Well, let me chip in with my experience here. I'm in IT support, 33 years old. I've been doing helpdesk support (starting with internal, then residential and now at a business MSP) for 16 years. I sat in front of my first computer when I was 6 and my family said "well he's doing that for the rest of his life". And they were absolutely right.
I'm not afraid to say that I am very good at my job. At every place I've worked outside of my teens I have been considered the most vital tech in the workshop (usually with the heaviest workload) with the most knowledge and usually one of the best troubleshooting methodologies. I have home-labbed every OS under the sun (including obscure UNIXes for fun) and because of that I have a huge working knowledge of all major OS internals, which often makes me to the go-to guy for whatever niche people run into that they can't solve. I have my weak points of course (networking, sysadmin and higher level stuff) but that's because I haven't had any desire to advance up the chain. I've found my comfortable role and I'm sticking with it.
Outside of doing tech support I'm also responsible for mentoring all new entries into the field, which means I've developed a pretty good knack for teaching. All of the managers I've worked under have said that there is a distinct level of quality difference between techs I train and those trained by others, which I've always worn as a badge of pride. I try to train them to be the best and it seems i'm doing alright so far.
In the last two years I've started stepping away from helpdesk into a backend automation role. I picked up PowerShell as a bit of a hobby in my downtime and work, ended up being quite good with it and because of that my manager developed an "automation coordinator" role for me. Essentially my job is to find out repeat issues the team run into, then come up with an automated solution they can one-click to fix. So far it's going pretty well, I've managed to wrangle our RMM solution into a more acceptable self-healing standard and some of my largest scripts are now core to our workflows.
Finally, education. I have completed high-school, I have a Certificate III in Information Technology (that I was forced to get to say I have SOME sort of cert under my belt) and everything else I've taught myself. I managed to get my foot in the door by immediately working in IT for the high school I graduated from and at this point I can pretty easily get a job anywhere because despite lacking the certs, I have the experience. Unfortunately (from my understanding) IT has a higher barrier for entry these days, I'm to understand you need to have some sort of cert to be considered for most jobs (which is funny because I'm surrounded by university students with degrees, but I tend to know more than them). But i'm always happy to give someone without a cert consideration. My golden rule is: "if you have zero knowledge but a good personality and work ethic, you're in, because I can teach the knowledge".
If I could give advice for people considering IT, it'd be this: it is one of the most mentally stressful careers you can choose. Clients do not understand IT, do not want to understand IT and they certainly do not want to pay for it. But if you do go into IT and you're passionate, you'll never be out of a job. Even when the robots and AI take over, someone will need to maintain them
And if you have a problem-solving nature, IT is one of the most rewarding careers to satiate that. You are going to run into some of the most obscure, arcane problems humans can come up with and you're going to feel like a rockstar every time you solve one. So do consider it.
Anyway, I hope this gives people something to think about.
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