Tech Careers: IT Support & Web Development

A course teaches a subject; a pathway walks you into a trade. This page maps two related trades, and the first thing to understand is how each one proves a worker is ready — because the proof decides the plan.

IT support proves itself by certification. When a business hires a sixteen-dollar-an-hour technician to touch its computers, it wants evidence beyond a smile, and the industry settled long ago on the CompTIA A+ — a pair of proctored, performance-based exams covering hardware, operating systems, networking, security and troubleshooting. The A+, usually followed by the Network+, is studied for independently all the time; no school, sponsor or degree is required to sit the exams, and entry-level job listings name these certifications the way carpentry listings name a driver’s license. It is the closest thing the computer world has to a journeyman’s card.

Web development proves itself by portfolio. Nobody licenses web developers, and employers learned to ignore paper and ask one question instead: show me what you have built. A hiring manager will take a student with five real, live, well-made sites over a graduate with none. That cuts both ways — there is no exam to hide behind, and the portfolio must be genuinely good. The whole craft can be learned from free, excellent curricula; the famous coding bootcamps mostly repackage what is free, which is why this pathway treats them with the same caution our Online Entrepreneur pathway applies to marketing gurus.

The two tracks share a foundation — how a computer actually works, how the internet actually works, how to troubleshoot, how to serve a frustrated human kindly — and many students will walk a year of each before choosing. Our Electronics & Microcontrollers course is the natural companion for the IT track (a student who has soldered and programmed a Pico does not fear the inside of a PC case), and Graphic Design & Illustration is the natural companion for the web track.

Everything here is done with a parent as partner: under 18 the accounts are theirs, exam registration runs through their consent, and client work is supervised. And one rule stands over both tracks before all others: we only ever touch machines, accounts and networks we have permission to touch. The law (and this pathway) makes no exception for curiosity.

“Fabricando fit faber” — by making, one becomes a maker. Nobody becomes a technician by watching videos about computers, and nobody becomes a developer by collecting tutorial certificates. Every section below ends in something you fix, build, document or ship.

Both tracks walk the same four stages; only the artifacts differ. Each stage has a gate — something real that proves you are ready for the next. A diligent student can walk all four in two to three school years.

This trade touches other people’s property, other people’s data and federal law. Learn the rules now; professionals live by them, and the industry’s whole trust structure assumes they are kept.

Who owns the accounts

The laws and the line

• Unauthorized access is a federal crime. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act makes it illegal to access any computer, account or network without permission — a school Wi-Fi password “found,” a sibling’s account “tested,” a neighbor’s router “explored.” There is no white-hat exception for the uninvited. Security skill is practiced only on your own lab machines and in sanctioned arenas built for it (picoCTF and CyberPatriot below are exactly that).
• Other people’s data is a trust. The moment you fix someone’s computer you can see their email, photos, finances. The professional rule is the Golden Rule with a screwdriver: look at nothing the job doesn’t require, copy nothing, mention nothing. One violated trust ends a reputation that took years to build.
• Back up before you touch. Never work on anyone’s machine without a backup of their data first, and never promise what you can’t undo. “First, do no harm” is as binding at the workbench as at the bedside.
• Licenses are law. Software, fonts, images and code all carry licenses. Free-and-open-source means free under stated terms, not “no rules”; pirated software never touches a machine you service, and code you borrow keeps its license and its credit.

Family rules that are not negotiable

• A parent approves every platform, sees every account and holds every password.
• Client work — even free church work — is arranged by and visible to a parent; no solo visits to anyone’s home or office.
• Money flows through the parent; keep your split in a written family agreement.
• Never give out your age, school, address or schedule online. In public you are the business name, not your full name.
• Online communities (Discord servers, forums) are joined with permission and read with discernment; direct messages from strangers get shown to a parent.

Faithful in little. “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much” (Luke 16:10). The whole trade is built on this verse: the technician trusted with the password, the developer trusted with the customer database, got there by being trustworthy with small things first. Every rule above is practice.

The story. In August 1986, an astronomer named Clifford Stoll, newly reassigned to the computer lab at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was handed a chore: find out why the lab’s accounting system was off by 75 cents. Most people would have shrugged and written it off. Stoll pulled the thread. The 75 cents led to an unauthorized user, the user led to a break-in, and over the following year — armed with printers he borrowed to log every keystroke, a logbook he kept religiously, and patience — the junior sysadmin unraveled an espionage ring that was selling stolen U.S. military data to the KGB. He told the story in The Cuckoo’s Egg (1989), still the best book ever written about the temperament this trade runs on: take small anomalies seriously, write everything down, and stay curious one step longer than the problem expects.

The day’s work. An IT support technician is the person an organization calls when the technology that everyone depends on stops working: the computer that won’t boot, the printer that won’t print, the Wi-Fi that drops, the file that vanished, the email that won’t send. The work arrives as tickets — short written requests, handled in order, documented when closed. Half the job is technical: hardware, operating systems, networks, printers, security. The other half is human: a frustrated person who is behind on their work is standing at your desk, and your calm, your courtesy and your plain English are as much a part of the fix as the driver you reinstall. Students who like both halves — the puzzle and the person — love this trade.

The six steps (the trade’s own method)

The industry teaches one troubleshooting method, and it is on the A+ exam because it is the actual daily discipline:

1. Identify the problem. Ask the user what happened, what changed, what it did before. Back up their data before touching anything.
2. Establish a theory of probable cause. Start with the obvious (is it plugged in? really?) and question your assumptions.
3. Test the theory. If it holds, continue; if not, form a new one or escalate — knowing when to hand a problem up is a skill, not a failure.
4. Plan and implement the fix, at a time that doesn’t knock the user’s work over.
5. Verify full functionality — the user confirms, not you — and prevent recurrence (the loose cable gets secured, the update gets scheduled).
6. Document everything: the problem, the cause, the fix, in the ticket, so the next technician inherits your work and not your mystery.

Worked example — “the printer won’t print.” (1) Identify: since this morning; nothing changed “except the power went out last night.” (2) Theory: the outage reset the printer’s network settings. (3) Test: print a configuration page from the printer’s own panel — it shows a new, wrong IP address. Theory holds. (4) Fix: set a static address, re-point the computer’s print queue. (5) Verify: the user prints her own document; set the printer to keep its address through power cycles so it can’t recur. (6) Document: four sentences in the ticket. Total time, eleven minutes — because the method did the thinking. Notice the 75-cent habit: the clue was the power outage the user almost didn’t mention.

The home lab: your apprenticeship bench

Every serious technician builds one, and a student can build one for almost nothing:

• One sacrificial desktop (free–$50: ask relatives, church members and local businesses for retired machines; they usually have a closet full). Take it apart completely and rebuild it. Replace a part. Upgrade the memory. Install Windows; then wipe it and install Linux; then make it dual-boot. Break it on purpose and repair it.
• Virtual machines (free: VirtualBox): run whole practice computers as software inside your real one — install operating systems, misconfigure them, take snapshots, roll back. This is where most exam practice lives.
• The home network, with permission: map every device in the house, learn the router’s settings page, set up the guest network, wire something with a real cable you crimped yourself. A $30 used managed switch teaches more Network+ than any video.
• A Raspberry Pi (ties straight into our Electronics course): make it a file server, an ad-blocker, a weather station — a machine with a job teaches administration.
• The logbook, always. Every build, break and fix, dated and written up. By exam day it is studying; by interview day it is proof.

Then let the lab serve people. Family machines first, then — parent arranging — the church office, the co-op, grandparents’ neighbors. Ten documented real fixes for real people is a better credential than most internships, and it is the Stage 2–3 gate.

CompTIA’s certifications are vendor-neutral, proctored and industry-standard; they are earned in a sequence, and each one renews the ones below it. The facts below are current as of 2026 — exam versions and prices change every few years, so confirm at comptia.org before scheduling.

• Minors: a parent or guardian files consent through CompTIA Central before registration (policy since June 2026), then the exam is taken at a Pearson VUE center or proctored online at home with a webcam. No sponsor, school or work history is needed — ever.
• Renewal: certifications are valid three years and renew by continuing education or by passing a higher exam — passing Network+ renews A+; passing Security+ renews both. Plan the ladder and you only ever climb.
• The money, honestly: ~$548 for the A+ pair is the single real expense of this entire pathway — the price of a trade license, not tuition, and less than one college credit-hour. Study until practice exams are comfortable before booking, because a failed attempt costs the full fee. CompTIA also runs an academic store with discounted student vouchers; homeschool families have qualified with proof of enrollment — worth checking before paying list price. What you should not pay for: study material. The best of it is free (below).
• A note on the Google IT Support Certificate (Coursera, ~$49/month, financial aid available): a decent structured curriculum some employers recognize, and fine as a supplement — but it is a course completion certificate, not a proctored certification, and it does not replace the A+. Free study plus the real exam is the stronger path.

What studying actually looks like

• Watch the full free video course for the exam (Professor Messer’s A+ series — complete, current and free on YouTube — is the trade’s standard; Mike Meyers’s books are the standard print companion). One video a day with notes beats binge-watching.
• Do everything in the lab. Every topic becomes a task: the partitioning video becomes an afternoon partitioning the sacrificial PC; the subnetting lesson becomes your own network map. The exams include simulations, and the lab is where you stop fearing them.
• Flashcards for the raw memory (ports, acronyms, cable categories, Wi-Fi standards) — make your own; the making is the memorizing.
• Practice exams until consistently passing with margin — then book the real one with your parent, Core 1 first, Core 2 within a month or two while it’s hot.

Pace for a diligent student: Tech+ (if used) in a semester; A+ across two semesters of grades 10–11 with the lab running alongside; Network+ across grade 11–12. A senior with A+, Network+, a two-year logbook and a church’s computers under care is employable the week after graduation — and halfway to Security+.

The story. In 1990, at the CERN physics laboratory in Geneva, an English engineer named Tim Berners-Lee got tired of physicists being unable to share documents across incompatible computers, and in about three months of focused work invented the solution: a simple language for pages (HTML), a protocol for fetching them (HTTP), and an address scheme for naming them (the URL). The first website went live on his desk in 1991 — plain text explaining what the web was. Then came the decision that made this trade possible: in 1993 CERN released the whole thing free, to everyone, forever, no patent, no royalty. And the web kept a second gift embedded in its design: View Source. Every page ever shipped carries its own blueprint, readable by anyone who asks. The web is the only trade in history where every finished work in the world doubles as a free lesson — a generation of professionals, including some in the stories below, learned exactly that way.

The day’s work. A web developer turns a need — a church needs a site people can actually find the service times on; a business needs customers to book appointments; a ministry needs donations to work on a phone — into pages and applications that are fast, clear, correct and kind to the visitor. The front of the craft is HTML (structure), CSS (appearance) and JavaScript (behavior); behind it sit servers, databases and the tools of the trade, above all Git, the system that tracks every change to the code and lets many hands work on one project without chaos.

The roadmap (in order, no skipping)

1. HTML and CSS, written by hand in a plain text editor — no site builders, no frameworks, no AI autocomplete yet. Structure, headings, links, images; then layout, color, type. Gate: your personal page, hand-written, live.
2. Make it good on every screen: responsive layout (phone first), readable type, accessibility — alt text, contrast, keyboard navigation. Accessibility is craftsmanship and courtesy, not compliance paperwork; it’s building the ramp into the building instead of bolting it on.
3. JavaScript, the real programming language of the trade: variables, logic, functions, events, manipulating the page. This is the longest, steepest stretch — months, not weeks — and the place tutorial-watching most tempts. Build small things constantly: a calculator, a quiz, a Bible memory game, a unit converter for the shop course.
4. Git and GitHub from the first JavaScript project onward: commit as you work, write honest commit messages, publish the repository. Your GitHub profile becomes the workbench employers inspect.
5. Deploy everything, free: GitHub Pages, Netlify or Cloudflare Pages put real sites on the real internet at no cost. A project isn’t done until a stranger can load it on a phone.
6. Then one step deeper, by inclination: a front-end framework (React is the market’s default) or a first back-end (Node.js, a database, a simple application with accounts and storage). A high schooler does not need both; the portfolio decides.

The free curricula (any one of these is sufficient)

The portfolio: five projects that hire you

Not twenty tutorial clones — five real works, each live, each in Git, each with a short write-up of what it does and what was hard:

1. Your own site, hand-coded, where the other four live. It is your shop window; keep it fast, plain and current.
2. A site for a real organization you belong to — the church, the co-op, the 4-H club — built free, with a parent brokering it. Real content, real feedback, real maintenance: your first client without the contract.
3. An application that does something: a working tool with JavaScript logic and state — a scheduling helper, a quiz engine, a scripture memory trainer. This is the project interviews ask about.
4. The redesign with receipts: take a dated local business site, rebuild it better as a demonstration, and write up the before/after — speed, phones, clarity. (Then, parent alongside, you may offer it to the owner. Our Online Entrepreneur pathway teaches the selling half of that conversation.)
5. A contribution to someone else’s project: one accepted fix to an open-source project — documentation counts. It proves you can read others’ code and work by others’ rules, which is the actual job.

The bootcamp question, answered honestly

Coding bootcamps — 3-to-6-month intensive schools, typically $10,000–$20,000 — teach roughly the material of The Odin Project with deadlines, classmates and career services attached. For a career-changing adult with savings and no time, that trade can make sense. For a high school student it almost never does: you have the one asset bootcamps charge to simulate — time — and the free curricula are as good or better. The industry also learned the hard way (several famous bootcamps collapsed or were sanctioned over the last few years, some after misleading placement claims and predatory income-share loan agreements) that the sign on the door guarantees nothing. If a bootcamp is ever considered later, judge it like a used car: audited placement numbers, named employers, contract read by a parent — and remember that by the time you’d enroll, the portfolio this pathway builds may already have done the job for free.

And the AI question: modern AI tools write code, and professionals use them daily — so learn to use them after you can judge their output, the way a shop student learns hand tools before power tools. A developer who can only prompt is a passenger; a developer who can read, verify and repair what the tool produces is the one still hired. In practice that means: no AI during the fundamentals (steps 1–3 above), honest use with attribution afterward.

The craftsman’s standard. “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings” (Proverbs 22:29). The web is drowning in careless pages. Diligence — the page that loads fast on a bad connection, reads clearly to tired eyes, works for the blind visitor’s screen reader — is rare enough to be a career strategy by itself.

Computing is young enough that some of its masters are still writing, but it already has a canon. Read a few of the books that formed the trade, then follow living teachers who give the goods away free. Library first, always.

The books

Teachers working now (all free)

The guru test, tech edition

Tech has its own gold-rush peddlers: the “six figures in 90 days, no experience” influencer, the $997 course wrapping free material, the bootcamp ad dressed as a testimonial. Before following anyone, score them:

• Do they show the work or the salary? Code, labs, projects and syllabi are teaching. Screenshots of offer letters, day-in-the-life vlogs of office snacks, and “my student went from barista to $150k” are bait.
• What do they sell? Messer and freeCodeCamp give the whole course away and sell optional extras. A teacher whose free content exists only to funnel you into a paid “academy” is a seller.
• Do they promise speed and ease? “No coding needed,” “AI makes developers obsolete, buy my prompting course,” “guaranteed job” — every phrase is a tell. Real competence takes a few honest years; everyone honest says so.
• Certificate or certification? A paid video site’s “certificate of completion” proves you watched videos. A proctored certification (CompTIA) or a live portfolio proves skill. Never pay for paper that isn’t one of those two.
• Is the language clean and the content wholesome? Much tech YouTube is fine; some runs on profanity and cynicism. You become what you binge. Choose teachers you’d be glad to sound like at the dinner table.

The rule of this pathway: the study is free — the library, the curricula and the teachers above cover every hour of it. The only check a parent ever writes is to Pearson VUE for a real exam, and the only other spending is lab hardware a family chooses to buy used.

A contest gives you a deadline, a real problem and judges who owe you nothing. These are the proven ones for this pathway; dates are the 2026–27 season’s rhythm — confirm on each official site before planning a semester. (The computer-science ones also live in our Contests directory.)

The quiet contests count double. Ten computers fixed for ten real people, each documented; a church site that real members use every week and that you have maintained through a year of “can you just add…” requests. No ribbon — but a student with either one has won what every employer is actually judging for.

Use your real record. A CyberPatriot score sheet, a picoCTF rank, a live URL with a year of commits behind it — these beat any line of self-description. The contests sit late in this pathway on purpose: build first, compete with the receipts.

Each is a real person, and each illustrates one move from this pathway. Read them as case studies, not celebrity tales — the point is never “be famous,” it is “see the move.”

Notice what’s missing: not one degree requirement, not one paid bootcamp, not one permission slip from the industry. Every story begins with free knowledge, a real machine or a real need close at hand, and years of unglamorous hours — with the public work (a logbook, an open-source commit, a shipped app) doing the talking.

One school year, either track, every skill on this page used once; three to five focused hours a week. Shift the calendar to fit your family; keep the order. (A student sampling both tracks can run the first semester of each in alternating years.)

“Job pathway” means this leads somewhere whether or not the first job is the life’s work. Both of these are ladder trades: the entry job is genuinely entry-level, and nearly everyone above it started there. (Pay figures are U.S. medians from the Bureau of Labor Statistics as of May 2024 — midpoints across all ages and regions, so entry pay sits below them and the ladder goes well above.)

Honest weather report: plain password-reset help desk work is slowly shrinking as software automates the easy tickets, and AI tools now write everyday code — which is precisely why this pathway trains the parts that endure: hands-on hardware, networks, security, troubleshooting judgment, kindness to frustrated humans, and the ability to verify what a tool produces. Both trades increasingly pay for the person who can be trusted with what the automation can’t be.

For the transcript: Track A documents cleanly as a Computer Technology credit (the certificate is third-party proof most electives can’t match); Track B as Web Design / Computer Science credit with the portfolio as documentation. College remains fully open — these trades also make the best student jobs on any campus — but the point of the pathway is that it does not wait on college, and neither door charges admission.

Three books and one free resource a year, for either track. All findable at libraries; Eloquent JavaScript is free online.

Parent note. These are adult trade books chosen for clean, honest teaching — skim anything before handing it over, as you would any library find. The pathway never requires a paid course, a paid community or a paid mentor; the one legitimate bill is the proctored exam fee, paid by you, to Pearson VUE, when practice scores say the student is ready. Supervise every account, hold every password, keep the computer in a shared room — and enjoy this: it is one of the few school subjects where the final exam is a stranger’s computer working again, or a stranger’s church finding the service times on their phone.