"Learn to code" is not a plan
Tech is not one career — it's dozens of them, and most don't require writing software at all. The reason "just learn to code" advice fails so many people is that it skips the actual first decision: which of these jobs do you even want?
Pick a lane
Four realistic entry points, roughly ordered by how fast you can become hireable:
- IT Support / Help Desk — the most common on-ramp into tech. You're troubleshooting accounts, hardware, and basic networking for a company's employees. Low barrier to entry, high demand, and it's where a huge share of sysadmins and engineers started.
- Systems / Network Administration — the next tier up from support: you keep servers, networks, and infrastructure running. This is where home-lab experience translates almost directly into job-ready skill.
- Cybersecurity — high demand, and increasingly reachable without a degree, but usually easier to move into laterally from support or sysadmin work than to enter cold.
- Software Development — the one people default to, and the one with the most competition for entry-level roles. Absolutely reachable without a degree, but it takes longer to become genuinely job-ready than the other three.
If you're not sure which one, Help Desk is the easiest place to start regardless — it's the widest door, and you'll get a much clearer sense of what the day-to-day of the others actually looks like once you're inside the industry.
Certifications that actually move the needle
Certs don't replace experience, but for a career with no industry background, they're how you prove baseline competence to a recruiter who's never met you:
- CompTIA A+ — the standard entry point for IT support roles. Covers hardware, OS basics, and troubleshooting.
- CompTIA Network+ — networking fundamentals: the concepts underneath everything in the "Home & Hobby" guides on this site.
- CompTIA Security+ — the most commonly requested baseline cert for security-adjacent roles, and often required for government/contractor positions.
- A cloud fundamentals cert (AWS Cloud Practitioner, Azure Fundamentals) — increasingly expected even for support roles, since so much infrastructure has moved off-premises.
Don't collect all four before applying to anything. One or two, plus real proof of hands-on skill, beats a wall of certifications with nothing behind them.
Build proof, not just credentials
The resume filter isn't looking for a perfect background — it's looking for evidence you can actually do the job. That evidence is cheap to build at home:
- Set up a home lab: even a single old PC or a cheap mini PC running a couple of self-hosted services demonstrates real, practical skill.
- Document what you build. A short write-up of "I set up a home network with a separated IoT VLAN and here's why" is a portfolio piece a help-desk resume almost never has.
- Fix things for people you know. Free, informal IT support for family and friends is real experience — put it on the resume as what it is.
Getting past the resume filter
Three things matter more than most people think:
- Apply directly on the company site when possible, not just through aggregators — some tracking systems weight these differently.
- Mirror the language of the job posting. Applicant tracking systems and the humans skimming afterward are both pattern-matching against the posting's own wording.
- Network before you need to. A huge share of entry-level tech roles are filled through referrals, including from online communities (forums, Discords, local meetups) built around the exact skills you're learning.