Looking for a basic way to ease into the field

Hello everyone, It has been a little while since i have been to the forum. I have stopped going to school due to the program i was in was for the birds. I could have recieved a job at comcast without paying the 12,000 for a diploma and just could have used my high school diploma.

So i am switching to a more in depth class, it even has a 8 week plc class which i am dying to take. But before i go back i am reading and trying to teach myself so this way when i go back i kinda know it which i hope i can then breeze through it. Especially with family, work, and the classes being fast. i would not have much time to study.

With this all said i found a website last night that has a bunch of cool electronic kits. They range from making your own security sensor, timers, water flood alarm, phone tap, ect.ect.. I thought that buying some of those would be a great idea for learning besides just reading a book. Not to mention i have Multism 9 full version which i have to use more of but i wanted to get through ac in the book i am in now and then start the hands on stuff. I plan on doing this the next few months since i do not see a reason to rush through this.

After doing all of this what would any of you guru's suggest be the next step. I do not for any reason expect the learning to end there but i cannot do the full time school or a 4 year degree. So i am thinking this may be the long way but the right way, except once i know the basics and have some hands on experience where do i go from there?

I still am trying to find out exactly what part of the field to go into but like i said i wont have a full fledge degree so i believe my options are limited hence why i have no clue what will be available for me to enter for a job. Can anyone give opinion, suggestions, insight, experience or some knowledge that can help someone who really wants to do something with themselves but just waited way to long to do something about it?? thank you

I have hired and known several guys who were completely self-taught so it can be done. It is possible to go a long way in the industry that way, but there is no question that there are barriers to getting jobs that you have to overcome. As an employer, I have been in the position hundreds of times of having to judge how much a candidate knows from a resume and a one hour discussion. It is not easy, so we look for any "official" credits as evidence including degrees, diplomas, examination results, class marks and so on. It would be very useful if, after you have studied for a while, that you find some sort of examination program that you can submit to that results in some sort of credits.

This may not be an appropriate example, but where I live, one can earn a professional accreditation through the engineering regulatory body that gives you a useful title. You earn this by writing exams. They let you study on your own, and you can schedule which exams are taken when. In one example that I looked into many years ago, they would recommend no more than two exams per year and they allowed a total of about 12 years (can't remember exactly) to complete all of them. In fact, I was considering this route after graduating from the local technical college (2 year program in electronics) to avoid attending an engineering school for another 4 years. In the end, I realized that it was going to be a lot easier to attend school full time than trying to do the entire program through self-study. So I quite my job and went back to school with my wife's support. The rest is history.

To deal with your question about what to study and when, it might be useful to have a look at the course syllabus for an engineering school or technical college, then mimic their order of topics and curriculum. Schools have put a lot of effort into figuring out the best order of topics to learn so learn from that. I recommend that you study some mathematics first since math will be necessary no matter what you specialize in.

I just dragged out some old college books and here are some useful topics:
Calculus For Electronics (A.E. Richmond)
Probability and Statistics for Engineers and Scientists (R. Walpole, R. Myers)
Complex Variables and Applications (R. Churchill, Brown, Verhey)
Numerical Methods (R. Hornbeck)

Do yourself a favor and choose math books with titles like "...for Electronics" or " ...for Engineers" because these won't be quite as boring as general texts aimed at everybody.

I suggest to study math not just because it is needed to understand other topics, but also I have known people who did not study the math but tried to learn all the other stuff, and failed.

Ah.... A fellow OTA student! (Older Than Average)
Personal experiance for me was I took it in the ass finacialy and got jack **** for actual eduction to boot!
Found out that saying "Those who can, do! Those who cant, teach!" is dead on.
Found my real life CAN DO experiance got a lot of "deaf ear, blind eye" treatment.

IF you have real world life experiance college can be a real disapointment. do alot of research and actual person to person talking with the department heads, proffesors and actual students of the place you are thinking of going to.
And if you are white, keep track of your every school and classroom record, paperwork, anything that is to be recorded or used to track your grades or actual existance! Really!

White, is the new slap around minority. The true minoritys have great legal backing!
I do love you "minorities" I wish one of my grandgparants would have been any color but white!
Us whities get nothing, unless you have an actual legal person in your family.
Trust me on this! My school records and classroom paper work got lost on a monthly basis. Everything I did not have a copy of myself would disapear from school records from time to time.
Funny part was when they would then tell me I never sumitted something and I would promptly pull said unsubmited info from my back pack WITH that persons own signature on it!
I did that 7 or 8 times one semester! The school records dept got to know me by name and cringed every time I walked into their office! I was polite the first few times but after the same classroom transcripts got lost 3 times I would just walk to the front of the line butt in and toss my paperwork at the fist person I saw and say how the F--k did you a-holes loose it now!

I am not a jerk by nature but after spending $20,000 plus in 3 years and getting "misplaced" enough times I do get a little more confrontational.

IF you have this problem record everything they lost, who you talked to and when, how many times it happend, there reason it happened, their excuse for it happening and anything else you can think of. Plus lots of signatures from everyone involved!

I am not trying to talk bad about any school or discourage anyone from going back to better themselves. I actualy support and encourage it!
just prepare yourself for the unlikely but still very possible chance your education could become an uphill battle outside the class room.

Just make sure you do your research before signing up to any college! Most are truely great and help every student to the fullest others can be more like what I ran into.
And yes my experiance came from a larger college. 12000 plus students.

Self study is well suited to someone who is intensely interested in electronics because the motivation comes almost automatically and you really need that motivation to get through the theory. You can't succeed on your own unless you are passionate about it. So naturally, electronics would be your hobby too, and so naturally along the way you would build projects not only to teach yourself how things work, but also just for the fun of it. So naturally, when it comes time to prove your worth to a potential employer, the best evidence you can bring is all those projects. I mean, bring along a suitcase and show off one after the other of your best looking and most complex projects. This worked on me a few years ago. I was interviewing technicians and one guy came along and gave me a show and tell of his best work by actually putting the hardware on the table. It made the interview very easy because all I had to do was grill him on why he did this, or what was the result of doing that, etc. And I asked some pretty theoretical questions to see if the guy really understood the principals behind it all. Happily he did, so I gave him a chance and it worked out pretty good! At least until he got itchy feet and got a better job somewhere else.

If electronics isn't your hobby, then I wonder if self-study is right for you. I see way too much evidence on the flip side of this point. That is, I have talked to many many engineering students in universities who are there as a result of things other than a passion for electronics and it is quite sad how little they know, even the ones with good marks. After interviewing several thousand of these types, my interview technique now always includes questions about what projects they have built. The answers are very revealing.

You will need someone to bounce questions off of as you go through the theory. Find someone who already has proven to really know his stuff, to bounce questions off of. You can rely on this forum for backup too.

Wow, thanks guys this is great info. Radioron, thank you for your posts, alot of good info in there especially coming from an employer. What would be a good entry level title that I could get in with learning on my own and having an almost 2 year diploma in electrical construction maintenance? I am just gonna get that diploma for now and continue with learning electronics. I will definitley look into math books like you spoke of and i like the idea of seeing the curiculum of a schools engineering program and going with that.

tcmetch, i agree totally with you about the loss of info. This school i am going to i paid them everything i owed at the end and when i came back to pay it in full with cash they somehow did not charge me 1,000 dollars that the day before had said was not paid, funny right? So i then went and did the figuring myself to see what else they messed up on. the program i was in had alot to do with service like comcast, security alarms and fire alarms. you would think the school before you sign up and everything would say hey, if you have a criminal record or a bad driving record this is not for you do to security and fire needing a perk card. also, to work with comcast or a company that provides you with a vehicle you need good driving record. so i find this out half way and bailed. i wanna be paid for thinking not physical work anymore.

tony8404 said:

What would be a good entry level title that I could get in with learning on my own and having an almost 2 year diploma in electrical construction maintenance?

Click to expand...

I can't give a good answer to this without learning a lot more about what you have studied in your courses, and also knowing what type of company you were thinking of as an employer. Since I'm not willing to put the time in to resolve this lack of info, I'll just take a general shot at an answer by saying that the usual categories where I live include:
- electrician : mainly involved with installing and maintaining electrical distribution physical plant, building wiring, and maintenance of electrical systems at factories, mills and many other systems. Not much involvement with electronic circuits. Very focused on jobs involving safety Electrical Code.
- electronics technician: handles the more complex IT installations in commercial and private buildings but does not usually touch high voltage (ie. greater than 60 volts) electrical; looks after doing the jobs in factories and manufacturing companies like testing, repairs, building one-off equipment; does problem solving of electronic equipment and systems including repairs of complex equipment
- electronics technologist: designs electronic systems; maintains complex electronics and systems; fault finding and improvements of more complicated electronics. Often works in team with engineer to create products and complex systems.
- engineer: applies physical principals to create technologies; invents processes; designs equipment and systems; often is the last resort problem solver for the most difficult problems
- professional engineer: an engineer who has proven technical competency; who also legally takes responsibility for his/her work; who formally subscribes to a code of ethics

There is a lot of overlap between categories and categorization can be fuzzy. For example, a tech trained in the military might have a strong cross section of capabilities across these categories.

From what you have posted so far, are you aiming for something like an electronics technician role, or perhaps an electronics technologist?

I have many second time around education friends and some family members to that have been through what you said and what I went though and now know first hand why I would come back from college on a weekend and be so wound up!

Electrical and electronics are my life. I am mostly self taught too. Natural passion plus a little bit of obsesion!
I went back to college for a electrical engineering degree be cause of having worked with too many engineers that had no idea what they were doing but were still pulling down $50k or more a year.
I figured I had the natural talent and life knowlege to make an engineering degree an easy score plus better myself at the same time.
Class work and learning was a no brainer. Department heads and some professors with book smarts were another story. If you did not learn it from them or if their research did not prove positive results it was impossible to do in their eyes. The deaf ear, blind eye treatment!
Also very true advice on the bring your toys to show and tell aproch to interviews. I was offered a job twice from a local welding supply center. I turned them down twice too. I never applied. They asked me to be the new service tech just from local word.
Wow! does starting pay go up then!

Loved the job! It was a dream come true for me! But a year later the corporate pinheads thought that if they dropped my stores service dept they could force the customer base to buy new machines every time theirs got older and broke down.
Big time back fire! I went self employed and used my severance pay to form my own service company. I hand picked my favorite customers and expanded my service beyond welders and plasma cutters.
They lost customer base, ended up sending what locals machines I refused to work on to two different service regions and lost face.
My typical repair time was one day to a week, Now thiers is 2 weeks to a month.
I often freely loaned one of the store rental machines out to the better customers if they apsolutely needed to keep going while I worked on their machine. That dont happen now either!
That estimated $50k a year savings from my dept elimination costs them over $100k a year now more than I they had left my local region alone(My former boss and regional manager both told me this!). Plus I still have my job I love!
I would happily go back and work for them again but knowing about the $100K F-up. Imagine what I would ask for return pay!

Sorry RadioRon, for the lack of info. So far i have read a book called basic electricity. I am now reading another book called basic electricity and electronics. As far as school goes i have completed half of it. Here is a link to the school's webpage of the course i am in which gives alittle info on the courses. **broken link removed**

let me know what you think of this school... thanks

Man Tcmech, you are starting to be my inspiration lol. That is awesome you taught yourself. My father is a retired engineer, so i do have a personal professor except it is hard for me to get to see him at times. But wouldnt you think that if i was able to spend a few hours on a saturday for the next 6 months imagine what i can learn from him without paying ???? he has most of the electrical equipment at his house like scopes, power supplies, soldering guns, spare parts, meters. i just do not see why he is not interested in helping me besides with paying the get me know where school lol...

He did say to bad he could not just place his hand on top of my head and bam i would be done lol... I so wish this could happen lol...

He is somewhat of a perfectionist which is not bad he just really knows his stuff and if he doesnt he wont even try to act as if he did when he darn knows he doesnt. so what this means for me is unless i know it or know most of it i want to say doesnt discourage him but almost like he wants to say until you have that you cannot go on. Though when he sees i know what he is trying to show me or to see if i know it and i already answer before he is done, then he will go ahead and talk or show me something the book did not even show. He has done this a few times and it made me feel one i did not read the chapter right or i missed something lol... but yet i look over the chapter and no it is not in it. i check another book same thing but if i do some googling i would find it but man can you imagine for the last 30 to 40 years his experience of tips and tricks.
I would love to know that stuff and go to an interview and let them ask some questions or try to trick me lol

Hey TcMech here is a link to the schools webpage that shows the program i am gonna go back to finish... the second link is to the program i was in ..


**broken link removed**

2nd link **broken link removed**

let me know what you think

Thanks for the complement!

It looks similar to my industrial maintenace degree I got out of high school my first time at college, but more focused towards electrical/ electronics. I cant say and wont say for sure but it may be well worth checking out.

Loved that college time though! Leaned a valuable lession about life at that time too.
If you dont have a degree they say "Sorry we cant hire you because your under qualified.", Get a good degree with a well diversified back ground and then they say, "Sorry we cant hire you because your over qualified."

I hoped I was not comming off sounding angry or pissy about what I went through.
I believe in passing my hard earned lessons along to anyone that can use them. You got the short short version. From my return to college to to day has been 7 years now. Almost all has been an uphill struggle to get here.
I was frowned on by many for going back at age 28, Told to quit by many more while I was there, Laughed at when I lost my funding due to a back injury and had to drop out for a semester. laughed at again when I got very sick (nearly died too) the next semester and had to drop classes again. ($10K a semseter with living expenses factored in, ouch!) Told I would never get a good job without finishing my degree. (thats when I got offerd the repair tech job I turned down twice),
Still get asked by my parents when I am going to get a real job about ten times a year.
(I pull $25K to 40K take home year to year now) A real job around here is in that range too but before taxes and typicaly takes 40-50 hours a week 50 weeks a year. (I probibly put in just over half that time.) But I am still a unemplyed bum to many, (with a profitable tax paying business in my name but that part dont count I guess).

I am looked at as nuts because I am so happy to be in the pay in tax bracket most years! Would you rather make $13k and get a $500 wellfare kick back from the government or make $40K and pay in a $1000 every year?

Knowledge can be bought with cash, Wisdom gets payed for out of your hide, pride, self esteem, reputation, blood, tears, and sweat, plus a lot of wasted cash on top of all of that.
But in the end you stop worring about the litle things everyone else gets so wound up about and you know just how deep your roots are. So when you do see that storm comming that has everyone else running for cover you will be thinking Ah... finnaly some rain!

lol... oh yes my friend i feel as if god hates me and for some reason he feels it is very funny to countinue to keep peeing on me!

For some reason i feel if i was to finish the school and get this little diploma that i will not be able to do anything with it. To me i can keep the 8 or 9 thousand and buy some books, some parts or kits and be better off except i would not have a piece of paper.

I like going at my own pace even though i can be a lazy @%% i would rather completely understand something then to have to rush through it and pretend i know it and suffer greater. But if that program i put the link to doesnt seem bad at all and might be key to getting into a entry level position then i will finish up reading my books and go back.

But if that diploma program is not gonna make a difference please let me know so i can just keep the money and buy some materials to learn on my own. Plus i can get some great help from my father which is like having one of the schools professors without paying lol

Matter of fact i am gonna call him today and see what he thinks of this idea... I would rather totally sell my house move in with in laws which i have already done and just go to a 4 year engineering degree but again God like to pee on me so that will never happen. My wife had gotten laid off in september and the unemployment is only good for so long. so if she is unable to get a job then i may lose the house and of course country wide mortgage (is the worse mortgage provider out there ) doesnt want to help out. I call them as a curtiousy to try to let them know what i forsee in the future that i may have troubles and they try to push off a refinance that lowers my payment 30 dollars a month i said you know what that will fix everything. the lady really i said are you stupid or something and hung up. I thought there was some kinda of hardship program or modification they have to do isnt there?

I think the school you attended may not have been the right school, but I will say, that some form of credentials from an accredited school will benefit you greatly. Perhaps your community college, rates should be much lower than what your last school charged, or maybe a place like ITT or Devry. Without some formal training I suspect you will have problems getting into the field.

All the above posts are very interesting and so true.
I just want to add an experience I had with a customer about 20 years ago.
He came in to our electronics business to buy a part to fix a kit he was to take to a job interview.
It was a power supply he had made at technical school. It did not look very impressive and I suggested he build one of our TEC-1 Z-80 computers and add a SPO256_AL2 speech chip.
I suggested this because he wanted to work for the local telephone company (PMG) and I heard him mention that he wanted to design a speech board to provide digital speech. This was long before this type of equipment was available.
He said he knew nothing about microprocessors and wandered what he would say if questioned about the computer.
I told him that the interviewer would not know anything about Z-80 language and I gave him a brief overview.
He had the choice of doing electronics or working for his father in the local fruit shop.
He came back a few weeks later. He got the job.
They were so impressed with his project that they said absolutely nothing.
This re-enforces what a previous poster said. Take a project to an interview and you have a greater chance of “getting your foot in the door.”
My second point is this: Electronics is 90% construction and 10% “book-reading.”
For every hour you read a text book, you need to spend 10 hours on construction. If you saw the hundreds (if not thousands) of projects I have put together, you would realise the essential part of construction.
The biggest mistake from University graduates is this: “My professor said the circuit will work and I don’t need to test it.”
They have the misguided attitude that it just takes “designing a circuit” and it will work.
If that were the case, I would be a multimillionaire.
Actually very little mathematics is needed in electronics.
Mostly you need an understanding of what value component is needed for a particular location.
Once you put the circuit together, you can adjust the results with different values.
I certainly would not make mathematics a priority.
There is so much help on the web, in the form of calculators and discussion-groups, that the time spent on learning complex mathematics is much better spent on things like learning a language (for programming).
You have to remember one thing: Learn as least as possible to get the greatest monitory return.
One of the best is to get in on a niche market where you can get either CASH or command a high return for your effort.
And the best area is SERVICE. A previous poster picked up a niche market and this will always be profitable.
Another trick you possibly have not thought of: Go to a company and say you will work for FREE for 2 weeks to show how you perform.
I did this to two companies when I was very young and got the jobs for many years.
Later, a young lad did the same to me and I employed him. He turned out to be a brilliant programmer and now he has his own IT business.
What I am saying is this: If you have a flair for electronics, and understand how a circuit works, pursue the field as it is the most rewarding field you will ever encounter. It is one of the most diverse fields of all and can give you a challenge every day of your life.

Have you thought of "Buying a Diploma." They cost $10.00 and no-one will ever challenge it.
Diplomas do not have a registration number.
When I employ applicants with a diploma, I found it impossible to verify the authenticity. See for yourself, how difficult it is.

Great idea. i love the diploma for 10.00 and i also love the 1 hour of reading you need 10 hours of construction. I am gonna go and buy like 200 dollars worth of kits this weekend.

Ah HAAA hahaha
I feel like a real dumbass now!
I thought long and hard about the "buy a deploma" aproch before I went back to college for my EE degree. I figured employers had some sort of universal check and see if its true reference place to actualy weed out the fake degrees from the real ones.
I too had planed to use my fake deploma and do the "show and tell" consept at the interviews and the I will work for free for a week or two to get my foot firmly in the door.

I chickened out and got "schooled" the hard way!

IF I had known what I just learned today I could perhaps be doing EE and pulling that $50k plus a year and be firmly rooted in that garden of usless, clueless, underqualified, and over paid engineers that pissed me off bad enough to want to go back and get that degree in the first place.

thanks alot Colin55! Where were you about 8 years ago with that info?
But seriously that is some very useful information to know.

Once again, who you know and what they know could save a pile of time and money over what you know and how you came to know it.