At what point in your IT career did you start taking certs?

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When you landed your first IT job back in 600 BC, did you take additional certs within your first year or did you just soak up the experience first? Also what certs did you walk into your first job with? I am not too far off my first year and tbh I am thinking of finding new employment after the year is up but I am wondering if I have hindered myself by focusing on getting experience and ignoring certs in my first year..? its not that I haven't been studying, believe me I watch videos most nights and do labs on the weekend but I have not worked towards any certs mainly because I do not have the knowledge to pass any exam that is deemed as relevant, the MTAs are nice and all that and I do already have one which helped me get my foot in the door, but I don't think they would really do much for my CV (Windows Server maybe the exception) at this point, and MCSA is out of league.

 

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There's no reason you can't do an MCSA. I see a few people on here saying that getting higher level certs should only be used to back up experience on the technology, but I personally disagree with that. If I want to learn something, I'm not going to wait for someone to tell me I'm allowed to learn it. I want to soak up as much beneficial knowledge as possible. I don't expect to get given a 60k a year admin job doing crazy high level stuff, but I do believe that having knowledge will help me get into a either a junior sysadmin job, a junior networking job, or somewhere where I can have a bit of control over new projects and the environment. As a matter of fact, I've been allowed a lot more responsibility in my current job because I've demonstrated that I understand certain things that I've learned from studying.

Yeah, nothing beats experience. Because nothing beats seeing things go crazy in a production environment with hundreds/thousands of users. Those things aren't replicable in a lab, but in my humble opinion I think you may as well get certs even if you're not using the technology. Just don't lie in your interview about it.

I'd also like to stress that I completely respect differing opinions on that, as I am still relatively new to the field.

 

Definitely consider a client O/S MCSA to go alongside your existing helpdesk experience. It'll expand your knowledge and teach you things you didn't know previously - sometimes it'll teach you stuff you won't need to know, and sometimes it'll teach you useful stuff that you'll start using regularly.

And to answer the query: I studied for the A+ before I got my first I.T job proper, then I think I got lazy and rested on my laurels too much in my first year of experience, and got my first Windows 7 cert (70-680) after about 17 months in my first job.

 

Taking certs was the beginning of my career. When I started my first job i think I had A+ and N+ then from there got some Microsoft and went on from there.
The certs can also help you get experience both by being given the chance to progress at work and also by gaining a better understanding of what you are currently doing at work and even ways to improve what is being done, you will probably find a lot of what is being done a certain way is being done that way because "that is the way its always done" or "it was like that when I started" by study you may discover better ways to do something.

 

Got my first job with my comp sci degree.

Took my first cert after working 7 years full-time as a programmer.

At that point I'd been self studying for 10+ years without taking cert exams or paying a cert vendor.

You don't need to pay people and take exams to learn stuff folks.

 

I think that is the key if you just want to learn then once you have learnt the subject then you have completed what you set out to do(although there is question of how do you confirm you have really understood and learnt it), I would also say if you are looking to learn a subject but not take the cert there is probably better and cheaper learning material then using material created just for an exam.

I think the majority of people learn the subject to gain a qualification which they can then use to prove they have learnt the subject and help them in interviews career progression etc.

 

99, I would have been in primary school then

 

First IT job 1995, first cert about 2002. Successful projects completed is proof in itself, generally a programs not complete unless it works, its its own proof of understanding the material, if you didn't learn it you wont be able to create a working program.

There are a ton people out there with certs that don't understand anything. So they don't constitute proof.

 

I did my first exam (MCP NT4 Workstation) before I started looking for IT work, but I was still at school I think.

Got an IT job and was quite lucky to get stuck into some networking projects straight away and did Network+ and CCNA after a year or so. Then I got involved in a reasonable size multi-domain NT4 design/migration to Active Directory and subsequent management of it. I learnt a lot in the process so I started taking the Windows 2000 exams. It was probably another 3-4 years or so before I got my MCSE in Windows 2000.

I had changed jobs by then as well. I'm sure the certifications had some bearing on getting an interview, but I'd like to think the job offer was based more on the experience I had, the projects I had on my CV and how I could talk through what I had done.

Dave

 

Now! and I'm nearly 10 years in