Transcription
Everybody, Josh here. I gathered up 100 different entry-level IT jobs from Indeed. I gathered the title, the full job description of all 100 jobs, as well as a pay. And the pay range from 29k all the way up to over 120k for quote-unquote entry-level jobs. And today we're going to be doing a big analysis on it with AI, specifically Claude, to figure out which certifications are most important, which skills you should be learning, if a degree matters or not, etc. So, let's get right into it.
So, in terms of the pay, again, it ranged from 40k to over 120k. Most entry-level IT jobs are going to fall between 40 and 80k. It just really depends on if you're like inland US or you're in some kind of coastal city somewhere and depending on what you're doing. So, if you're in like a coastal city or like a main kind of big city, you can probably expect 60k or more depending on what you're doing.
And then getting into what skills actually raise your pay. This is in terms of the higher-paying jobs. So, 60% of the higher-paying jobs actually mentioned Linux in the job description. 47% of the higher-paying jobs mentioned Active Directory. 33% AWS, I'll just say cloud in general, right? And then networking was mentioned in half the jobs. So, if you want to earn more money, I would personally recommend getting some kind of Linux experience, doing some hands-on labs, Active Directory, and then understanding networking in depth. And then of course, learn cloud in some way, shape, or form. It doesn't really matter if it's AWS or Azure.
And before getting into job title matters, if you're interested in getting into IT or cybersecurity, definitely check out the Cybrary. We have a live production SOC with a lot of enterprise license security tools available. We have classes that cover everything from incident response to vulnerability management. We have a community with over 1,600 members in it. They're really, really helpful. And people are getting jobs out of the Cybrary pretty regularly. We record them here so we can kind of see what people are doing. This whole platform is not managed by me alone. We have a team of staff to help support the infrastructure as well as help with anything that you might need. So, definitely check it out and back to the video.
So, does job title matter? And this is something that I talk about quite a bit. Job title is really, really ambiguous and companies don't actually know how to title their positions. And as you can see, these are the titles that appeared most across the 100 entry-level IT jobs. And there's not really that much variance between pay. You might expect help desk to be like entry-level and lower, but you can see like a bunch of other ambiguous titles actually are lower salary than help desk, including a security title. It's really odd, so I wouldn't really focus on title too much.
And getting into do you need a degree? This is one of the more interesting things for me. 62 of the jobs mentioned a degree, 38 of the jobs didn't have any mention of a degree, but you notice the pay between the jobs mentioning a degree and not is It's not really It doesn't really change that much. According to these 100 jobs at least, this data is saying a degree adds about $1,300, which is It's not It's basically nothing, right? It's not to say that you shouldn't get a degree because it will only help you in the end, but there's usually, especially for entry-level IT, there's better things you can focus on that have like a way higher ROI. Like just studying and doing labs on your own or like 3 months in the cyber range, just if you go hard, it's worth quite a bit.
Getting into do you need certifications? This is also very, very interesting. All 100 entry-level jobs, CompTIA A+ was mentioned 23 times, Network+ 21 times, Security+ mentioned 13 times, CCNA CCNP mentioned 13 times, and then Azure, or we can call it cloud certs, were mentioned three times. And that's not to say that you should necessarily try to get A+. If you want to bin max on like keyword matching, A+ is probably the cert to get, but A+ jobs are currently on the lower end of the salary. If you want to focus more on salary, I might personally recommend like Network Plus, Security Plus, and then one of the cloud certs like AWS Cloud Practitioner or 900 Azure Fundamentals. Of course, anything better than those.
And are the jobs really entry-level? Cuz this is like a huge problem, right? Cuz jobs will be entry-level and then will list 5 years of experience, right? So, 30 of the jobs specifically mentioned 0 to 1 year of experience, 10 of them want 2 years or more, 6 want 3 years or more, and then there were five wanting that were quote-unquote entry-level wanting 5 years or more experience.
Then what are the jobs actually like in terms of skills mentioned in them? You can see here like 76 out of 100 jobs mentioned troubleshooting, and then it goes down 75 hardware and imaging, 68% phone call and phone support, 56% customer service, and then the rest of the stuff is like, you know, really related to the top five things or the top four things. Nothing really surprising here in terms of entry-level IT. Just be prepared to interact with humans and do troubleshooting and help people to resolution with their problems.
This is something very interesting for me getting into remote. 30% of the jobs mentioned remote, and then 70% were on-site. Remote usually pays less because it has more competition, but in this case the data shows that remote pays a bit more like about $7,000 per year more. This is probably because these are more specialized positions that's requiring a certain skill set that's not easy to find. So, they pay more willing to let the person work remote as long as they can find somebody fits the role. Another analysis with like 500 jobs and the results were the same, the remote jobs ended up paying more, which is really surprising.
I'll put a link to the 100 jobs in the pinned comment. Definitely check out the Cybrary, it's a really good product and it's not something you will regret if you join. Let me know what you want to see in the next video. Thanks for watching and we will see you next time.