Looking for some career/education direction, advice appreciated

About me, I?m a 29 year old Army signal veteran that has been working in IT since my ETS in 2010. Two of those years were with a startup that with 3 people made over a million the first year doing consulting and setups for law firms and small medical practices. My boss (the CEO) was a hard headed dude that busted his balls but didn?t know how to manage a company for shit. I worked my ass off and kept clients very happy with tier1-tier3 support but eventually burned out because IT work bores me to death and I stopped learning. I did gain a fair amount of knowledge about small business and how things work juggling just about every task from sales to proposals to project management and doing implementations. My IT skills go back to growing up playing MMOs (UO since age 12) and always fixing my shit when it broke to keep playing. As I?ve aged I realized I just stayed with IT because it was easy and comfortable, but really no passion there. The part I enjoyed most about my last job was working with people and working the business side of things. Coming up with solutions, telling clients why they needed them then overseeing the implementation felt pretty natural, but I hated doing the mundane work and the more difficult approach my stubborn boss would always push rather than the faster/smarter way. All in all though it was a very good learning experience and showed me I do NOT want to do IT for a living.

So I?ve quit my job and moved from Philadelphia to Texas to enjoy a lower cost of living, be near family, away from parasitic ex and all that. I?m now stuck on what to focus on and learn. I have my GI bill and get a housing stipend, so it?s a no brainer to enroll in classes and get a degree. I?m stuck between CS (I believe I?d enjoy dev work) and business (I want to start my own businesses/not work for other people). I figure being able to do my own code combined with my current IT skills would be great as an entrepreneur. I also think I could gain a lot by learning business, finance and marketing. Any suggestion here on degree? I plan to knock out basic garbage at a CC then go to a decent 4 year in San Antonio/Austin area.

I also need to figure out what kind of job to work at while in college. One thing that stood out to me based on their work day/skills necessary/potential income is real estate. Getting my license would be paid by my GI bill and take about two months. My uncle is very well connected in the area and I could land clients through him or through typical lead generation. My IT skills would come in handy with online listings, creating & managing a website, etc. I've always been good at researching and picking up new shit very quickly. I?m fairly attractive/fit and it helps being a young vet in a military town. My sales/communication skills are probably around average, but is something I?d work at. I figure with a night class/online class schedule through CC I could focus on building a client base and learning the ins and outs of realty. Most realtors I meet/family has worked with are old dimwits who take half a day to make a listing online and will show a ton of properties they?re not interested in. I?d form a systematic approach and my own database to make sure I?m not wasting people?s time and keep them constantly updated with email contact of listings that may interest them.

If not real estate other options I?ve considered are being a waiter at a decent restaurant with hopes of bartending, landing one of a few different 14-week programming training programs with hiring prospects for vets in the area, or getting into sales to develop my people skills. On the side I plan to study the stock market and live frugally and start stashing money. Up until now I?ve been horribly ignorant with finance and wasted every penny I?ve earned.

Thanks for any advice.

I'm landing in Northeast San Antonio with plans on being established as the growth continues in New Braunfels and all the way up to Austin. I figure within 5-10 years with both cities' growth rates the two will be practically connected. Knowing this also makes the real estate avenue more appealing.

The startup I worked for did what you describe. Basically a managed service provider for these small companies that typically had no IT staff. I'd thought about launching something like that down here, but it'd be a little further down the road. Right now I'm just really hesitant to get into the same work I was doing because it turned into a pretty negative experience that spread into all facets of my life and I really dislike the 24/7 emergencies that arise in the field.

moontayle_sl said:

Get a focus. I found out post-Navy that generalized knowledge is not valuable unless all you're looking for is low level IT work. Linux admin is growing, big data/storage is just huge because of the cloud. Find something that piques your interest and go after it.

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Agreed on working without a focus.

I picked up VMware from scratch and had to learn pretty much setting up small practices from zero IT infrastructure to 2-3 servers, 50+ workstations, application support, backups, firewalls, network, etc. The problem is I didn't cert in anything, but to be honest none of that work really piqued my interest much. Dabbled as a jr linux guy for a bit and despite command line being a little more "fun", sysadmin work is just being an IT janitor. 90% of the break/fix was no-brainer crap and always super time sensitive. I'd say the most enjoyable side was the engineering piece, mapping out the projects and coming up with a new solution (backup design, DR design, etc) but again the passion was never really there. All of that said, I've also never worked an IT gig where I had a solid team and co-workers to learn anything from. The last 2.5 years I was the most technical in the company (sad) and the majority of the frustration was dealing with an old hard headed dude who was scared of the cloud.

Any insight on the real estate side of things? Feel like it could be an amazing fit and learning the ins and outs of buying & selling real estate would always be a useful life skill if after a year or two it didn't pan out.

Interesting that this thread went the same direction as another one I threw out on another forum and really got the gears turning for me.

Both the idea of IT sales and tech recruiter were thrown out there and seem like very good avenues to use my prior experience and move into the sales world. The sales guys I worked with when finding new solutions for the MSP I worked for were typically not tech savvy, but if they were on any level it went a long way. Same goes with tech recruiters - twice I was setup for an interview that the recruiter really screwed up on. She didn't seem to understand that just having the word citrix or linux in my resume didn't translate into enterprise level citrix/linux administration.

Looking more into both of these avenues now. They seem like an excellent fit. Thank you guys.