All,
I am not sure if this would be in the category of marketing your services or not. If so, I sincerely apologize.

I am curious about something here and I am looking for opinions form people in the IT industry.

I am currently an IT student and also active duty military getting close to retirement. Since I do not work in the IT arena for my military job, my personal experience in the field is limited to what I read online, in books and magazines, and in class. Does anyone think it would be a good idea for a company to give someone like me some low level tasks, (in my case tasks that can be done online or via e-mail) to get someone oriented in the IT career? The company would not have to pay for this (in my case anyway). Then someone at the comapny could take a look at the work and then give advice on whether it is right or wrong or just not quite there etc...

The student (me) would get invaluable training and the company could get free work freeing up its paid employees to do other things.

Having said all of that, as time goes by, the work they give could be more important and then maybe they could even pay a little for the work. Once the student (me) has their degree, then the company would already have first hand knowledge of the work ethics of the person and their experience and then maybe hire them for a full time job.

Does any of this make sense?????

I really am interested in your opinions

Hi,
What kind of IT study are you doing? The term and courses can cover a wide range of training. If your looking for coding experience there are a number of open source projects that you could join for some experience and they look good on a CV. If your interested in network administration go door knocking around small local firms.

While studying one of my mates became a network admin/IT support guy by going around local firms checking there wireless connection. If they where running WEP he walked in and showed them how insecure they where. He built up about half a dozen small clients like that, word of mouth meant he got some larger clients as well.

When he left uni he passed the firms on to me which gave me some hands on experience.

Real word experience is worth getting if you can find it.