Problem: No IT experience but has studied or even graduated in IT courses.

Possible solutions:

1) Networking with people. Google on "meetup (your local city)" and then join some meetup groups and expand your networking (social networking) life.

2) Volunteer your time in your local area aiming to find volunteering opportunities that match your education background -- yes I understand that you often can't find the right match. The best you can do is to take apart computer parts in a recycle depot....which leads us to creative solution #3

3) I have in mind a sharing internship program and here comes its rough outline:

Lease (long-term) a room for other IT grads to bring their own computer hardware and software for job-related training purposes.

You will ask who is going to pay for this room's rent and what kind of hardware and software to bring job-related training purposes?

The organizers (namely some grads who like to work as organizers) will have to go around to IT (or even non-IT) industry companies for sponsors to sponsor for the monthly room fees. Suppose the rent is $1000 per month, you can find 20 sponsors to pay only $50 each or find 50 sponsors to pay $20 each, the more you can find, the less each company has to pay. All the details of this plan can be put into a website and if the sponsors ask what can they get in return for sponsoring this plan ? You can put the names and banner ads of the sponsor companies into the website to advertise their business for them and help increase their publicity. The organizers can run free ads on craigslist to drive people to take part in this sharing internship program and if done properly there will be many people interested in the website.

To answer the second question - what kind of hardware and software to bring to the room for job-related training ?

It depends on what type of job field you want to get into. For IT these days, it is common to know all ... SQL, Sharepoint, Exchange, VMWare, Cisco .... as well as the well known Windows Server and Linux. Then try to get these softwares at the least price (e.g. from ebay) then fix up a network and run all these things and work at them as if it is your daily chore. Ask questions from those who already have many years of experience, what kind of problems or routine tasks do they normally do at work, even have them duplicate their regular tasks and even problems and see if you can solve them.

This is a rough outline for the sharing internship program. Hiring companies do not want a no-experience fresh graduate to mess up their company network. It is hard for a fresh grad to come up with SOLID ON-THE-JOB TRAINING IN A VERY SHORT PERIOD OF TIME. So if you understand the plan above (please re-read a few times so you get the picture), I am bringing all resources possible to set up or simulate a close-to-job envirnoment for new grads to get SOLID WORK EXPERIENCE. It is a sharing internship program for whoever wants to get into IT field. It could also be good for other fields like programming or other tech fields. In short you can look at it as a practical training space where all the utilities cost and equipment costs are shared and lowered.

You might have huge negatives on the cost of running all these especially on software and hardware equipments. To answer that, hardware costs are dropping recently and for software costs and room utilities costs, try to find more sponsors to lower the costs. The key is SHARING RESOURCES and SHARING RESPONSIBILITIES.

The above is only rough outline. The whole purpose is to help giving SOLID WORKING EXPERIENCE TO the no-experience grads. Take it as a brainstorming session, add your ideas and fine-tune each detail to your liking. Who knows, it might even not be viable because of some issues that I have not considered!

Any comments and feedbacks are welcome

Averagejoe

A most excellent post regarding this aspect Joe.

Welcome to the forum, please enjoy your stay with us and feel free to comment further.

... maybe we can help each other. Please contact my at:
And let's see what we can arrange.