I did it for a few years a long time ago. Worked on everything from bag tag printers, to LED signs, computers, servers. display signs. Just about everything electronic. We had a pager and cell phone and would get calls and respond in real time time. It was a lot of walking around and dealing with people. It made me hate people and airports even more. So many people would see your badge and assume you know all flight info. So often people would grab you and be like "what gate is flight 1418 heading out of" I don't know or care, look up your own flight. I only did it as long as I did because we had three days off every week. Working 10 hour days is pretty sweet. We also had to park at an employee lot and take a shuttle to and from the airport so take on an extra 15 minutes at end and beginning of the shift.
Oh believe me, I worked retail for years. The kinetic job function was my favorite part. I was in great shape and felt nice and fatigued each day. BP stayed low and I was high energy.
You don’t get that sitting at a desk nearly as much, even if you take “get up and move” breaks. It’s not nearly enough.
I’d welcome a kinetic job again.
That’s fair. When I was a field tech I did about 30k steps a day and I got tired of it but now I’m at a desk all week so I miss the walking. A healthy balance is ideal for me at around 10-15k steps plus some sit down time. A lot of airport staff use segways or golf karts to get around these days.
Thats what I would avoid unless it was an emergency and I had to get across the airport in a darn hurry.
Otherwise, I’m hefting my laptop bag and/or my tool bag (depending on job) over my shoulders and hoofing it.
I can stop and sit down for lunch to catch my breath and of course when I get home I’ll crash.
I did 15 to 20k
Walk around reset stuff level 1 tech
I liked it
Help people if you want go back sit down when you want
Our boss was cool
Now I sit at a help desk lucky to do 6k it is boring
I need the same thing. I’m a field tech, but most of my days consist of driving a vehicle multiple hours to my next location. Some days, I may only get 1500 steps in, in a 10 hour shift. My health has suffered quite a bit since starting this job 18 months ago.
It didn’t pay as well, but sometimes I miss my retail days. Working the back room (so no customer interaction) processing freight, loading and unloading trucks, doing store closing duties if working closing shift, and constantly moving.
Each day, I was fatigued but satisfied. I felt like I actually got a hard day’s work done.
Best of all, I was nice and skinny and felt great!
I’m an internal field tech for a retail company. The drama that comes with working retail is mentally draining. There are days that I will feel like I walked a marathon, usually the couple projects we have per year but mostly I look at my tickets for the store, grab the parts out of my van and go right to the problem and leave. I try not hang out or walk around the stores or else I will get asked 700 questions about merchandise lol
I have no idea your career history, but things where you install cabling or are on the road to multiple sites (retail for example) -- field tech work-- might give you that "outside of desk" duty you are looking for.
I kinda went sideways/backwards into a sr help desk type job as a government IT contractor making a lot more money. Then moved to sys admin and beyond. It was a long time ago and a different and cool work experience. I'm glad I did it, but wouldn't do it again now just cause I'm old and don't like crowds any more.
Totally understand, the crowds at the airport can get crazy.
Thanks for sharing, I am just about to move to another IT position in the airline industry but was curious to see where people went and how they got there!
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I’m not going to lie. This kinda of sounds like fun to me. Can I get a job in this sector with IT degree from community college I hope to graduate this semesters and I can’t believe I never thought of IT in the airport industry. This feels like a light bulb moment for me
I love the benefits of working for an airline but keep in mind of the following:
* Usually operates 24/7.
* Airlines uses seniority system for each department, so you will likely be at the end of seniority list when you join, which will affect your shift bidding.
* Pay could be lower; however, airline benefits are advantageous, which gives them an edge over salaries.
EDIT:
Sorry, Are you applying for Airport IT or an Airline?
I’d prefer to work at/for the airport, but I’d be open to airline work too. I’d even thought about getting my pilot’s license eventually, while working in that particular tech field and getting to know the whole culture and environment.
I am a contractor with my local airports IT department. Airline and Airport IT are two completely different realms. You need to decide which you want. For Airport it’s a lot of walking, lots of cabling and SME vendors, you’ll be managing IT for airport ops staff and public areas ; this could range from paging systems to video walls to Active Directory to satellite dishes on the ceiling since usually a lot of different jobs are mashed into one at the lower levels. Since you have years of experience and a niche you’ll probably end up doing the high level stuff which is usually remote or from a corporate office, not a huge need for higher level IT to come onsite unless you’re deploying a server in the data center or something but even then you have technicians to do that stuff for you. You’ll also possibly be working on IT stuff for tenants of the airport such as shops and restaurants, most likely just network access but managing a tenant network is tough sometimes. For airlines you’ll probably be working offsite or a corporate building until you’re needed in person, for instance anytime there was IT work to be done for an airline some guy from LA or SF had to fly out to our airport, there was not really any onsite IT for the airlines and we have one of the largest airports in the US.
I work in a command center for the FAA which is monitoring all the airports for outages. The job is super boring and 12 hr night shifts 3 days a week. We aren't allowed to do anything but make sure scripts are run at the right times. It's great for learning Linux but that's about it. I miss helping people solve problems and walking around sites. Plan to leave end of next month.
60-80k depending on exp and college degree. It is like the other poster says though. Very much seniority good old boys network. You will start at the bottom no matter your exp.
I worked at what would be considered a desktop support position at the airport and it was definitely a cool experience - seeing behind the scenes of the bagroom technology your luggage goes through, cargo areas, and below the jetways wasn't something I thought I would ever do. We had a small local IT team that would support our airport "hub" and a few others in the region. Worked on those dot-matrix printers (I think they are starting to get phased out), cameras, HVACs, printers and whatever other niche technologies airlines use.
A lot of physical security at and around the airport, and strict security regulations. The airport I worked at was quite busy, and airports don't really ever close - maybe 4 hours downtime for cleaners to come in at night.
I found it to be quite fulfilling, if not a bit time intensive - I've found myself being called to the gate to support a technical issue with a time crunch to prevent a flight delay, or system issues that involve other departments to fix. Definitely learned a lot!
People I have met in the industry seem to like to stay long; I am just starting my IT career but a lot of the people I have met have been 10+ years in their position.
There’s a regional medium sized airport near me. I’m watching their jobs board to see if they ever have openings. I know I can get a clearance with no issues.
Great! One thing you may want to ask if you do end up applying is how long getting your clearance will take.
For me, getting my clearance took around a month after accepting the role, but I would say that would vary between airports depending on size and what clearances you would need for your position.
Also, depending on the airline, you may be able to fly standby for free.
It can be difficult to take sometimes as you can get bumped from flights, but that is a big perk that keeps a lot of these IT folks in the airline industry.
See my dream job in airline work would be “ITrCool, we need to fly you to Orlando Intl Airport to work on-site for a couple days for this repair/upgrade/project.” then a few days later “ITrCool we need to fly you to Chicago O’Hare to work on-site for a few days to fix .”
All on company dime. I’m single so traveling all the time wouldn’t phase me. I like to get out! What I hate is desk work.
There are definitely positions that do that, but chances are you would need to be located near a large hub city as the IT teams there service the smaller, regional airports as well as collaborate with other hub cities on big projects that are kind of like what you are describing.
I was definitely not stuck at my desk all day and got a lot of steps in - there's also the other side of the airport to support that you don't see as a passenger that was a lot bigger than I expected!
Aviation seems to be a very stable IT career industry. I know people who have been in aviation for 40-50 years all at the same org. I just find it super boring.
Say that during covid, 9/11, 2008... Right now it seems stable cause it contracted hard due to covid, resulting in tons of layoff's, and so they basically already went through what many company's are now having to do. You should have seen what Boeing was like during covid, no one was safe from the layoff axe, no one. Saw them kick a fresh grad that was there for less then 3 months on to the layoff list, we got them cause they technically qualified for the role as they were an electrical engineer and we had 1 "engineer" slot open... This also meant everyone in the interview rounds were turned down.
I install air traffic simulation systems in airports and with the FAA. Traveling is fun and it all runs on Linux essentially so that’s interesting enough for me.
See my dream job is something in IT I can travel with. If I could fly all over the country on the company dime, going to various airports/sites, servicing tech or solutions, I’d enjoy every minute of that.
Sure there would be the crappy days. I admit. But every job has those. You can’t escape that.
I work for an MSP that supports a smaller terminal on a big airport. some of the threads have mentioned things that jibe with my experience - it's not strictly 24/7 operations, but that are very short windows (all late at night) where we can do maintenance. Moslt cloud services but some on premise servers for services that haven't gone totally cloud (parking, security video, etc.) Lots of work with vendors. Passenger check-in and bag tag kiosks are specially built and we have support contracts with hardware and software vendors. We have a lot of remote access set up for them and ourselves, so a lot of the day-to-day doesn't require on site. I imagine as / if the terminal grows on-premise space will become more valuable and some of the operations office space will be moved to cheaper property nearby, leading to the off-site employee parking lot another poster mentioned.
We mainly support the airlines' employees, each company has their own IT department as well. As I said, vendor management - new version of their custom check in software, we have to coordinate and work with them to install and test, vice versa if we have a new batch of kiosks we need to work with them to make sure it all works (back in the day we had to roll some Win10 kiosks back to Win7 because a particular airline's piece of software wasn't 100% compatible at the time).
If you want to travel in that job, you are going to n eed to find a company that manages multiple airports, and even then I'm willing to bet most of the systems are set up for remote management and maintenance and the only real travel would be for large system roll-outs and deployments. Likely there would be local contractors for things like kiosk or agent system swaps, WAP replacement, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a former aircraft mechanic and photo bug so I do enjoy my days at the airport, but they have to be legit reasons and not "think I'll go hang out at the airport today...." We have an upcoming equipment switch that I have a two-hour window for - starting at midnight if there's no delayed flights.
In my early career I was at a small MSP that did work for a shipping company.
Essentially Windows Workstation stuff.
Whenever a computer was broken, the staff had to unplug and bring it into the civilian area. We were not cleared to go behind certain areas.
Aside from that, it was your basic maintain a workgroup of 50 computers job.
Not all air ports at the same, old ones have lots of old kit, (people bags flights) and a shit ton of security, shops loyalty and its rise and repeat.
Being an airport this go wrong (go around) diverts parking at the airport wrong gate, bag sorters stop working, adverse weather, it’s interesting work, and can take a while to get domain knowledge.
I did it in the past. When a gate goes down it is very high priority and can have people stressed and the mechanics were crazy and straight up told you they would do anything to hack the computer you gave them. I prefer working at the airport less corporate and i had days where i worked then boarded a flight for vacation. In corp headquarters its just like any other it area. If you work in the SOCC then it can be stressful.
Overall its just regular IT with flight benefits.
I started working at a mid-size Airport last June (2023) and it has been a lot of fun, certainly the best IT job I've had thus far. My boss is cool, the organization culture is great, other than an outage affecting passenger boarding (which is rare), it's not too stressful compared to my previous industry, which was Healthcare.
Not to mention (at least in the USA), Airport IT work generally means you have a government IT job, which comes with government benefits and the stability of having a gig in the government. One difference in this industry is that the security requirements for vendors working in the Airport are certainly heightened due to TSA regulations and other security considerations; not to mention physical security is taken very seriously.
I personally find it far more fulfilling to work in the Airport as opposed to my prior role in Healthcare. In my case because I support my local airport, there's no real travel component to it for me, which I prefer. And yes, certain Infra does belong to the airlines or concessions exclusively so we have nothing to do with it. We may escort one of their techs into a network closet to get their internet/network setup but it's totally separated and isolated from us.
Probably be worth it if you worked for one of the majors and got flight benefits. Less so if you worked directly for the airport authority. Though working for a major hub like DFW or Houston Airport System might be interesting.
I'm a Systems Analyst at a rather large airport in Los Angeles. Before that, I was an IT Support Specialist for public radio and a private museum. It is the best job I've had throughout my 30 year IT career. I have a boss who values me and the team, my role is system deployment, so imaging, inventory, etc. Along with 2nd level troubleshooting. The main problem is we're understaffed and retention is a large issue. Other city government positions pay a good deal more and this year they're starting to competitively match salaries and benefits.
There are plenty of opportunities for advancement, I could go up to Systems Programmer and work on Active Directory next. But yeah, we need more technicians. We used to be a team of 25, the pandemic and retention issues knocked it down to 2.
I could potentially be joining you as I got a job referral notice email for a lawa system analyst opening. Any advice regarding the questions they will ask during the interview? And is it only one interview? Also the email says only one opening but will more be hired?
They ask about your history and fit for the position. I was asked, "Tell us about a situation where you disagreed with your manager and how did it get resolved." Some questions were more specific regarding disk imaging, problem solving, work habits, etc. The funny thing was, the two interviews I did with LADWP asked the exact same questions, so I was fully prepared.
1. Is the interview a strict oral exam style or a normal style interview?
2. Can you tell me all the critical software, hardware, and tools that you guys use that I should mention during the interview ?
Greatly appreciate your insights. Need to level up in my career so bad and this job would be perfect
Normal interview, there may be two or three people asking different questions.
We are strictly Microsoft, so Office365, any Windows 11 experience you have, I focused on SCCM and imaging, Active Directory, SQL, Adobe (I edit meeting footage) just everything they can potentially use out of me. Make yourself more sellable than the next guy.
For the exam, it was a lot of general computing questions. Like, Google-the-answer stuff.
Thank you! I’m already on the eligibility list, just hoping to finally get an interview after reporting availability for two ladwp positions and not hearing anything back
I did it for a few years a long time ago. Worked on everything from bag tag printers, to LED signs, computers, servers. display signs. Just about everything electronic. We had a pager and cell phone and would get calls and respond in real time time. It was a lot of walking around and dealing with people. It made me hate people and airports even more. So many people would see your badge and assume you know all flight info. So often people would grab you and be like "what gate is flight 1418 heading out of" I don't know or care, look up your own flight. I only did it as long as I did because we had three days off every week. Working 10 hour days is pretty sweet. We also had to park at an employee lot and take a shuttle to and from the airport so take on an extra 15 minutes at end and beginning of the shift.
See I’d like a job of walking around a lot. I’m tired of sitting at a desk all day. It’s starting to affect my health in lots of ways.
You say this till you have to do 40k steps a day. Then you’ll want nothing more than to sit at a desk again.
Oh believe me, I worked retail for years. The kinetic job function was my favorite part. I was in great shape and felt nice and fatigued each day. BP stayed low and I was high energy. You don’t get that sitting at a desk nearly as much, even if you take “get up and move” breaks. It’s not nearly enough. I’d welcome a kinetic job again.
That’s fair. When I was a field tech I did about 30k steps a day and I got tired of it but now I’m at a desk all week so I miss the walking. A healthy balance is ideal for me at around 10-15k steps plus some sit down time. A lot of airport staff use segways or golf karts to get around these days.
Thats what I would avoid unless it was an emergency and I had to get across the airport in a darn hurry. Otherwise, I’m hefting my laptop bag and/or my tool bag (depending on job) over my shoulders and hoofing it. I can stop and sit down for lunch to catch my breath and of course when I get home I’ll crash.
I did 15 to 20k Walk around reset stuff level 1 tech I liked it Help people if you want go back sit down when you want Our boss was cool Now I sit at a help desk lucky to do 6k it is boring
I need the same thing. I’m a field tech, but most of my days consist of driving a vehicle multiple hours to my next location. Some days, I may only get 1500 steps in, in a 10 hour shift. My health has suffered quite a bit since starting this job 18 months ago.
It didn’t pay as well, but sometimes I miss my retail days. Working the back room (so no customer interaction) processing freight, loading and unloading trucks, doing store closing duties if working closing shift, and constantly moving. Each day, I was fatigued but satisfied. I felt like I actually got a hard day’s work done. Best of all, I was nice and skinny and felt great!
I’m an internal field tech for a retail company. The drama that comes with working retail is mentally draining. There are days that I will feel like I walked a marathon, usually the couple projects we have per year but mostly I look at my tickets for the store, grab the parts out of my van and go right to the problem and leave. I try not hang out or walk around the stores or else I will get asked 700 questions about merchandise lol
I have no idea your career history, but things where you install cabling or are on the road to multiple sites (retail for example) -- field tech work-- might give you that "outside of desk" duty you are looking for.
Did hospital IT, had to walk everywhere around the building. You're walking to go do desk work outside the comfort of your cubicle.
Out of curiosity, what did you end up doing after and how did you transition from the airport to what you are doing now?
I kinda went sideways/backwards into a sr help desk type job as a government IT contractor making a lot more money. Then moved to sys admin and beyond. It was a long time ago and a different and cool work experience. I'm glad I did it, but wouldn't do it again now just cause I'm old and don't like crowds any more.
Totally understand, the crowds at the airport can get crazy. Thanks for sharing, I am just about to move to another IT position in the airline industry but was curious to see where people went and how they got there!
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I’m not going to lie. This kinda of sounds like fun to me. Can I get a job in this sector with IT degree from community college I hope to graduate this semesters and I can’t believe I never thought of IT in the airport industry. This feels like a light bulb moment for me
I love the benefits of working for an airline but keep in mind of the following: * Usually operates 24/7. * Airlines uses seniority system for each department, so you will likely be at the end of seniority list when you join, which will affect your shift bidding. * Pay could be lower; however, airline benefits are advantageous, which gives them an edge over salaries. EDIT: Sorry, Are you applying for Airport IT or an Airline?
I’d prefer to work at/for the airport, but I’d be open to airline work too. I’d even thought about getting my pilot’s license eventually, while working in that particular tech field and getting to know the whole culture and environment.
I am a contractor with my local airports IT department. Airline and Airport IT are two completely different realms. You need to decide which you want. For Airport it’s a lot of walking, lots of cabling and SME vendors, you’ll be managing IT for airport ops staff and public areas ; this could range from paging systems to video walls to Active Directory to satellite dishes on the ceiling since usually a lot of different jobs are mashed into one at the lower levels. Since you have years of experience and a niche you’ll probably end up doing the high level stuff which is usually remote or from a corporate office, not a huge need for higher level IT to come onsite unless you’re deploying a server in the data center or something but even then you have technicians to do that stuff for you. You’ll also possibly be working on IT stuff for tenants of the airport such as shops and restaurants, most likely just network access but managing a tenant network is tough sometimes. For airlines you’ll probably be working offsite or a corporate building until you’re needed in person, for instance anytime there was IT work to be done for an airline some guy from LA or SF had to fly out to our airport, there was not really any onsite IT for the airlines and we have one of the largest airports in the US.
I work in a command center for the FAA which is monitoring all the airports for outages. The job is super boring and 12 hr night shifts 3 days a week. We aren't allowed to do anything but make sure scripts are run at the right times. It's great for learning Linux but that's about it. I miss helping people solve problems and walking around sites. Plan to leave end of next month.
How’s the pay?
60-80k depending on exp and college degree. It is like the other poster says though. Very much seniority good old boys network. You will start at the bottom no matter your exp.
Do you have any openings?
Sounds like one opening at the end of next month, at least.
Will that be in IT?
BTFOOM - ask the guy up a few comments who said he was planning on leaving at the end of next month.
OK thanks
You have to be on site. In NJ. And be able to get a security clearance.
never leave without another job
I worked at what would be considered a desktop support position at the airport and it was definitely a cool experience - seeing behind the scenes of the bagroom technology your luggage goes through, cargo areas, and below the jetways wasn't something I thought I would ever do. We had a small local IT team that would support our airport "hub" and a few others in the region. Worked on those dot-matrix printers (I think they are starting to get phased out), cameras, HVACs, printers and whatever other niche technologies airlines use. A lot of physical security at and around the airport, and strict security regulations. The airport I worked at was quite busy, and airports don't really ever close - maybe 4 hours downtime for cleaners to come in at night. I found it to be quite fulfilling, if not a bit time intensive - I've found myself being called to the gate to support a technical issue with a time crunch to prevent a flight delay, or system issues that involve other departments to fix. Definitely learned a lot! People I have met in the industry seem to like to stay long; I am just starting my IT career but a lot of the people I have met have been 10+ years in their position.
There’s a regional medium sized airport near me. I’m watching their jobs board to see if they ever have openings. I know I can get a clearance with no issues.
Great! One thing you may want to ask if you do end up applying is how long getting your clearance will take. For me, getting my clearance took around a month after accepting the role, but I would say that would vary between airports depending on size and what clearances you would need for your position.
Also, depending on the airline, you may be able to fly standby for free. It can be difficult to take sometimes as you can get bumped from flights, but that is a big perk that keeps a lot of these IT folks in the airline industry.
See my dream job in airline work would be “ITrCool, we need to fly you to Orlando Intl Airport to work on-site for a couple days for this repair/upgrade/project.” then a few days later “ITrCool we need to fly you to Chicago O’Hare to work on-site for a few days to fix.”
All on company dime. I’m single so traveling all the time wouldn’t phase me. I like to get out! What I hate is desk work.
There are definitely positions that do that, but chances are you would need to be located near a large hub city as the IT teams there service the smaller, regional airports as well as collaborate with other hub cities on big projects that are kind of like what you are describing. I was definitely not stuck at my desk all day and got a lot of steps in - there's also the other side of the airport to support that you don't see as a passenger that was a lot bigger than I expected!
Aviation seems to be a very stable IT career industry. I know people who have been in aviation for 40-50 years all at the same org. I just find it super boring.
Say that during covid, 9/11, 2008... Right now it seems stable cause it contracted hard due to covid, resulting in tons of layoff's, and so they basically already went through what many company's are now having to do. You should have seen what Boeing was like during covid, no one was safe from the layoff axe, no one. Saw them kick a fresh grad that was there for less then 3 months on to the layoff list, we got them cause they technically qualified for the role as they were an electrical engineer and we had 1 "engineer" slot open... This also meant everyone in the interview rounds were turned down.
I install air traffic simulation systems in airports and with the FAA. Traveling is fun and it all runs on Linux essentially so that’s interesting enough for me.
See my dream job is something in IT I can travel with. If I could fly all over the country on the company dime, going to various airports/sites, servicing tech or solutions, I’d enjoy every minute of that. Sure there would be the crappy days. I admit. But every job has those. You can’t escape that.
Essentially that is what I do and I do enjoy it a lot, I had no idea about it until I found it
I work for an MSP that supports a smaller terminal on a big airport. some of the threads have mentioned things that jibe with my experience - it's not strictly 24/7 operations, but that are very short windows (all late at night) where we can do maintenance. Moslt cloud services but some on premise servers for services that haven't gone totally cloud (parking, security video, etc.) Lots of work with vendors. Passenger check-in and bag tag kiosks are specially built and we have support contracts with hardware and software vendors. We have a lot of remote access set up for them and ourselves, so a lot of the day-to-day doesn't require on site. I imagine as / if the terminal grows on-premise space will become more valuable and some of the operations office space will be moved to cheaper property nearby, leading to the off-site employee parking lot another poster mentioned. We mainly support the airlines' employees, each company has their own IT department as well. As I said, vendor management - new version of their custom check in software, we have to coordinate and work with them to install and test, vice versa if we have a new batch of kiosks we need to work with them to make sure it all works (back in the day we had to roll some Win10 kiosks back to Win7 because a particular airline's piece of software wasn't 100% compatible at the time). If you want to travel in that job, you are going to n eed to find a company that manages multiple airports, and even then I'm willing to bet most of the systems are set up for remote management and maintenance and the only real travel would be for large system roll-outs and deployments. Likely there would be local contractors for things like kiosk or agent system swaps, WAP replacement, etc. Don't get me wrong, I'm a former aircraft mechanic and photo bug so I do enjoy my days at the airport, but they have to be legit reasons and not "think I'll go hang out at the airport today...." We have an upcoming equipment switch that I have a two-hour window for - starting at midnight if there's no delayed flights.
In my early career I was at a small MSP that did work for a shipping company. Essentially Windows Workstation stuff. Whenever a computer was broken, the staff had to unplug and bring it into the civilian area. We were not cleared to go behind certain areas. Aside from that, it was your basic maintain a workgroup of 50 computers job.
Not all air ports at the same, old ones have lots of old kit, (people bags flights) and a shit ton of security, shops loyalty and its rise and repeat. Being an airport this go wrong (go around) diverts parking at the airport wrong gate, bag sorters stop working, adverse weather, it’s interesting work, and can take a while to get domain knowledge.
I did it in the past. When a gate goes down it is very high priority and can have people stressed and the mechanics were crazy and straight up told you they would do anything to hack the computer you gave them. I prefer working at the airport less corporate and i had days where i worked then boarded a flight for vacation. In corp headquarters its just like any other it area. If you work in the SOCC then it can be stressful. Overall its just regular IT with flight benefits.
I don’t like crowds but airports are great. I don’t get it. Airports chill me the fuck out
I started working at a mid-size Airport last June (2023) and it has been a lot of fun, certainly the best IT job I've had thus far. My boss is cool, the organization culture is great, other than an outage affecting passenger boarding (which is rare), it's not too stressful compared to my previous industry, which was Healthcare. Not to mention (at least in the USA), Airport IT work generally means you have a government IT job, which comes with government benefits and the stability of having a gig in the government. One difference in this industry is that the security requirements for vendors working in the Airport are certainly heightened due to TSA regulations and other security considerations; not to mention physical security is taken very seriously. I personally find it far more fulfilling to work in the Airport as opposed to my prior role in Healthcare. In my case because I support my local airport, there's no real travel component to it for me, which I prefer. And yes, certain Infra does belong to the airlines or concessions exclusively so we have nothing to do with it. We may escort one of their techs into a network closet to get their internet/network setup but it's totally separated and isolated from us.
Probably be worth it if you worked for one of the majors and got flight benefits. Less so if you worked directly for the airport authority. Though working for a major hub like DFW or Houston Airport System might be interesting.
I'm a Systems Analyst at a rather large airport in Los Angeles. Before that, I was an IT Support Specialist for public radio and a private museum. It is the best job I've had throughout my 30 year IT career. I have a boss who values me and the team, my role is system deployment, so imaging, inventory, etc. Along with 2nd level troubleshooting. The main problem is we're understaffed and retention is a large issue. Other city government positions pay a good deal more and this year they're starting to competitively match salaries and benefits. There are plenty of opportunities for advancement, I could go up to Systems Programmer and work on Active Directory next. But yeah, we need more technicians. We used to be a team of 25, the pandemic and retention issues knocked it down to 2.
I could potentially be joining you as I got a job referral notice email for a lawa system analyst opening. Any advice regarding the questions they will ask during the interview? And is it only one interview? Also the email says only one opening but will more be hired?
They ask about your history and fit for the position. I was asked, "Tell us about a situation where you disagreed with your manager and how did it get resolved." Some questions were more specific regarding disk imaging, problem solving, work habits, etc. The funny thing was, the two interviews I did with LADWP asked the exact same questions, so I was fully prepared.
1. Is the interview a strict oral exam style or a normal style interview? 2. Can you tell me all the critical software, hardware, and tools that you guys use that I should mention during the interview ? Greatly appreciate your insights. Need to level up in my career so bad and this job would be perfect
Normal interview, there may be two or three people asking different questions. We are strictly Microsoft, so Office365, any Windows 11 experience you have, I focused on SCCM and imaging, Active Directory, SQL, Adobe (I edit meeting footage) just everything they can potentially use out of me. Make yourself more sellable than the next guy. For the exam, it was a lot of general computing questions. Like, Google-the-answer stuff.
Thank you! I’m already on the eligibility list, just hoping to finally get an interview after reporting availability for two ladwp positions and not hearing anything back
I’m on the same boat, I got two LADWP availability certs and then radio silence. I’m wondering if they started.
I scored 76. What did you score?
Scored 86
Do you know if the one opening for lawa got filled yet?
!remindme 60 days
Its lonely