[MattM]

Just spotted this. I completed an IT degree back in 2002, but the level of teaching was not that good and i gradually ceased going to class. Instead i frequently found myself booking a room on campus and teaching my classmates. At its best i was booking the rooms to coincide with the lectures in the hope that the lack of students in the real one, might prompt them to rethink.

Thus, i class myself as self-taught

[starryidwoman]

Well Ian, I'm self taught all the way. Since 1990 when the 1rst pc my room-mate built (while taking a course: micro computer processing) Found my niche when a girlfriend rented me one for 3 mos. (we were opening our own bus. and I had to know how to use a pc. I taught myself WordPerfect 5 pretty well in 3 mos. Later on, tech's from the states posted me a prog. that bk. then cost $89.00 Email 96 it was called. Just becasue I told their tech's how to fix something they tried to tell me how to fix and it didn't work!

Anyway............self taught all the way.

[YJoosshhiuea101]

Self taught, thanks to various books

[dt3k]

When my buisiness failed, as a freelance travel photographer, in 1990 I took a course with a company who placed me in work afterwards. Although I started out on crap money I've been in work continually since then and I'm now being paid pretty well...unfortunately rip-off NuLabour take about 50% (and rising) of it in tax and NI.

[aggieoo7]

Only 49 years experience and still learning...

Both 32 and 64 bit Vista Ultimate, Microsoft Office 2007,McAfee Security Center,IE8.
Mainboard is nForce 680i SLI
4GB PC8500 OCZ MEMORY,DUAL 8800 GTX 768MB VIDEO ADAPTERS,
One 10k Raptor main drive and 1TB backup data drive.
Intel Extreme 6800 cpu. OC to 3.75ghz with Zalman Cooling.
ADSL via 2wire at&t gateway wireless router.

[Roflcopter66]

Hmmm i'd class myself as self taught...

I kinda learnt from overwhelmingly abundant mistakes haha.

[JoeBlow9878]

Self-taught.

I learn a lot from forums -- like PC Review! But I also read books (online and printed).

Thanks!

[truefoe]

Although I spent 10 years in Academia supporting and learning about; PCs I do not consider myself professionally "trained" as most of what I learned was more about programming and mathematics and hardly anything about the actual job of supporting PCs. Most of the support end I had to find on my own.



Micro computers were relatively new when I began in 1978 in the Air Force. I was not allowed to be trained by the USAF as they had strict rules about color blind people not being allowed to learn anything about computers.



Since that time I have learned so much more about IT that I feel I learned more after leaving Academia than when I was in school (college or tech)



OJT(On the Job Training) is far more valuable than college environment. This OJTcan come in varied forms. Some get it from building their own PCs in their homes, this would give them a brief and narrow view of how to work on a certain type or style of PC(most people do not have the money to buy every level of PC offered at any one point in PC evolution) but when you are on the job in a large corporation or the government; you will find many different pieces of hardware and software in combinations that differ radically.



You may also be asked to build or deploy PCs that only do one particular thing, the average home PC does a huge number of tasks for the owner that even some corporations do not have to worry about.



Building/supporting a PC for a hard core gamer is not the same as building/supporting one for a company that build widgets.



The challenges are different and the tolerances are also very different. When helping someone who has a problem at home with their PC they just want it to work for now, the company or government wants it to be fully annotated so they can fix it themselves the next time it shows up.



In terms of "done" any training, I have "done" both, taught and studied. It’s odd that some of the best instruction I received was from the teachers/instructors in the community college I attended and not from the Liberal Arts College where I worked.


The Community College allowd me to focus on the parts of IT I wanted whereas there were manditory classes in the Arts college that had little or nothing to do with IT.

I have no experience with RIT or other tech schools that teach to the job but I hear they are very good and a majority fo the graduates of these types of schools seem to know more than the average kid who takes his parents PC apart for fun.

[Raafay]

I have spent so much of Money to Learn Computers and get a degree in IT but the Poll results show that most the user are Self Taught! (its good you have saved lot of money)