I've been in IT for 17 years, I got my start at a mid size manufacturing company at 18, working in the plant floor. After year of that I applied for a customer service job in the office, while I worked in their customer service department (at age 20) I went to a year of night school for a certificate in computer networking technology. The cert helped me get my foot in the door of their IT department. I acquired great experience during my 8 years at that job, I set up a wireless network in a 50,000sq ft manufacturing plant, maintained their phone system, did operations support on an IBM AS/400, learned about many aspects of IT support all the way from workstations and printers up to servers, routers, switches, etc. I've spent the last 9 years in the IT department at a local government where I still do anything from end user support to system administration, server replacement, license place recognition systems, in car video systems, GPS tracking of police vehicles, network design (as we've replaced buildings), wireless network design and installation, etc.. While I'm burned out on the world of IT I do realize how fortunate I am to have stayed employed in this field with no gaps in employment, and I can retire with a rather nice pension at age 59 after putting in 30 years here (I started at 29). I still have no degree and no real certs, my counterpart here has certs falling out his rear and can't ever seem to fix anything, he asks me. lol.