I used to set three alarms before a night shift because I was terrified of sleeping through one. Not because the job was important to me — but because I couldn’t afford to lose it.
That was my life for over ten years. Rotating shifts. Twelve hours at a stretch. Every other weekend gone. Nights where I’d drive home at 7am while everyone else was just heading to work, and I’d think — is this actually it? Not in a dramatic way. Just a quiet, creeping feeling that I was spending my one life on something that was slowly grinding me down.
Then my first kid arrived. And something shifted.
Ten Years of the Grind
I’m not going to romanticise it. Shift work was brutal — not because of any single terrible thing, but because of the accumulation. The missed birthdays. The family dinners I wasn’t at. The weekends that weren’t mine. The friendships that quietly faded because you’re never available at the same time as everyone else.
And the fatigue. God, the fatigue. Not just physical — that thing where your brain is always slightly foggy because your sleep schedule makes no sense and your body clock has completely given up trying to figure out what time of day it is.
I did that for more than a decade. I wasn’t unhappy every single day. But I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I was trading my time for a wage and not much else. There was no path forward. No version of that job that was going to look meaningfully different in five years.
I just never had a compelling enough reason to do something about it.
The Moment That Changed Everything
When my son was born, I didn’t have some cinematic epiphany. It wasn’t a movie moment. It was more like — standing there, holding this tiny person, and suddenly feeling the weight of time in a way I never had before. Every hour I spent at work from that point on was an hour I wasn’t spending with him. And that mattered in a way that nothing had before.
I needed out. Not eventually. Now.
The question was what to do instead. I’d always been into computers — built my first PC as a teenager, tinkered with things constantly, watched YouTube videos about networking and servers just for fun. It had never occurred to me that this could be a career. I’d always assumed IT was for people with degrees, or people who’d grown up wanting to be in IT, not someone who’d spent their working life somewhere completely different.
Turns out I was wrong about that. Very wrong.
Going All In — The Self-Taught Path
I decided to go into IT with zero professional experience and zero formal qualifications. What I had was time (barely), stubbornness, and an internet connection.
My approach was messy but it worked. I started with YouTube — just watching everything I could find about Active Directory, networking fundamentals, Windows Server. Then I found Udemy and started working through courses properly. I built a homelab — nothing fancy at first, just an old desktop and some VMs — so I could actually get my hands on the stuff I was learning about rather than just watching someone else do it.
I also enrolled at university. I thought having a formal qualification would matter. I was a year into my first IT job when I realised it probably wasn’t going to add as much value as I’d assumed — not compared to the experience I was getting on the job and the things I was building at home. So I made the call to drop out, put the debt away, and invest that time back into learning by doing.
That was the right decision for me. I want to be careful here because it’s not the right decision for everyone — a degree absolutely has value, especially in certain paths. But for where I was headed, the homelab and the job experience were going to get me there faster and cheaper.
Starting at the Bottom (And That Was Fine)
My first IT job was help desk. Which, if you’ve worked in IT, you already know means a lot of password resets and a lot of “have you tried turning it off and on again?” And I loved it.
Not because it was glamorous — it wasn’t. But because every ticket was a chance to learn something. Every escalation was a chance to watch someone more senior handle a problem and understand why they handled it that way. Help desk gets a bad reputation, but if you treat it as a paid apprenticeship instead of a dead end, it’s one of the best environments to develop the fundamentals fast.
I also kept building the homelab in parallel. After hours, on weekends (the ones I had back), I was running Proxmox, building out an Active Directory environment, getting hands-on with Intune and SCCM. The things I couldn’t get experience with at work yet, I was building myself at home. That’s what got me to the next level faster than just waiting for opportunities to come to me.
Where I Am Now
Three years in, I’m a sysadmin. Monday to Friday. No weekend shifts. No rotating roster. No setting three alarms because I’m terrified of missing a night shift start.
I’m earning more than I was in my previous career. I genuinely enjoy the work — the troubleshooting, the building, the problem-solving. There are still frustrating days. IT is not without its chaos. But it’s interesting frustration, if that makes sense. The kind where you’re annoyed because you haven’t figured something out yet, not because you’re watching the clock and willing the shift to end.
And I’m present. I’m home in the evenings. I’m there on weekends. That quiet, creeping feeling that I was wasting my life? Gone.
Why I Started TrevTech
I’m not writing this to tell you that a career change into IT is easy. It’s not. There’s a real learning curve, and the early stages — studying while working, building a lab on a tight budget, imposter syndrome on your first proper IT job — are genuinely hard.
But I also know that when I was in the middle of deciding whether to make the jump, I would have given a lot to find someone who’d actually done it from a completely non-IT background and come out the other side. Not a polished success story. Not a LinkedIn post. Just an honest account of what it actually took.
That’s what TrevTech is. Everything I’ve learned, broken, and fixed — documented so you don’t have to start from zero.
The homelab content, the Proxmox guides, the Active Directory walkthroughs — they’re not just tutorials. They’re the actual path I took to build the skills that changed my career. If you’re thinking about making the same kind of change, or you’re already in IT and want to go deeper, this is the channel I wished existed when I was starting out.
Watch the Video
I made a video to go alongside this post — it’s the first thing I’ve published on the channel, and it’s the most personal thing I’ve made. It’s the version of this story told out loud, and if any of what I’ve written here resonates, I think it’s worth two minutes of your time.
▶ Watch: Building Real Enterprise Skills at Home | TrevTech Begins Here
If you’re on the same path — grinding through a career change, studying on your lunch break, running a homelab in your spare room — you’re exactly who this channel is for. Hit subscribe. There’s a lot more coming.
— Trev | I broke it. Fixed it.
