OP,
I have been in a similar boat as you.<p>Back in 2013, my daughter was born and within 2 days I was laid off from my position as IT Manager at a small MSP in Dallas.<p>No college degree at the time, no savings, wife and I were not working. The one thing I did have though (fortunately) was experience in the industry - about 8 years of IT experience (dev, systems engineering, architecture, management).<p>I freaked out initially - the stress of a new kid, no money kind of ate at me. For not only was I a dad (a young one at that), but also now my family has no income (wife was on maternity leave).<p>The first thing I did was head to a local coffee shop and busted out my laptop.<p>I hadn&#x27;t edited my resume in a few years. I deleted everything and started over. I knew this crappy employer wasn&#x27;t going to dictate my families future. I also knew what I was worth.<p>I immediately got on LinkedIn and started connecting with everyone I knew&#x2F;asked for references and then started connecting with hiring managers at prospective companies.<p>I created a burner phone number (google voice number) and used this on my resume - then created a Monster, Dice and Careerbuilder accounts (to attract headhunters) and filled out those profiles entirely.<p>Having not spent a lot of time in a few years looking at salaries in different segments of IT, I spent a few hours figuring out what in the hell I wanted to do - and what would make me some $$$.<p>I found that in the Dallas&#x2F;Fort Worth area (at the time), Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and VMware were heavily searched terms by recruiters on LinkedIn and Indeed.com.. I started looking at what I could do to leverage my current knowledge&#x2F;skills and find a lucrative position.<p>After spending a few hours researching, I found that I could leverage my systems (Windows&#x2F;*Nix) administration experience and help developers deploy their code. I was pretty good with Python and was interested in learning Ruby.<p>Bingo - DevOps!!<p>I found what interested me - the best of both worlds and I started targeting my job searches&#x2F;applications towards that.<p>By the end of the day, I had a call from a local recruiting agency looking for Cloud and DevOps engineers. By the next morning I was on the phone with the hiring manager - and by the end of the day (3 phone interviews later) I had an offer in my inbox ($90K more than my last job).<p>In summary:
What you went through completely sucks. Don&#x27;t beg. Show people that you can get shit done. Do the work, be the prize.