I am an IT worker. Starter out small & now have worked on the largest Citrix infrastructure in Australia, roll out Softgrid (Virtual streaming of any application) for said Citrix system as well & done some of the largest VMware upgrades & roll outs in Aus as well.
Currently looking for work lol end of contract & all that.
been dealing with servers since I was 18 & general IT before that so well over 10 years in IT service. To me its all easy & logical.
some of the things I specialise in:
www.citrix.com
www.vmware.com
Micro$oft - Softgrid :
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/so...fault.mspx
IT made life pretty easy for me I'll say that, given I love technology I find it easy. Hours for me now are all 9 ~ 5 unless I am doing work that requires systems to be down after hours.
The steps I took are as follows:
PC service tech in a shop type front
work on a helpdesk/support desk, went to levels 1, 2 & 3.
Then Windows server support or Sysadmin job
Then learned more about set server technologys (Mentioned above) which then brings you to be called an windows server engineer or just server engineer.
In all of those positions you problem solve. Its a case of learn how a technology works, break it, fix it your self & learn ;) the more you learn about how it all runs the better you become at it & then when you see a error or weird problem occur, the experience you got breaking some software & fixing it again comes in. I wouldn't say there is much stress... unless your in helpdesk where it can suck since your attached to a phone headset. The support sometimes means a rotated on call roster for any servers that crash & need to get fixed or any server hardware problems. (Keep in mind that server hardware & computer hardware are almost the same so you can learn heaps on your own pc with this)
Learning more about any of the technology's I mentioned above & it makes you a specialist for that technology. This is where it gets really good. So I have been a Citrix, vmware & Softgrid plus windows server engineer or specialist for the last few years. Pay is great - perks in some cases wicked. Also in some years there has been an IT worker "shortage" so then pay rates for contracts even full time have been nuts. :)
But... I need a long break from it after all these years & I am planning a good long holiday