How to make it in the IT?

Lots of questions, lots of answers. It depends. I know that sounds like a weaselly answer, but it's true.

One of the main thing it depends on is which type of business you want to get into. Sure, pretty much all businesses use IT, but you can really carve out a niche for yourself by getting into one area and sticking with it. Let's say, for example, that you are interested in developing for financial services companies. This means a lot of online banking and trading systems, all sorts of calculation systems and the like. Like voice recognition? Then you'll be working with SCLITE (the government developed it, it's open source, Google it), working on recognition and often it's a game of inches in terms of improving speech recognition. Want to work in hardware? The software development life cycle?

What I've found is that, inevitably, everyone starts to specialize in some way or another. This is also how you get and keep a network. If you're known in the banking field, you'll find it easier to find more banking jobs, rather than branching off into a job in video game development. It's not impossible to jump industries, but it can be difficult.

Once you've got an idea of an industry you want to concentrate on (and it may take you a few jobs to really know that, so don't panic if you don't know this right away), concentrate on the types of software and development methodologies that your favorite area tends to use. E. g. if you go into a very conservative industry, such as insurance, they're probably going to use the waterfall development method more often than anything else. Agile developmental methodologies will probably terrify management. And if you're okay with that, then go into insurance.

Another thing, at least what I've done, is I look at things like the top companies to work for in my geographic area. What do they have in common? Where I come from, there's a lot of defense work but I don't have clearance so it's useless for me to concentrate in those areas, at least at this point in my career. See what I mean?