How do you land an IT job? Show, don’t tell

If there’s one piece of advice I’d give to those going into IT, it’s this: Crow all you want, but prove you can do the work by doing it. Yes, it may seem obvious. But I’ll bet way too many of us have worked for or with someone who talked the talk but didn’t walk the walk — and we still think back on them with contempt or frustration.

I suppose you can say I’m a seasoned IT pro who’s been in the business long enough and survived a sufficient number of economic ups and downs that I had to to find creative ways to land a job. As they say, there’s a time and place for everything. Nobody likes someone who flaunts their skills endlessly, but sometimes you have to market yourself in order to get your foot in the door.

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Going out on a limb

One one occasion, the company had closed, and I hadn’t been able to land an IT job. I was told I was overqualified, or the position had already been filled. Frustrated, I decided to take the matter into my own hands. I remembered a tip from a friend and went out to see if any companies needed an IT pro but either hadn’t published any job openings or didn’t know they could benefit from one.

I gathered up my courage, took a chance, and walked into a fairly new PC vendor/service outlet with the following proposal for the owner: “I’m sure you have a machine in the back that nobody can fix — every shop has one. How about a deal? If I can fix it, you give me a job. If not, I leave.” Anyone who’s spent time in PC repair knows that every shop has at least one machine on the racks that the technicians refer to with an inappropriate name because no one can figure out what’s wrong with it.

The owner was amused, but took me seriously and said they’d been having trouble with one machine in particular with and were almost ready to call the customer and tell them it couldn’t be fixed. I looked it over, recognized the problem as an obscure issue I’d seen years before, and replaced one part. I got lucky — it took me about five minutes to diagnose and solve a puzzle that none of their technicians had seen before.

The owner kept his end of the bargain and created a job for me as a senior technician and network technician. In all, I spent five years there.

It pays to have good friends — and solid skills

I’d been in IT about a decade when another turn of bad luck saw another employer cutting back. Soon the company I worked for relocated to another state, and I was one of the unemployed. I didn’t want to move, so I went searching through the want ads.

My roommate, who also worked in IT, lost his job around the same time. Having a pragmatic point of view, we weren’t too picky about which of us got a job. Our goal was to get at least one of us employed so that the bills would get paid. But we didn’t want to outright compete with each other, either — at least not at first.

One day when we were hitting the pavement looking for work, my roommate went into a company to apply for a PC repair job and take their aptitude test. I went with him and waited in the parking lot. An hour later, he came out and said, “They want to talk to you.”

I went inside, not knowing exactly what to expect, and was greeted by the owner who said, “Your roommate says you’re the man to talk to when it comes to firewalls and security.” I took the test and aced it, and the company created a network security position for me on the spot. I ended up working there for years afterward.

This was a classic example of “show me what you can do,” because some of the questions on the test covered obscure, rarely encountered problems. It wasn’t designed to see who was or wasn’t capable of working there, but to give the owner an understanding of the technical skill level of the applicant. The fact that I was able to answer the obscure questions caught his attention. And my roommate had definitely helped by identifying that I might be a good fit for the company.

Soon after, I was able to return the favor and found my roommate a job working for one of my company’s customers. The client needed to replace an in-house technician, and I knew he had the skills for the job.

The trick is to be truthful and bold. If you know how to do something, back it up by proving you can. If you don’t, say so but also emphasize how you’re willing to learn — then prove that, too.

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This story, “How do you land an IT job? Show, don’t tell,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more crazy-but-true stories in the anonymous Off the Record blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.