How to break into IT with no experience
Every week someone asks a version of the same question: "I want to work in IT, I have no experience and no degree, where do I start?" The forums answer with a shopping list: get the A+, learn Linux, build a homelab, get Network+, maybe Security+, grab an internship. Six months later the person has three certs, no job, and a growing suspicion they were sold something.
I hired for a 50-seat enterprise service desk for nine years. Here's what actually mattered when a zero-experience resume crossed my desk, in order.
1. The helpdesk is the front door. Use it.
Nobody starts as a cloud architect. The service desk is where IT pulls almost all of its entry-level hiring from, and it's the one job where talking to people and being reliable outrank almost every technical skill, because we can teach the technical part in three months. We cannot teach you to answer a phone calmly while someone yells about a deadline.
So aim at tier 1 roles, contract roles, MSPs, and desktop support. Yes, the pay is modest. It's not a destination, it's an on-ramp: the first escalation.
2. Your real resume is "evidence you touch computers on purpose"
With no job history, I'm looking for any sign that computers are a thing you do, not a thing that happens to you. All of these counted with me, roughly in order:
Fixed things for people who didn't ask you to. "Was the person friends and family called when their laptop died" is the classic, and it works, but write it like work: "Unofficial IT support for a 40-person warehouse: set up a shared PC, recovered a failed drive, moved the office to Gmail." Volume and specifics beat adjectives.
Built anything at home. A homelab doesn't need to be pretty. A $50 used office PC running Linux with two services on it, described in five sentences, beats "proficient in Windows and Linux" every time. One real project proves more than ten claimed skills.
Volunteered. Church, school, a local nonprofit, a community center. Anyone who will let you touch their machines. Real users, real problems, real references.
Did it at another job. The retail worker who became the de facto POS repair person, the teacher who ran the computer lab. That's directly relevant experience hiding in an unrelated job title. Pull it out and make it its own bullet.
3. The CompTIA A+: worth it, with an asterisk
Here's the asterisk: the A+ is a filter, not a ticket. At volume, a hiring manager screens a stack of 80 resumes in fifteen minutes. The A+ is a checkbox that keeps yours in the pile. It will not, by itself, get you hired; interviews do that. But it buys you the interview, especially in corporate and government shops where HR filters on keywords before a human ever sees you.
So: if you can afford it, get the A+. Study from video courses and practice exams, not $3000 bootcamps. The content is the same. If you genuinely can't afford it, apply anyway; smaller shops and MSPs care more about the evidence in section 2 than the cert. Network+ can wait until you're employed and someone else might pay for it.
What I'd skip: degree programs sold specifically as "IT training" at for-profit schools, anything promising job placement "guarantees," and cert-stacking before your first job. I'd rather see one A+ and a home network diagram than A+/Net+/Sec+/Linux+ and no story.
4. Apply before you feel ready
The single most common mistake I saw wasn't lack of skill. It was people waiting until they felt "qualified" to apply. Nobody feels qualified; the resume screens are mostly luck and keywords anyway. Put the A+ in progress on the resume (that's legitimate and common; just label it clearly) and start applying the day you decide this is the direction.
Volume matters at this tier. Ten applications a week to carefully tailored postings is the floor, not the goal. And when the rejection emails come (they come for everyone) they cost you nothing.
5. In the interview, the question under every question
Tier 1 interviews are mostly one long question: "when you don't know the answer, what do you do?" Candidates lose by bluffing. "I haven't seen that one, here's how I'd figure it out: check the knowledge base, search, ask a senior tech, write down what worked" is a stronger answer than a half-remembered guess delivered with fake confidence. I always asked a question I was fairly sure the candidate couldn't answer, just to see which kind they were.
The first ninety days
Once you're in: document everything you fix (your notes become the knowledge base, and the person who writes the knowledge base becomes hard to lose), learn the ticketing system better than anyone, and keep a private list of every problem you solve that isn't in your job description. That list is the resume for the next escalation, and I'll cover it in how the helpdesk-to-sysadmin escape actually happens.