Eve Tahmincioglu interviewed me for her career column on MSNBC about how to get experience in IT when just starting out from school or after a career switch: The chicken-or-egg issue that is ‘experience’.

The main points I covered with Eve are that working with open source projects while in school and/or on your own time will help you to gain experience, build your professional network and develop compelling material for your resume. Something that didn’t get into the piece is that even if you aren’t going on the programming track in IT, you can still get experience in working with open source systems by installing and configuring them for pro bono clients or personal projects.

There is really no excuse for not having some practical experience under your belt with the wide availability of free software and systems to work with.