Steven McEvoy Shares His IT Experiences
For a time, Steven McEvoy’s job prospects were few and far between. McEvoy was having trouble getting a job after being off for a long period of time due to injury. He had experience working in IT for non-profits, but no official credentials. Two years went by with no luck landing a professional IT position. However, when he started training and working toward certification, he found a job very quickly.
McEvoy now works as an IT Applications Specialist at Crawford and Company. He is on the intermediate team and is working to learn the responsibilities of the senior IT staff.
Crawford and Company creates proprietary software that is primarily used by the insurance industry for claims management.
“My favorite thing is the fact that in the specific job I have, it is different every day,” McEvoy said. “I can come in and remote a machine in Sydney, I can come in and remote a machine in Vancouver. I can be remoted in to a 2k3 server anywhere in the country.”
Crawford and Company has 87 offices in Canada and 400 worldwide. As part of his job role, he spends time doing remote repairs for machines across the country, does rebuilds for opting images, makes universal backups and supports and beta tests the proprietary software for Crawford and Company.
“The biggest challenge is the speed at which the company is growing,” McEvoy said. “We have added 500 users in three months – probably 1,000 next year in Canada. Every time there is a new hire, new equipment needs to be purchased and deployed. Often what happens is users think they know how to do things right and start to do them, and it is a lot harder to fix something that is done wrong than to it is to do it right the first time.”
McEvoy spends time studying for certifications when he isn’t working. As part of the associate degree program he completed, he earned all three designations of CompTIA A+. He has also completed four Microsoft Visa exams and is working on getting CompTIA Linux+ and CompTIA Server+ certified as well as earning his MCSA and MCSE for Server 2003 certifications.Â
“I find that the biggest advantage of having certifications is salary range,” McEvoy said. “There is a guy on my team who basically does the exact same work that I do, and he makes significantly less than I do…He is making 20 percent less than I am based on the fact that I have significantly more certifications and training.”
 McEvoy is also hoping that his studies and certifications will help facilitate a move onto the senior IT team. In addition to training, McEvoy keeps up with trends through subscriptions to industry magazines and whitepapers. He recommends that other IT professionals be continuously learning and that they find something they are passionate about, as he has found in computer forensics and data recovery.
McEvoy has also joined the CompTIA IT Pro program so he can access the forums there and posts there and on Microsoft’s TechNet forums.
McEvoy strongly recommends certification for anyone looking to get an IT profession, and advises IT Professionals to take initiaitve with their job search, especially in light of the current job market given the increased outsourcing of entry-level IT jobs.
A younger classmate was having trouble finding a job because he had no background experience, but he had a specific company in mind that he really wanted to work for. McEvoy recommended that he contact the Human Resources department at that company to determine who made hiring decisions for the department he wanted to work for. He suggested the classmate offer to volunteer as an intern.
The advice was successful – his classmate volunteered at the company while still in school and was offered a permanent position there after graduation.
“So it might be a short term sacrifice because it is usually not nearly as much money, or sometimes no money, but it gets your foot in the door particularly if it is somewhere you really want to be,” McEvoy said.
McEvoy is also building his name through his book reviews and blog. He works as a freelance writer for seven different publications, and has published more than 200 book reviews in media outlets and 400 on his blog in the past three years. When he started the training program, he became more technology-focused, reviewing all the books he used in his studies as well as additional technology-themed books.
Interested in earning some certifications of your own? Visit Killtest.com/comptia/ for more information on CompTIA certifications.
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