How to become an IT specialist? (DEV/QA)

 This Article is for people, who is interested in IT, who knows something about it or learned programming/computer science at school or university and want to get some job.
 We can face a lot of jobs, related to programming/QA  in nowadays. A lot of people  want to be a software engineer, QA or some IT manager,  but how can random people join this community and get a work? Every company accepts only experienced candidates and how people can get experience w/o actual work?

 

 The thing is that IT is not a medicine or any other stuff that requires experience on the actual work. In IT you can make your experience by your own. I don't think that Bill Gates or any other famous person in IT waited for his first job - they just created it.

So if you want to become a developer, than you have to create some thing by your own and get this experience for free. If you don't have any unique ideas - create something which already exists. For example your own mini social network, or your own audio converter, etc.

First of all - you need to decide what exact job you want to get. QA, dev?

DEV - you need to choose your programming language. It can be any modern language.

1. See http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2880277/posts and try to make your own program. 
2. For beggining it can be something very simple http://www.completecsharptutorial.com/basic/parameter-examples.php 
3. You can even run your programs on-line with http://www.completecsharptutorial.com/basic/parameter-examples.php. 
4. After you will make this step - try to build something bigger - chat, simple social network, etc.
5. Google any related information and learn.

Estimated time to become a dev - 6 months. (if you work hard every day)

QA - abbreviate from Quality Assurance. QA guy is responsible for product quality. This job is not about finding defects, no. This job is about making the product more mature. Actually this job is very simple and does not require a lot of information to know. In general you test feature, find a bug and report about it. But if you want to be professional QA - you prevent defects and not just finding them.
useful links:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_assurance
2. http://www.xqual.com/documentation/tutorial_qa_engineer_skills.html
3. http://www.qatutorial.com/?q=Manual_Testing
4. http://vk.com/doc18801766_380577093?hash=ff58ff7ec283494a12&dl=248755529c5f9b90c2
5. Google any related information and learn.

Estimated time to become a QA - 3 months. (if you work hard every day)

Wish you all good luck and please, keep asking questions.