[RonGianti]

I started in a small firm working on an NT 4 / Novell network with 15 PC's. Took a Microsoft 9 month part time course after I was able to take a PC apart and put it back together on my own.

I read lots of books for a couple years, rode the tech wave of the late 1990's and double my yearly salary twice in 5 years (it wasn't much to begin with, say $9 / hour).

I was willing to learn something new and read on my own time, ended up at a company that supports 800 PC's on an international network Canada to US to Mexico.

Took a Cisco PIX (firewall) class in 2005, just took a VMWare class and rolled out 6 ESX (VMWare) servers attached to an EMC storage device. Most of the time our company will hire a specialist for some new piece of equipment, let them set it up, document it and then we learn it in and out ourselves and no longer need to pay $300/hour to a vendor. Because we save the company money this way, they are more than happy to pay for our classes and take them on company time too.

I'd say if someone wanted to get into the field on the hardware side, you could take a 10 month part time PC / Microsoft course then start in tech support, with the goal of getting some exposure and moving up. Its still a great career in the US if you concider that you don't need a 4 year degree to get into it.