Local computer technicians talk STEM jobs at CyberExpo
Two local computer service professionals visited South Arkansas Community College to inform students about jobs in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
SouthArk’s chapter of Phi Beta Lambda hosted the event as well as others during Cyber Security Awareness Month. Tim Bolin and Bryan Windham both got their start in south Arkansas, working for companies like Murphy Oil Corporation and Cross Oil Refinery before starting their own service and consulting companies in El Dorado, according to the event program.
Windham, owner of Computer Troubleshooters, cited a Fortune Magazine article to highlight four college majors and jobs with feasibility beyond 2020. Computer engineering is the most technical, relies heavily on great math skills and requires a bachelor’s degree to get into, he said.
“These are the folks that build the processors, the video cards. They make your games run faster … If you like to tear things apart, figure out how they work and you really like math, computer engineering could be a great field for you. Today it’s one of the four-year degrees in the IT (information technology), computer field that pays the most. Nationwide coming out of college, these jobs pay about $60,000 to $65,000 a year starting out.”
Computer science is more familiar and also requires a four-year degree. The occupation involves using analytics to code and program software, fix problems and develop websites, Windham said. “Computer science is the area of technology that has the most available jobs. The latest Fortune Magazine says that there are 22,000 jobs every month in computer science that go unclaimed … It’s not nearly as strong in math, but there is quite a bit of math in there,” he said.
Networking professionals install cabling, firewalls, routers and switches. Companies who hire them prefer specific certifications over a traditional college education, Windham said.
“It’s not typically the guys who put the network in a small law firm or medical practice. These guys build big networks that cross county lines, state lines and sometimes international,” he said.
Windham and Bolin work in the information systems field, catering to the needs of small to corporate businesses in the area. The Fortune article noted that 70,000 jobs in the field go unclaimed every month, the Computer Troubleshooters owner said.
“They don’t have a computer or an IT person on staff, so they hire companies like mine and Tim’s to come in and take care of their technology for them. I call it information system and these are guys that typically have Microsoft, Microsoft Server, CompTIA certifications,” Windham said. “Ya’ll probably never heard of the term. It’s an old term ‘jack of all trades, master of none.’ That means somebody that’s good in a lot of things, but not necessarily good at one thing.”
Bolin, founder of T. Bolin Consulting, said that his company comes up with a plan to go about the day, but because the company is usually a small businesses IT department, it can be unpredictable. Two things that Bolin’s business does periodically are vulnerability assessment and penetration testing.
Penetration testing is “a legal way to be a hacker” and “an one-time snapshot,” while vulnerability assessment is continuous, Bolin said.
“What really means is ‘Where is my network vulnerable to attack and how do I fix it?’ … They see how vulnerable your network is to attacks from the outside,” Bolin said. “The other side to that, penetration testing, is testing to see how easy it is to attack that network. So you put software in place that protects you from being attacked, but then now let’s see if we can break it and try to attack the network.”
During the question and answer portion of the program, a student asked instructor Vicki Badgley if SouthArk’s computer IT opportunities will still exist near the end of his high school career to which she answered very optimistically after she plugged the course of study.