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I’m getting into IT from the bottom; I had no technical background or knowledge prior to my recent study. I’m now studying for the Comptia A+ and doing a lot of networking and powershell on the side, as well as building a homelab. The main reason I want to get into this field is so I can have a source of income while I travel and see the world. What fields in IT are most suited to this? Thanks in advance for any responses!

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I freelanced for about a decade prior to taking this current job due to covid lockdowns 5 years ago. About the only calls I got for IT work were for webdev/SEO work, and not a lot of those. The vast majority of those ten years was spent using my carpentry/finishing construction skills as opposed to IT ones, and I made by far the most and most regular money painting houses, interior and exterior, and working alone was able to pay myself about 3 times anything I made doing IT, by the hour.

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Well I’m not putting in 20 hours of study a week to paint houses. I wouldn’t be able to do it and travel anyway.

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I think I’d try and find some established consultants that hire freelancers for projects and try and get on their contact lists for whatever specialty you’d prefer to pursue. They’re the ones that get the calls.

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Okay that’s actually very helpful. Do you know how one would go about this? My plan so far has been to build up an online presence (hence me coming on here and also on LinkedIn) showcase my work and hopefully attract clients/employers, but I’ll do whatever needs to be done

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If you want to get into solution development, having some good professional looking code projects on github will really help you to establish a professional presence and can help get you out of ‘freelancing’ and into ‘consultancy’ fairly quickly. Build a couple of truly useful projects and put a pricetag on them in github, might pay your way if you make a hit. Similar with app development on mobile, make something good and just put it in the stores, build your own revenue stream by selling finished product right out of the gate.

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So are you suggesting I focus on learning to program?

And would you mind elaborating and what solution development is exactly?

I have been learning powershell alongside my networking based studies, would scripting projects suffice for this?

And based on what I mentioned I want, does it sound like consultancy might be the path I’m looking at?

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IT is a broad field. There’s security, consulting, help desk, administration.

Even those have sub fields.

No one can give a step by step sadly, however, you’re on the right track by just learning what you can. Learning powershell is good for automation in IT, I’ve written an entire suite for a previous place of employment. Rebuilding from the ground up where I am now. There’s plenty of projects on GitHub however doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all relevant or useful.

Freelancing can be difficult cause it’s not guaranteed.Is there any specific roles that interest you?

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I do like networking. I enjoy the logic of it; there’s no ambiguity in it, things are either properly configured or not, yet it can be done different ways, more efficiently, less efficiently, etc. Security also interests me, but I see it (and correct me if I’m wrong) as an extension of networking; it seems logical to master networking to understand the system you will be securing. I like the idea of being a network/security specialist, who can do the set up, maintenance, and security.

As for powershell, im really struggling with it. I’m using chat gpt to help me learn, and its about 90% useless.

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I can’t help but feel like “networking” is a fairly “hands on” arena. Companies will be wanting your help installing things, confugring, running wire, troubleshooting bottlenecks…and we all have that experience where we’re changing networking settings remotely and then losing all access because we did it wrong, and having to go on-site. That might not jive well with your mental picture of working remote while traveling.

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And that will be the tough bit, finding something entry level that will allow you 100% remote work. Probably not happening with networking or help-desking. That’s the main reason I mentioned development work, most of that can be done remotely or spent building product to push directly for sale. Webwork/webmastering/seo-google integration is another sub-field that lends itself well to being all remote.

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You might want to also check out this post:

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I do computer and network monitoring on the side using Wazuh and Avast security suite. It’s a solid plan

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One more vote for networking. I think I’ll choose exactly this way if I were you.

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I have some local friends who freelance and they act like an MSP more or less. I’m seeing a lot of interest in Quantum resilience. My friend just set up a local hospital with some quantum resilient protection and the hospital is happy, as is he. If I were starting off from the bottom I’d do something similar and just pick up certs as i went along.

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Have you considered being an air steward or even a pilot ?

I had an IT manager who trained to be a pilot at age of 30 and became a pilot at 35. i think he although still is like a co-pilot after 12 yrs but when we met up for gatherings…he said he never regretted.

He did introduced a few “retired” air stewardess into my IT team (due to kobid), they managed most of the paperwork, some phone support and 1st level user troubleshooting. Users tend to complained less if a female voice answered the phones or when they go over to the user before calling the “admins” for issues they cannot solve or just to hand over the issue.

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Okay. I’m currently focusing on networking and learning powershell. Would building impressive homelab setups and useful powershell scripts suffice?

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Just wondering why labs (installation of servers and/or networking) or Powershell ?
Then what aspects of powershell ?

If your focus is on being a freelancer…why not focus on GCP or AWS or Azure ?
It would be easier to have training for these platforms as they offer relatively free or low cost training, labs, free credits and even free tiers ?

Then smaller companies or Organization may want to leverage of the cloud and if they have some budget for “freelance” or “roaming” admins, it would relative easier to manager these resources than on-prem ones ?

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the answer is to why is because I’ve been figuring this stuff out slowly and changing my plans as I go. Can you elaborate a bit on what the actual job of someone involved in GCP or AWS or azure would be?

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It could be something very less sensitive like powering on workloads (that were accidentally off or OS hang).

To be fair, I do not think most Organizations would let “freelancers” or temp staff etc access their workloads or networks ?
Would you hire freelancers and why ?

In the past, I would think of web designers bit nowadays due to the complexity that involve sales, payment gateways etc, most went from using freelancers to vendors or even in-house.

At least you have a choice and time ? But why choose such low hanging fruits ?

It is almost like you want to be a car mechanic but only want to learn how to unscrew the bolts of the tyres ?

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