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Career Advice for long time IT person

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(@pcgizzmo)
Posts: 2
New Member
Topic starter
 

Hello,

I have seen many posts about people wanting to get into the Forensics field. I'm also hoping to get some opinions. My background

I have been in IT for 19 years. I'm 45. I am currently an IT Infrastructure manager for a medium sized company. I've been an consultant and held System Administrator and Network Administrator roles before my current job.

I'm wanting a change and have always been interested in Computer Forensics. The state I live in requires someone doing forensics to be a private investigator, law enforcement or attorney. I can get my PI license in 6 months of classes on the weekends.

My thoughts were to possibly get my PI license and EnCase cert and possibly ACE. Then sell services to small law firms, companies and law enforcement agencies that can not afford a full time person.

I'm looking or input on this plan

1. Would it be better for me to go to work for a large company or firm?
2. Would the lack of degree cause me problems with my years of experience?
3. Any other input or things I may not be thinking about?

Thanks..

 
Posted : 25/09/2015 6:26 am
BraindeadVirtually
(@braindeadvirtually)
Posts: 115
Estimable Member
 

1. Would it be better for me to go to work for a large company or firm?
2. Would the lack of degree cause me problems with my years of experience?
3. Any other input or things I may not be thinking about?

Thanks..

1. Better in what terms? Larger companies have greater resources in general but you have to think what kind of CF work you want to do - generally falling into these categories

a) Criminal - Child Protection/Indecent Images/Counter Terrorism/High Tech Crime/Military Intelligence (or whatever the your equivalent terms are, I'm in the UK)
b) Corporate - which would necessarily involve working for a large consultancy (Deloittle/KPMG etc) or a big bank with the resources and requirement to sustain a specialist CF resource
c) Legal - eDiscovery. Working with law firms / specialist attorneys dealing with enormous quantities of data involved in massive lawsuits usually in the corporate world

2. Absolutely not. There are plenty of people out there working in this field or trying to get into it who have all the degrees but no actual IT experience - ask them to pull a laptop apart to get at the hard disk and they give you a blank look.

Good luck with this. I also jumped from generic IT to CF a few years back. I didn't really plan out where I wanted to end up though. It's definitely worth giving some thought to.

 
Posted : 25/09/2015 6:12 pm
(@pcgizzmo)
Posts: 2
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Topic starter
 

Thank you for this reply. It gives me some hope. In regards to my Question #1 I was just thinking from an employment opportunity.

I'm 45 which in the US rules me out for most Law Enforcement jobs because they actually require you to be a Law Enforcement officer to perform the forensics (at least the large PD's I've looked at) and 45 is about 10 years over the limit.

I assume Government agencies would not necessarily require this unless it's like the FBI in which case I've passed the age of becoming an agent as well.

Also my question was for just general ease of employment would it be better to go to a larger company? To be honest I love the idea of going out on my own and contracting out to smaller companies and law enforcement agencies that can't necessarily afford a full time forensics person but I don't really know the feasibility of this or how hard it would be to get started.

Thanks again for the input. I saw my question had over 200 views so I assume others were interested as well.

 
Posted : 01/10/2015 7:54 pm
(@deltron)
Posts: 125
Estimable Member
 

Hello,

My thoughts were to possibly get my PI license and EnCase cert and possibly ACE. Then sell services to small law firms, companies and law enforcement agencies that can not afford a full time person.

I would say go the route of working for a firm first, learn the etiquette of a forensic.
I see a lot of IT people become leads of the new ediscovery/forensic of the company and do objective more of an IT way and not a forensic way.

For examples when I started in ediscovery for a company I suggested we used write blockers and ftk to image the drivers due to they would just plug the drives in with the sata to usb connector and use notron ghost to image them.

I also had a small firms that did IT work that dabble in forensic "image a laptop" by going to the root folder and making a zip folder of the computer.

IT has a different mind set then forensic and they both approach the same objective differently; but I don't know you or your background/education. I would say start out as a forensic investigator at a big/medium firm that has a good reputation and learn./

 
Posted : 01/10/2015 11:40 pm
(@bithead)
Posts: 1206
Noble Member
 

I'm 45 which in the US rules me out for most Law Enforcement jobs because they actually require you to be a Law Enforcement officer to perform the forensics (at least the large PD's I've looked at) and 45 is about 10 years over the limit.

I assume Government agencies would not necessarily require this unless it's like the FBI in which case I've passed the age of becoming an agent as well.

There are many opportunities especially at the federal level that do not require you to be a law enforcement officer. If you check USA Jobs you will see two that illustrate this, and more show up regularly.

 
Posted : 02/10/2015 7:43 am
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