's not to say CompTIA exams are bad as they are very useful for theory and HR and recruiters often appreciate them.
Also, try not to think of the CourseCareers certificate as the end goal. It's simply a by-product of getting through the course. While the certificate is good to have, the experience you gain, your portfolio, an overhauled resume, and increased interview capability are the main target outcomes of getting through the course.
Pretty much any entry-level IT job pays 40-70k realistically. The lower end accounts for locations where salary might be less.
Examples of job titles, might be:
- IT Support Specialist
- Help Desk Technician
- IT Technician
- Service Desk Technician
- Service Desk Analyst
- Support Analyst
Also, since all of the labs are done in Azure, it's possible to start with a Cloud Support Engineer type position, (which is usually 70-100k but this will no doubt require some extra effort on the student's side in the form of additional cloud-based projects or a bit of prior experience).
Examples of such job titles might be:
- Cloud Support Engineer
- Support Engineer
- Azure Support Engineer
- Technical Support Engineer
- Application Support Engineer
Additional information can be found on the Information Technology Course page.
For general course information, read I would like general information on how courses work.