you work in IT, right? I know some others here do as well..

anyway, I got laid off in late november from working at a major insurance company for nearly 5 years. i wasn't a huge fan of the corporate america shit and am heavily considering a career change. through the workforce investment act, i may qualify (i'm pretty sure I do) for a $5000 grant for IT training courses. i'm thinking about getting microsoft certified, etc. i've also got a degree, so I'm hoping that helps me out a little bit.
did you have to go through this training, and would you recommend going into the field?

holy cow! I didn't know you were laid off.
Both congrats and sorry.

what did you do there?

he got laid off, didn't you read?

underwriting. sucked balls. only cool thing was that we would always get submissions for bars/venues in the area that had shows. mosh pits aren't liked at all in the insurance industry.

Forget A+, its useless because you already know everything it teaches. Get your CCNA or MCIT Cert or both. I would definitely recommend going into this field aril. Great pay, great companies, great co workers. I have seriously never met another systems administrator or IT nerd I couldn't get along with. Anyways IT personnel are always in demand and sometimes the positions can be pretty cake. I literally just got offered yesterday a job for a managed hosting and infrastructure company. 3rd shift, work from home, all i would do is monitor our customers servers and starting pay is $22/hour.

tl;dr: yes get your ccna or mcit or both with that grant.

I had to get A+ to get into the place Im at now, but if you have 5 years experience then yea, get the MCITP at least. Good luck, it's a bitch

even if A+ is basic stuff, I don't care. I wouldn't mind starting out getting A+ certified if it's all basic stuff. Maybe later on i'll get the CCNA or MCIT, but I think I'm going to start with the A+ if I choose to go down this route

A+ is good for Helpdesk Technician and Desktop Support, which wouldn't be a bad thing to get certified for. again, I'm not even sure if I'd want to do this for a long time, but even getting an A+ would look good on a resume

Yeah, you have a bachelors, go for the certs. I think A+ is sort of obsolete. You would want to be doing more engineering and less helpdesk, I would start with the Cisco cert. 5 years experience and you can go for a CISSP which is potentially big money, I'm going for that one of these days. Network security specialists will always have a job somewhere.

reim do you have a CCNA?

is the job market dying out for people with A+ certs? and also, CCNA is just cisco networking, right? how difficult is the training? i don't want to be training for months.. if I decide to do this I'm putting 2 months in tops

helpdesk sucks balls dude.

A+ is PC hardware troubleshooting, so far as knowing what the interrupt request number is for a PCI card. I haven't heard "IRQ" muttered by anyone for 10 years. You want to avoid working helpdesk/enduser support anyway possible. And yes CCNA is just Cisco networking but it's a skillset for every infrastructure and 90% of infrastructures are Cisco (pulling that number out of my ass).

just talked to the training center in rhode island. girl told me that cisco prefers if someone has some "real world" cisco experience before going into the CCNA training

I'm in the process of getting it. Currently I just have the MCITP and MCSA. I have enough hands on experience dealing with networking/routers/switches/firewalls that I don't really need the CCNA to land or perform in a normal SA position but I want to get it anyways. Looks good on a resume. This kind of plays into another weird quirk with IT that aril should know about. Every business is different but usually you will end up in one of two different IT teams. There are teams where everyone basically does everything under the sun. My favorite type. You get your hands dirty in a lot of stuff and you gain a lot of experience troubleshooting a lot of different issues. Then you have the "corporate" team. This IT team has a set job for each individual. Theres the network guy, the monitoring guy, the patching guy, the server technician/install guy etc etc. While a job is a job I really don't like those types of positions because shit can get real boring real quick plus sometimes people can get all anal if you try to help them do their job.

This is what you do. Get your MCITP certification. You get all of the learning material so as long as you study, you can pass it. Get yourself a Windows Server 2003/2007, Exchange Server 2003/2007/2010 and Acitve Directory books(preferrably from O'Reilly). After you get your cert and study said reading material you're ready to land your first entry level IT position. Try to find yourself a position in a small-medium sized business that is looking to take on someone to help out their only one IT admin. Believe me you'd be surprised how many growing businesses out there only have one IT guy that is absolutely swamped with shit to do and need the help. Even if its just installing OS's onto servers for the guy you are still gaining experience. You will eventually be given more responsibilities. Get your hands on server administration/monitoring/installing/troubleshooting experience and move on from there. From there on you can either move up the ladder in the company or move on to a bigger and better position somewhere else.

how long does it take to get the MCITP certification? I need a job soon. I dont want to be without a job until summer. The A+ training would only take 1.5-2.5 months. Does it take that long for MCITP?

However long you want it to take. The Microsoft prep material offered is super expensive but there are other options(like pirating) or you can buy:

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=M...TaLKNKLk0gH34ZWHCQ&ved=0CGkQ8wIwAw#

and

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=M...TaLKNKLk0gH34ZWHCQ&ved=0CFoQ8wIwAA#


Studying both of those kits will get you ready to take an exam to get you certified as MCITP: Server Administrator

You can find free practice exams on the web so you'll get a good idea after studying what type of questions will be asked. Once you feel ready, and for the love of god only take the test when you're ready, just find a place thats offering the test and take it.

sorry for all these questions, but how many tests does the MCITP take?

there's two (I think) for A+

3 exams for the server administrator. which out of all them is the one you want to get first. it will give you the foundation to land an IT job. then you can work on getting other certs.

Pretty sure A+ can be taken in either 1 or 2 parts. Same for CCNA (I think u can even split it up into 3 or 4 parts maybe?) I took part 1 of the CCNA and just barely failed it but I'm bad at networking. Half of the questions were subnetting. I know some people are really good at subnetting an IP real quick in their head. I just could never get the hang of it. And it's a joke. I bet everyone's using calculators now anyway.

I've never bothered getting my A+ and it seems most jobs I'm applying for now all "suggest" certifications....but really look more at real world experience.

Yea education and certifications are nice, some say preferred but never necessary in IT if you have the hands on experience. None and I repeat none of that shit will teach you how to get a server out of a boot loop or explain how to efficiently fix a currupted database. Also with networking, while some places love to have a CCNA around as long as you know basic networking, firewalls and know how to create a vlan in a datacenter/noc environment you'll be all set.

I've been working in IT for about 6 years now. I've had some schweet jobs and my resume looks awesome, but one thing I've never done is get certified. I've read all 4 core exam guides for MCSE as well as a CCNA book cover to cover. Stupidly, I never took the tests. My goal right now is to certify what I already know. I thought about taking those MCSE exams (they're not slated to be retired any time soon) and then upgrade to MCITP: Enterprise Administrator with 2 tests, but that's like 9 tests total. I decided to say fuck that and just get my MCITP:EA. Only 5 tests. Once I do what I SHOULD have done before, I'll do some research and see what I want to study up on next. It will have to be something I obviously enjoy and makes sense with where I want to go on the ol' career path... possibly some VMware or Citrix virtualization shizzle. I'll figure that out later and weigh all the options.

Anyway.. here's what MCITP certs are out there right now:

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcitp.aspx#tab2

As you can see there's quite a few, and some only require a couple tests. As for how long it takes... I was able to read through a single MCSE exam guide in about 4 or 5 weeks. You may be able to do the same. I wish I could have back that kind of pace. It's hard right now since my boss is working me like a dog and draining my fucking soul.

I love that shit. I rarely see it now though. The only places I've ever seen use VLSM's are ISPs and huge enterprises. I still think it's great stuff to know though. And of course it looks great on a resume.

The rick click button on my Mac mouse is missing.

Delete your system32 folder.

all the certs expire like every two years and depending on where you work they may or may not pay for them...Not sure if they are ever worth it . . the sys admin i work with (im an IT assistant) has been working in IT for 30 something years and has never been certified or educated.

also that A+ exam is a load of shit $200 per part.

any place that absolutely requires "certs" you probably don't want to work for.

Agreed with Mr. Marsh there -- certs are generally useless and if a job requires it, more than likely they are not going to hire anyone worth their salt. They are resume fillers and generally if I see a resume that has more certs than actual experience, into the circular file it goes).

Generally I would think a cert would open the door for more work in that category. IE: If you're new to Exchange and have little to no Exchange experience, you're not going to get hired as an Exchange engineer unless you at least have some sort of cert proving your expertise.

As Mr. Reimroc said above, smaller companies may hire a jack-of-all-trades where you may be able to dabble with and learn things you're not necessarily an expert with. However, big companies often look for a guy that will perform 1 task. IE: Exchange administrator. In that case, I don't think certs are bad if you're looking to break into a new aspect of your career.

I also agree that tons of certs in different things with no experience is dumb. More so for seasoned "professionals". I would think you'd want to get a cert, then work a related job. Boom, cert + experience.

so what's the consensus? Cert or no cert?

If work will pay for it and you actually have experience in your object of certfication, go for it.

If you are paying for it and you actually have experience in your object of certification, go for it, but choose what you go for very carefully.

if work will pay for it and it will up your pay then yes but if not..no

He doesn't really have IT experience so I would say go for it just to get his foot in the door. Then he can gain the hands on XP and be all set.

In your case, definitely go with certs. The Microsoft Press official exam guide books you should buy to study for Microsoft certs are nice and easy to follow too.

The A+ is two parts. 701 is what everyone takes, then there is 702 which is a general knowledge test. there are specialized tests for help desk, bench tech, etc. It seems like most people take 702.

It's probably different back there, but out here people are still wanting support for Windows 90 fucking 8, 2000/ME, so A+ makes sense here. I know that got my foot in the door. And the great part about my job and many others is they'll pay for me to get MCITP, or CCNA or any other cert I or they want me to have.

So in short, A+ may get your foot in the door to a place who will offer to pay for your certs

My fucking CCNA just expired, ugh. Taking it again this year. Took me about 1 month to study for it almost everyday, but I had hands on experienced with routers all day at that time. Probably would take about 2 months to study for without that experience just to go through the whole book and some extra practice questions and get good at submitting (memorize you power of 2's very well).

You can take the test in two parts or all in one go. I took it in one go which seemed shorter. Cisco just added additional exams through that you can take after your CCNA like CCNA Voice or CCNA Wireless which are much easier than the CCNP level certs.

But anyways, certs are good. Higher level certs are even better than grad schooling for IT unless you're going into teaching or something. And I would try to look at helpdesk as more of entry level. I couldnt do that for more than like a year without wanting to murder everyone.

Yeah Jim, best advice I can give is stat away from helldesk.