IT Courses/Qulifications

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Hi, i spoke to a salesman from an IT training course about doing an MCSE but have since decided not to use a training company due to all the negative things i have read about them.

I am very capable on computers but have no experience in the IT industry or qulifications to prove this, this experience has prompted me to ask myself wether the MCSE is really the course i should be doing to get me into the IT industry.

Any advice would be much apprectiated.

Thx

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

If you have no professional experience or qualifications whatsoever, you might want to start out with CompTIA's A+ cert. It's an entry-level hardware and OS technician qual and may help you get jobs and gain experience as you proceed to more challenging goals.

The MCSE course of study isn't easy and takes years to complete. Even if you passed all of the exams and earned your MCSE, if you still had no practical experience, I doubt that you would get hired to administer a Windows network. In fact, with no experience, it would be doubtful you could pass all of the exams.

Most of the members here *don't* have MCSEs, in part because it takes a long time to earn them. I know that one of our members Bluerinse is an MCSE and can tell you how challenging it was to finally achieve his goal.

I'm sure some of the other members will be along to offer their opinions as well. Good luck, mate.

 

Trip is right, with no experience a paper MCSE will just cost you a lot of money, especially if it's one of these 'quick MCSE' courses that training companies are touting so aggresively.

If you want to go that direction do it in chunks, 1 exam at a time starting with the most relevant qualifications for entry level support roles - hardware and client OS exams. Do A+, then an MCP in XP pro, Network +.

Try and focus your CV on non technical experience that is relevant to office/business life, they look forthings like;- excellent timekeeping, teamwork, sense of urgency, dependable etc. You can always state that you have 'relevant experience' with computers if you don't have any certs yet.

Whatever you do steer clear of 'get your MCSE in 2 weeks then go straight into a £20k job' courses - keep your money!

Good luck!

 

thanks guys i appreciate your advice

 

Oi Trip - I'm an MCSE and it was easy!

Just kiddin' - the MCSE is VERY difficult to achieve. I was fortunate enough to get a hefty redundancy payout from a previous employer which enabled me to take an entire year out to study full time (and when I say full time, i mean it - 12 hour days were the norm for me during this period).

If I hadn't been in that enviable situation I'd still be studying now! Like most on this forum, I'd recommend you start out with thge A+ & Network+ certs first. I don't think they're particularly useful in the industry, but what they will help you with is the basic knowledge you need to understand more difficult concepts, get you close to realising the mindset required for exams and ease you into studying.

I think it all depends on what you want to get out of the industry. If you're seriously interested in pursuing IT as a career, and are looking to make decent money, the MCSE will certainly help you. However, times have changed since the late nineties, when just having the cert was enough to get you 40k a year doing, basically, sod all. Nowadays, anyone technically worth their salt would consider any MCSE with less than a year's experience was probably a braindumper. This is largely because so many companies have been burned by the paper MCSE brigade in the past few years that they now value experience so much more highly than the certification that, unless you have a solid three to four years' worth of experience behind you I'd say you were actually at a DISadvantage over someone with, say, 18 months' experience and the A+/N+

Of course, this is a generalisation. There are people out there who have 'earned' their MCSE in a ridiculously short space of time and are technically gifted enough to walk straight into a sys admin/network admin role. If you're not one of these people (and few are!), stick with the entry-level certs to get you on the road, then move onto the M$ certs later - perhaps starting with the MCDST then moving onto the MCSA/MCSE.

Good luck!