I am wondering what kind of career moves I have available to me because I am over the bullshit of desktop support. I have been brushing up on my Linux skills, learning docker, and doing a whole bunch of networking-related things. At this point, I am 46 years old. Would it benefit me to go back to school to learn a skill to help me advance beyond this role? I just don’t know what to do. There are many options, none of them truly low cost and all of them involving a significant amount of risk.
I get that there is no avoiding risk when making a career change so late in life. I was looking at training for Java or Oracle and it isn’t cheap. Maybe given my experience I could teach A+ or Network+? I don’t know. I’ll welcome any ideas right now.
QA work has a fairly low barrier of entry, and from there I’ve known a few people who moved from QA into Developer roles. So there’s that route.
Okay, that sounds promising. By QA I believe you mean software QA, right?
Yep, correct
Different companies have different requirements, but generally if you know a bit of SQL and a bit of Linux terminal commands you should be good. Maybe have a browse through a testing framework like Selenium, though frameworks would vary depending on what the company does, so don’t fret too much about that.
Playwright is another good testing framework to lean
Can confirm, have taught a lot of QA people coding and got them into developer roles.