Google IT School

[Larommi]

I learned backwards. Went to work part time for a buddy who had a retail repair shop. Had some corporate customers also. I learned how to repair computers, hardware first, then the operating system. Then I had to teach myself subnets, networking, and everything else. If you put me in an corporate enviroment with Active Directory, I would be lost. I'm sure I could grasp it, but with my customers, I have no need.

Doing work for Onforce, we get 3 to 8 jobs a week from them. They pay 24-48 hours after completion. Walmart, Pet Supplies Plus, other retail outlets. Just setup a laptop in Ohio Media School.

And I agree with Cee Bee, you can't learn without hands on.

Man, this is almost exactly how it went down for me. I lucked out and had a great mentor.

I was driving delivery truck and really wanted to build myself a computer. Not knowing the challenges back in the day, I built an AMD K6-2 machine with an Nvidia video card. Back then that was no bueno as Nvidia did not play well with non-Intel chipsets.

I went to the local PC repair guy for help. He was kind enough to help me and not charge me, to the dismay of his minion that mocked me for not knowing. We chatted for a while and had a friendly conversation. One day I thought, I would offer my services part time for free if he trained me. He took me on part time, paid me and showed me the basics. A couple weeks later he fired everyone working for him and offered me a full time position. I was still very green but learning. I accepted the job. I started taking in computers while he was on the road doing repairs. I took it upon myself to start the repairs or at least the diagnostics. I read some stuff online and after about a month, I was training him and designing builds.

He handed me the keys to shop and some networking books and told me that was next. I learned on the go, and started getting certifications after the fact. I don't do so well with book learning but hands on....all day any day. That is the way I prefer to train people at my current job. I can make a list and instructions but hands on always wins.

[CeeBee]

I've been through training in several fields, my experience is that all training must have an existing foundation to build on.
College was electronics engineering, we had a couple of guys who aced all courses (think the 4.0 GPA kind if there was an equivalent). And one day one of them asked for some help with a TV amplifier he built that wasn't working, and the "hobby" crowd had a good laugh at the crap he built. We did however have a good amount of hands-on lab courses which more or less evened the field between those of us who started as hobbyists and those who just went for the degree.
I started programming BASIC as a hobby in a club when I was 12-13, having your own computer back then was unheard of. It was mostly trial and error with instructors trying to teach some core stuff as a condition to being allowed to play games, but being able to try and fail then repeat until success was key to learning the very basics. And later there was the fun of breaking copy protection from tapes and tweaking code to transfer to floppy... It did help a lot as a start, having to learn c/c++, a bit of Pascal and few microprocessor languages in college was extremely simple when having a foundation.
I started tinkering with computers because I had to, taking out a hard drive and going to a friend was common practice. Once I moved to US I could more easily build and upgrade and help a friend here and there. And I needed to set a small network and share a dialup to 2 computers, that was my entrance to networking.
From that point I wanted to set a real network, with a "server", $50 for NT server administration books and many instances of falling asleep on the closet floor next to the "server" at 5AM helped me have no issue setting up a domain and clients from the scratch. Fast forward few months and the network admin of the company left and I was offered the possibility to help the consultant they brought in with taking care of the 100+ machines and servers. And in a couple of months I was splitting between being network admin and engineering roles. And the learning process never stopped, got into AD environments, performed domain migration, integration with the big corporate etc etc.
At some point I was asked to set up a small intranet website where they had to post some ISO docs, and so web programming began, jumping from c++ to php was piece of cake.
And then there was the day when a colleague asked me to fix his computer with a fried mobo, and I had to decline since fixing it (including my labor) was more expensive than him buying a newer and better machine. That's when I knew I had to look elsewhere, realized that a properly set network will just keep working unless hardware breaks and computers were becoming disposable. At that point I started to shift my focus to software, and luckily enough my then-boss decided to leave and I was offered his position, with the string attached that I had to learn company's ERP and programming for it in the next 2 weeks - which I did, at least enough to handle most of it alone. And then requests to create pages and reports kept coming, and it was mostly web development for me... along with the ERP system and the network and taking care of all computers.
And then I moved to a full programming job that required being a backup network admin, and at my current job it's purely coding. ...Although having the network background was useful to force the network admins to admit that they were messing with the network and screwing some applications in the process of preventing some DDoS attacks, but only when presented with the Wireshark evidence, also useful in being able to make production iOS apps hit my local machine services for debugging instead of the www servers...