New, scared but happy!

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Hi there you lovely helpful people!

I have recently lost a business that I ran for 15 years very successfully (My Business Partner decided that He would rather live in America and run the entire business from there alone and promptly robbed me blind!).

My role within the business basically kept me at the office for most of my time (The nature of the business was specialised Canine Protection and detection, not IT related at all!). During the time spent there I looked after our pretty small computing needs which led me to a whole lot of useless, self-taught nonsense with no proof of my (meagre) skills and so......

I'm setting out from scratch, my future lies somewhere within the IT Industry but I am still unsure of where exactly within it. I have no formal computing certification of any kind but after reading through a few posts, I believe that the A+ Exam is where I need to be headed first.

I'm 36 years old, I have enough savings to keep me going for, maybe, six months and ideally I would love to be able to start learning in the field within that time scale. Is that at all feasible?? Any Newbie advice AT ALL would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance to everyone and thanks to the developers of this site for giving those who want to help the opportunity to do so

 

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Welcome to CF!

Sorry to hear about your past, but put that behind you and move on. You're in IT now!

You're spot on in realising that the A+ is the place to start. It will give you many of the fundamental skills that are needed in any area of IT.

Six months is a feasible target to aim for in completing the A+, but it may take you longer, or even less time depending on how well you pick things up. You can even try and get clarification from this lot if you're struggling with some of the topics.

Once again, welcome.

 

Greetings

What Si said

Grab yourself a book,an old PC to break and fix again and away you go.

A+ will give you the ideal foundations upon which to build your IT career.

Best of luck

 

Good luck - Im just starting my A+ as well.

 

Thanks for all the really quick responses!

I Feel more confident already

 

Yay!
So it's a good job you're used to being dropped in the 5h1t!


Welcome.

 

Hi, welcome aboard

Grab yourself Mike Myers All in One A+ book from Amazon and an old P3 computer from your local newspaper/ebay and you are ready to embark on the A+. From here you can go any direction you want.
There is always a great bunch on here when you want help or to give some to someone else.

All the best

Boyce

 

Greetings, jayatk9. Welcome to CertForums.

 

Hi jayatk9 - thanks for the intro. Good to have you here, and good luck

 

jayatk9, sorry to hear about your company. As ppl have already said A+ and Network+ are a good place to start. If your not planning on working as such for 6 months then personally to give you a better chance of getting a job in IT it might be a good idea to maybe do some voluntary work in IT. A lots of people do get fulltime jobs through doing this. If your studying A+ make sure you get a good book like Myers or the Sybex book which seem to be the choice of many studying A+.

 

The fact that you have had some experience working on business computers is good. That will help you grasp some of the concepts of IT from a practical perspective. For example why backups are so important, How downtime can cause a lack of productivity and that end users can be a pain in the bum

 

Hello and welcome to the forums!

 

Hi there and welcome to CF.

 

Hi and welcome to the forum.