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I've got an acquaintance in her early twenties who is unhappy at her current job (customer support for Verizon) and is interested in IT because she's heard there are lots of jobs with good salaries.
She sent me a message explaining that she was considering a tech college. It's going to cost her $12k for a 46-week program, which has me concerned.
More than the college itself, though, the problem is that she's not a geek -- not by any stretch of the imagination. Not that being a nerd is a solid IT prerequisite, but in college she actually tried majoring in computer graphics technology and dropped out after only a few months.
I figure the best way to approach it is to say "listen, there are free/cheap resources out there -- read this, this, and this, and if you're still interested then you're probably capable of teaching yourself everything you need to know, so keep your $12k and start ordering books from Amazon instead".
I could use some help pointing her to some beginner resources, though. Besides having no serious IT background, part of my difficulty stems from the fact that "IT" is pretty difficult to Google.
A resource which plots backbone servers and major datacenters on a geographical map would be especially helpful. The only two half-decent (emphasis on 'half') resources we've found so far are:
http://www.colotraq.com http://www.datacentermap.com
It would be nice if there was a Google Maps mashup or something better than DataCenterMap, but apparently that is (was?) considered a part of our nation's obscurity plan: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23689-2003Jul7