I'd like to hear from anyone who's studied a course by CompTIA, Cisco, Microsoft and any other course provider. Did you gain anything useful from them? Where did you start? I'd like to venture down the IT helpdesk/network and/or database administration route and I'd like to know where to start? I'm seriously considering going for the CompTIA A+ certification first and then maybe going for CCENT then CCNA and perhaps CCNP afterwards. Thoughts? Maybe I've skipped over some qualifications and perhaps it depends if I would specialise with a certain provider. I know the preferred route is often to do a Computer Science or similar degree but I'd rather something more flexible and 'bitesize' that I can study in my own time.
Computer Science is boring and mostly irelivent to employers. CompTia is a decent start point, As is the microsoft ones, Cisco is relivent to a few things only and you would be wise to find out if its a route you wish to head before doing it. Computer Degrees are not all that relivent in the real world as employers are looking for people with relivent experience than some fresh out of uni kid. The company I work for do recruitment from time to time and essential stuff is, Microsoft, .net,Comptia, Showing ability to build and manage server hardware ( tested at interview) Comptia. Degree is bottom of our list of things that we check for in recruitment, In the North East at least we are not alone in this recruitment method.
That's encouraging to hear! Well I found this on the CompTIA site: Career road map The database and network administration makes use of some Cisco qualifications like the CCNA cert. As you say though, they have a more limited appeal perhaps but nonetheless are useful. Do you have any qualifications in I.T?
I got mine from the Zenos Academy (Now Pearsson in Practice or something..) It was a good step in the door as I got my A+, N+, MCDST, Lvl 3 NVQ in IT and a couple of other things I don't remember. My first couple of jobs were as a phone monkey (not working from a script but not exactly hard fixes). Now I'm a site admin doing everything... I think I just interview well. But basically I think I was trying to say... Get your low level entry qualifications and experience can help you get to where you want to go. Obviously things like CCNA will really help grease the wheels.
What's your end ideal job goal? What sort of experience do you have already? I'd personally skip Comptia if you've got the relevant experience. Your end goal will decide the path you take so if you want networking go CCENT then CCNA, if you want helldesk then go for the Microsoft route Feel free to fire over any questions you have, I've done dousens of these exams & manage all the certification programs for the engineers at work
Thanks guys for your input, much appreciated. That's the thing I have little industry experience (beyond a short work experience stint) just 'aptitude'. Well personally whichever one I can get into first so either help desk or networking. I'm definitely starting with CompTIA A+ as it's a gateway to other qualifications. I'm looking now at jobs to see what they ask for but they insist on "experienced" applicants. Regarding the exams you've done and the qualifications/certifications there of. Do they expire after time and you have to renew them through updated exams/courses? I'm looking to move to London in January, so saving up money now. The intention of which in part is to find a better job and career prospects. One last question. To do various qualifications like the Microsoft ones, can it be done without needing to spend hundreds and even thousands of pounds?
Most MS & Cisco certs need renewing every 3 years (MS changed this recently). However you'll find that you'll be upgrading certs when new things are released anyway. Exams are about £100 each or so. You can find plenty of training materials online to do them without spending too much. I usually have a CBT Nuggets subscription (about $1200 a year) which gives me access to every training course they do, read the books & do the labs on top and you'll be OK
I've done CCNA 1 & 2 through my school and honestly they're a piece of cake. Its just general hardware questions usually with a bit of software for good measure. I would say it would take maybe a month or two to do if you have the same resources I had (some online textbook).
Experence trumps qualifications in most cases. A+ is definatly a good place to start and can probably be passes with a text book and a bit of technical knowledge (I've never done this so one so this is only what I've heard) MCP there are a couple of entry exams that can be done pretty easily again with a good text book and a bit of effort, CCNA is much more technical have a look for evening classes at a local college these will be much less expensive then intensive training courses. (although I'll admit is been 10 years since I did my MCSE and about 5 since I did the CCNA training (although I never took the exam and am kicking myself that I didn't bother). Try and find a job the experence will probably do you as much good as the basic qualifications and if your lucky your empolyer may even pay for you to take the exams!
Microsoft are doing free exam resits a.k.a. second shot http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/second-shot.aspx
I'm a network/datacentre architect ... my qualifications are precisely zero. At one point I held CCNA, but frankly the content of the course is nothing like I actually do and use in daily work life that I just let it expire. Ditto the CCNP which I started and ultimately abandoned. Speaking as someone who has been a line manager and recruited engineers for the past three years, I have the following advice about how to kick start your career in IT. Option 1 - You wanna play with desktops, servers, Microsoft-y applications Ignore A+ if you've ever built your own PC. Instead, do the Microsoft Windows 7 certification. Here's why: you'll be working for a Microsoft partner in all likelihood, and they will REQUIRE a certain number of staff to hold certifications at a given level, and this is one of those. You will learn much the same material but you'll have a certification that people actually care about, and due to the fact that you can immediately count towards their partnership status it is a huge point in your favour. The A+ is not a gateway certification, its a waste of your time, and I would (and have) ignore it on a CV over a similar CV with the Microsoft certification. Option 2 - You wanna play with network equipment Bit tougher. Even with a CCNA I wouldn't hire you without practical experience. You log onto a desktop, you break it, that's one desktop down, and there's usually spares. You log onto a switch, you break it, that's potentially a complete network outage, which could require a site visit to resolve. I got into networking by working for an ISP on their technical service desk and working up. I didn't require a CCNA to get the job, but at least a CCENT would catch their attention, and get you working with Cisco practically. An alternative you may want to consider is Juniper certifications. They've got some good coursework on their website which is totally free, unlike anything for Cisco which you'd have to pay for. The certifications then just cost an exam. Its not the same vendor, so you won't suddenly be able to configure Cisco devices, but you'll still learn the technologies involved which are pretty universal. You'll also hit a brick wall on this career path, eventually, if you don't pick up some deeper application knowledge. You can't design and deliver networks if you don't understand the applications running atop it, nor can you fix things. For example, if you don't understand why you can't NAT SIP you might assume you can, and then the shiny new datacentre you built won't work because you decided to NAT SIP and its a key requirement that SIP works. (I didn't do this, but had I done this, the multi-million pound investment our company just made would've been a bit broken, and I would've been in a lot of trouble.) Option 3 - You wanna be a Linux sysadmin Don't know much about this but its fairly hardcore. RedHat certified engineer would be a door opener and you'd have to at least dual boot or frankly give up Windows for a while and force yourself to make things work. It can be messy and painful as frankly the documentation isn't up to par for anything and you'll find yourself reading forums, blogs, trying multiple things until you find the one thing that actually fixes your particular problem and you'll end up commenting on said forum/blog to help the next person along fix it too. I've done this many a time!!
Zoon, you're an absolute champ. I'm going to be digesting that advice for the next couple of days at least - thank you
And an alternative to this would be the Fortinet certifications, which I think might be a bit more costly than the Juniper ones but they are a similar bag. I'm in a similar position to Zoon, just not as high up the ladder where my experience far outweighs my current line of certs. I do have a couple, but nothing to write home about. I prefer to do network/infrastructure stuff these days, and I do a lot of Linux sysadmin, unfortunately I also still do a lot of desktop support and windows server admin but hopefully that's going to change soon enough. (and for those who want to know, you can't NAT SIP due to RTP hehe)
I'd say you can NAT SIP, as long as you use a SIP protocol aware firewall. Juniper has the SIP ALG, Check Point has the SIP protocol detection, I'm sure there are others. This will modify not only the IP header information, but also the SIP application data, changing the IP addresses and ports within the SIP data itself, and then set up listeners on the correct ports that the RTP stream will use, based on the data its read. I'm not saying it always works, and it can be a pain to implement, but it can be done with the correct tools. I'm a network / security engineer, experience and certs in Check Point, Juniper, Cisco, Fortinet, plus a whole heap of other web-filter type products... Mike
Good post Zoon, have some rep. If you go the MS path be aware they've changed their exams recently so they actually test your knowledge rather than a bunch of multiple choice questions so you need more than a quick skim of a book and some training videos to pass them. & as everybody else is doing it: I'm a solutions architect designing infrastructure solutions, certs include MCP, MCSA:Messaging, MCSA, MCSE, MCTS, MCITP: (server + enterprise admin) & CCNA
Glad I could give useful input. We are going to be recruiting service desk techs and microsofty engineers in the north Bristol area over the next six to nine months so if anyone is in the area, or flexible to relocate, I can promise an introduction to the appropriate line manager. It seems that saspro and I do the same type of job albeit approaching from the opposite direction. I'm responsible for the architecture, roadmap, and design of data centre physical and logical layouts, cabling, connectivity, and network equipment ending at the Virtual NIC layer on HyperV and VMware hosts. I agree that with the correct firewall or gateway device that you can NAT SIP traffic with vendors that support doing so. I said that you cannot because the vendor we are using explicitly does not support it if you do it, and we are designing a vendor best practice supported system, to cover our arses and make support and deployment easier The reason you cannot NAT SIP is not due to RTP per se, it's because within the SIP packet IP addresses are hard coded and without some kind of application proxy to fix the packets appropriately they will be dropped by the SIP endpoint for being misaddressed. Of course, STUN sorts out Media streams, and that is explicitly made to traverse NAT.
I work as a Linux Sys Admin Get experience, not certs. Only cert i have is ITIL Foundation because my employer puts all the guys on it. They all need renewed so quickly at high costs its not worth it. I have looked at a couple of SUSE/RedHat certs but decided against it. Like zoon says drop the windows and get yourself a Linux distro on your PC if that’s where you want to go. I actually started with OSX and thought I quite like this command line stuff and wanted a little more management over my applications. Ended up migrating over to Linux(OpenSUSE + KDE). Playing with it in your own time is the best way, then try and get a job where they will let you play with it in work time These certs will cost you a fortune when you could probably get more experience using it yourself. One suggestion I will make if your struggling for get a door into IT to gain experience. Get on a service desk! There are 3 types of people on the service desk, those who are there for a job and don’t care. Those who enjoy it! And those who are learning to get off service desk! Be proactive and you might be able to progress in that company off the service desk to another role more orientated to what you want. 2 of my uni mates did just that. Food for thought
Been a while... but a bit of an update.. Thank you very much all for your contributions, very much appreciated! Great post as well Zoon. Apologies for the late reply but my life's quite different from when I last posted: I moved from Cardiff to London in late January on a transfer in Sainsbury's (12 years, you get a lot less for manslaughter) as I decided to get a better career and into IT that London was the place to be. It's something I had planned since 2011. Anyway, had a **** day on my second day in work here when I decided to look for IT jobs (IT Job Board). I found a job advertising for a trainee support desk job and applied for it, a few weeks later and I got the job. It was a bit of a fluke as it was for a fluent Welsh speaking job (pretty much the only requirement) but still, I take what I can get. The company's a small business but with some big contracts, including with the Welsh government running their learning platform for them. So I found a way in, admittedly in the most unlikeliest fashion! As Zoon correctly stated, they use Microsoft applications so I should receive training including Microsoft certifications down the line. I still would like to get CCNA at some point and other qualifications later on. Any suggestions as to what I should think about doing/studying etc?
Look at doing the MCSA 2012. Maybe some Exchange & SQL training if you can. If you're in London & need any help with training etc give me a shout
