Career Change to the IT Sector - Looking for Course Recommendations

Celephais

I am currently working in the Education field and am looking to change my focus towards IT over the coming year or two. There are a lot of courses out there, and so I have come here to ask for advice on which courses would be the best value/have the best prospects of employment.

I have a BA Arts (English & Philosophy), an MA Philosophy and a PDip in Education. I worked in secondary teaching for a year, but have spent the past two years teaching Fetac courses as part of a Probation Service programme. Although I have no direct computing experience, I am knowledgeable enough from my own personal use. As I have decent qualifications in my own field, I'm hoping to find good course that won't take me 4 years and a small fortune to complete.

There are plenty of Higher Diplomas around - I've noticed a couple of courses in Griffith College for instance. But I'm also aware that there are a lot of courses that will simply waste my time. I know I'm capable of picking up, for instance, a programming language in my own time over the text while. What I really need is a course which will give me a good grounding in the field, is industry relevant, and which I can ideally complete whilst working in a fairly short amount of time. The MSc in Web Technologies in NCI has been recommended to me as a high level course that I could possibly get into with very little official experience - if anyone has heard anything about this in particular, I would be interested in hearing about experiences.


This is all in an ideal world of course - I've come here to ask for recommendations from other people who may have found themselves in a similar situation.

Cheers!

Tom Dunne

Ha, I'm going the other way - from IT to education.

Anyway, there are a lot of conversion courses that take non-IT graduates and offer them a conversion course to IT, as you mention, post-graduate diplomas.

In what way do you feel they will waste your time? A PG diploma is a PG diploma, it is really the content that will vary. So choosing based on institution reputation, accessibility (as in, how close is the institution to you) and content is probably the way to go.

Celephais

Hehe - want to trade jobs?

Yeah, there does seem to be a decent amount of conversion courses. I guess I'm finding it difficult trying to assess institution reputation. What makes a particular course look good to an employer?

Course content does seem to vary - as long as I'm getting a good grounding in some programming I'll be happy. By wasting my time, I mean that I don't want to do a part-time course that takes place two evenings a week, when I could do it full-time in 2-3 days a week. I have some flexibility with my working hours now, so want to take advantage of that. I'm confident that I won't find an MSc particularly difficult, so I want to try and make the conversion as quickly as possible.

Celephais

To add to the above, I seem to have focused on NCI as somewhere worth looking into. I posted this in the NCI forum, but it doesn't seem to be too active, so I'll add my question here as well:

After looking around it seems that NCI have a good selection of well-regarded courses. I've come here to ask for peoples' opinions on the following courses for my situation:
Higher Diploma in Computing
MSc in Web Technologies

The HDip seems like a pretty good foundation, and I can get it done within a year. My worry is that it is not of a high enough level to get me employment on its own merit.

The MSc is a bigger commitment, both financially and time-wise, but it seems like it will offer a much more complete and focused addition to my CV.

Personally, I would prefer to do the HDip, but as I said I am not sure if it will actually be worth the money.

Has anyone here had any experience with either of these courses, and could maybe offer some advice on the situation? Any input is appreciated

Cheers!

Tom Dunne

I think no matter what you do, your CV will read "Primary degree: BA in English and Philosophy", with extra IT courses bolted on. This will colour the view of some recruiters/HR people, no matter what you do.

Personally, I would stay away from the private colleges as I believe the public institutions have a better reputation. Having said that, I did my MSc in a private college and I haven't done at all bad career wise (though bear in mind, my primary degree is in IT from DCU).

DIT and DCU have the better reputations in terms of IT/Computer Applications, but of course Trinity and UCD have very good reputations too.

If I were you, I would go straight for the MSc in an institution that has the courses you want and you have an interest in. No matter what you do, it's the fact that you have an MSc that really counts, with institution reputation of (slightly) lesser importance and actual subjects even less.

I would also have a look at the Development forum here on Boards.ie - there have been a few similar threads.

des2015

Hi, Are you employed? If not look at the ICT conversion courses on springboardcourses dot ie

These course are free for unemployed and the HDips include internships to help you gain the experience needed.

DBS have an open evening today (6th Jan) and NCI have an open day in a few weeks.

A few things to think about: 1. How long has it been since you were in 'study' mode and 2. how IT literate are you?

The HDips are specifically designed as conversion courses.
If I was making this decision I would talk to the colleges directly to suss out the work load.

Celephais

des: I am employed. The Springboard courses are a great idea, but I'm earning decent enough money now so there'll be no chance of getting that. There are a lot of conversion HDips, but there are also some MScs - I honestly think that I could cover an MSc easily enough, and so the Dips would be more of a waste in the long-run. It's been a couple of years since I've been in full 'study mode', but getting back into it is not a problem. I keep pretty mentally active. I'm IT literate on a very general level - I get the main concepts that are at play, but I have no advanced knowledge of any programming language, for instance.

I think at this stage, an MSc just seems like the better option - my problem is going to be getting onto one with no previous IT education, other than what I can do in my own time. Talking to the college directly definitely seems like a good idea - though I did email NCI with a request to talk to someone, and got a response which was a copy/paste of the course details on their website. So I may glance by them...

Tom: UCD have a pretty decent looking MSc conversion - the only problem is it's 16 months long, and looks to be full-time. I still need to work during this, so want to try and get something with max 2-3 weekdays, and some evenings. And also, having all of my qualifications from UCD just seems to bother me So it'll just be a case of searching around. I do think steering clear of private colleges might be a good idea - my wife spent a few years in DBS, and they were useless outside of collecting money.

I'll definitely check out the development forum - thanks for that. At least I can say now that it's not a decision I need to make in the next few weeks - looking at the MScs, I'll be waiting till September to get started. Cheers for the input!

des2015

Good luck with the course - try to find out what programming languages they will use in the course. There are loads of good free introductory programming training videos on Udemy and Youtube that would help you hit the ground running in September.

adocholiday

I did the MSc conversion in UCD. One thing to note OP (and this is purely from my experience mind) is that many of these courses don't have any kind of internship component. You are competing for jobs in a very active market where the majority of your peers have an extra 1-2 years of coursework behind them plus a period of work experience.

I found it pretty difficult to get a job after the course, took a few months of searching. I also couldn't get a software development role because we simply didn't cover enough material in the course and my overall knowledge was lacking.

There are jobs out there for people coming out of conversion courses, but be prepared to do a lot of work on the side to bring your skills up to scratch and to spend a bit of time job hunting.