Advice

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Hello all,

I currently work within a Recruitment Agency doing IT support and have been for the last five years, in all honesty it's kind of easy as any problems we can't deal with get sent to our MSP's for them to resolve.

I obviously need some more experience if I am to stand out in this market, doing CCNA course at local college spread over two years but thinking of also doing some self study and doing the MCSA, but not sure if it's worth doing the Server versions (although that's eventually what I would like to do) as most of our queries are Desktop based. However I do cover Server in it's most basic form for example - Creating Users on Active Directory, Adding Mailboxes to Exchange etc..

What's your thoughts guys?

Many Thanks

 

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Hi Adam,

It depends on what career path you would like to go down:

Networking - Routing & Switching or Security Firewalls etc
CCNA, CCNP, JNCIA, FNCIA

Server - AD Infrastructure, Virtualization or Messaging Specialist
MCSA MCSE MCP

Its good to cover all the technology as possible, get a good foundation of how everything ties together.
Once you have good solid foundation then you might want to think about specializing within certain field

The best way to learn how something works is to build your own lab at home, setup an exchange server or a firewall.
You build your lab similar to a work scenario so you can understand how things work, so when a ticket comes in you may already know the fix or know how to troubleshoot it.

 

Hello,

A good source of information for MS is their certification roadmap, this as you'd probably guess gives a very clear view of the pathway from entry level (MTA) to MCSE / MCSD. This might help you frame the route you want to take if Microsoft is your chosen route.

From the brief information in your post it looks like you've spent a lot of time dealing with Desktop support, so it might be prudent to get a desktop cert under your belt initially 70-680, 687, 688 etc to help underpin what you've already done. You have a little bit of server experience, but if you can, I would suggest getting a bit more hands on with solving server issues before attempting the MCSA Windows Server exams 411, 412 as some of the concepts will be foreign to you at the moment. You might however want to look over the contents of the 410.

Try speaking to your current company about handling some of the server issues as they come up or offer to do some shadowing of the MSPs. This will give you wider server exposure and get you some hands-on knowledge that can then aid you getting your server certs if that is what you want to do.

The CCNA is a good cert, but only relevant if you're working with Cisco network
infrastructure. In my view, if you have zero interaction with managing Cisco network infrastructure today you may want to consider the Network+ exam as an alternative to give you the grounding in Networking. Then decide whether you want to be a Network engineer which may lead you to take Juniper, HP, Cisco etc certs

Hope that helps.

Crazy Horse

 

From experience I would say the best way is to focus on one thing an be good at it. If you go Servers then Cisco certs will help you too little considering how much you invest in studying for them. I would advice- study what you work with on a regular basis.
If you need a cert for some job requirements just go with dumps .