Why I changed careers to work in IT in 2021

There could be a long list of answers to why I left my previous career(VFX for Film & TV) to work in IT. But I will do my best to list just the main ones.

As we were all in the thick of it with Covid and begin working from I started developing other interests in the hopes to keep me sane staying indoors. A lot of people cooked or tended to the neglected gardens, while I did do a bit of cooking and baking. I started looking around the house to see what projects I do.

I noticed our internet speeds where on the slow side and kept cutting out every so often, most likely all of us working from home. I decided to investigate and see what I could do to improve just that. I discovered that we had CAT5e patched in the walls of the house that my fellow housemates mentioned that the wall outlets “didn’t go anywhere”. Only to find the purple coloured cat5e hidden on the floor of the spare room where our Virgin hub was located. Aside from the RJ45 connectors never been crimped, it felt like I struck gold now knowing we had ethernet throughout the walls of our rented house.

Taking 5 machines off the wireless network helped a ton as we mostly had desktop machines. I researched around the web and bought myself a crimping tool, a cheap but functional Netgear switch and a 2nd hand Asus RT-ac68u router. I re-configured the BT-hub to just be used as a modem (Bridged-mode). Set the Asus router as the DHCP & DNS server, enabled it as an access point and we never had to restart the modem again…well almost never.

Maybe I was bored and had nothing to do and just wanted to feel productive in the end but the sense of accomplishment, knowledge gained and enjoyment I gained, I was hooked. Over time I looked into computer networking and IT admin as a whole. Eventually I couldn’t see myself being 50–60 years of age and still do VFX but I could with IT.

Since then I have added a NAS server to the mix but I will give an update on that in due time. I enrolled in an IT online training course in august of 2020, I had my first job in April 2021 as a 1st line Engineer and I’ve not looked back. So overall it came to just curiosity of the simplest things that slowly built up overtime, took form and in this case, started a completely different career.