computer career..help?

Question

if you where 33 had basic certificates in computing ,what would you study in the computing field of work,what could you see a future in ??? maybe a shortage of???
i am willing to commit 2 years full time at college and fund this myself

Answer 1

Schooling or certifications?
Schooling is good to be a professor but Certifications get you in better position outside of academia. Not all things in school will teach you for outside world. The only exception could be software programming and development

I would focus on certifications unless you are going to be professor of some sort.

You need to get minimally:
MCP (Microsot Certified Professional) and up (like MCSE)
CCNA/CCDA (Cisco Certified Network Associate & Design Associates)
CompTia A+, N+ (A+ for hardware fix/OS; N+ for Networking)

From there you could specialize
I think SAP certification is a good way to go (I am sure if there is one but it is the hottest market and hard to learn on your own. The software is very expensive to even play with it but most consultants make $90K +)

DBA will always be desired especially with data mining, Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC, accounting, and HIPAA. Also, protecting and managing data is always needed (and can't really automate the DBA's work and mindset)

WAN engineers are greatly desired because with the development and improvement of the Internet, more and more WAN engineers are needed to interconnect the network and improve performance

Software Developers & Architect
It is very vast but growing as more and more softwares need to automate functions and tasks and integrate with other software and hardwares. It is fast and growing but could end quickly by the industry trend.. Just be forewarned on that

Answer 2

The big easy money is in cobol and mysql databases, but it's the most boring computing job on the planet. You can learn it in a year easy from a recognised course.

You could start up a hosting company, people will always need hosting solutions, but you probably would need to do a business computing course for that.

Answer 3

What certifications do you already have?
There are promising careers in IT Auditing if you are not a very hands on (fixing hardware) type of person.
If you like hardware and software troubleshooting and configurations, a network administrator job might be right up your alley.

Answer 4

There's always demand for programmers, developers, and sys admins.

They are all pretty technical, and should be needed by most companies for a while.