Moving into IT Contracting

[davecf10]

Hello all,

I am currently a contractor working in the financial services industry, but would like to move into IT contracting.

Could anyone tell me what qualifications are in demand currently and what type of work would be a good route to go down to get attractive day rates?
I currently have no IT experience what so ever, and am trying to find out what would be an appropriate way forward?

Thanks.

[cojak]

Sorry to have to tell you this Dave but clients hire contractors because they have the experience to jump in and get their hands dirty immediately and delivery something a few days after that. If you see contractors ask about a different niche they will at least be experienced in other parts of IT.

Clients will not pay for you to learn on their time and at their expense.

What do you do at the moment? You might be able to launch yourself into IT from that but don't expect to be able to earn anything from it immediately.

[lukemg]

WSS, although a number of contractors stumble into it after redundancy etc, they have normally got the experience already.
I would consider looking for a perm role, maybe in the same company ? to build up skill levels.
Be certain you really want to do this, far from the stable profession I thought this would become, it is very volatile and you can easily find you have to reinvent yourself every few years if the direction of IT changes and all you know is suddenly worthless ! I wouldn't advise anyone to go into this now, with outsourcing compressing what is left.
My finance friends seem to all be approaching senior roles and although their earnings haven't always matched mine, theirs only seem to go up, my earnings graph is the worlds scariest roller-coaster...

[alreadypacked]

Hello all,

I am currently a contractor working in the financial services industry, but would like to move into IT contracting.

Could anyone tell me what qualifications are in demand currently and what type of work would be a good route to go down to get attractive day rates?
I currently have no IT experience what so ever, and am trying to find out what would be an appropriate way forward?

Thanks.

Although some who have a lot of experience might disagree. I think you need to have a dergree in computing to work in IT.

HTH

[SueEllen]

Although some who have a lot of experience might disagree. I think you need to have a dergree in computing to work in IT.

HTH

No you don't.

I have been at a few places where people don't have a degree at all or they have degrees in various engineering disciplines, maths, physics, chemistry, biological/life sciences, economics, foreign languages, music, social sciences, archaeology - in short anything but computing.

Some of the people with no degrees at all are developers, who have programmed since they were kids on various projects and have strong interests in certain aspects of technology and science.