Next steps advice

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Hello all

I stumbled across this forum by accident while searching for information regarding self study courses, and I have been impressed with the depth of knowledge and advice available. So I was wondering if anyone could offer some advice to me and my situation:

10 years ago I graduated with a degree in Computer Science, so by qualification I am more a software engineer than anything else. I started my first job on a helpdesk, and from there have moved to a variety of roles including 2nd line support, 3rd line support, and consultancy.

My roles in the past have also always revolved around bespoke application support, and although I have exposure to a wide range of technologies (IIS, Java, JBoss, Redhat, Oracle to name a few) I only really know them at a user level, and not to an administrator level.

I'm at the stage now where my current role is shifting more into the realms of a service designer/architect. To successfully architect solutions I really need to understand more about the constraints or benefits of certain technologies or approaches. I'm having some difficulty with this as most of my theoretical knowledge was learned 10 years ago, and I have no recent practical or theoretical experience of network or system administration. I believe this kind of knowledge would help me to make the right decisions, and also be very useful for my career going forward.

Having looked into CCENT, it would seem that the general advice is that unless I am going to be hands on with cisco equipment it would be a waste. So I am considering CompTIA Network+, do you think this would be a good choice for me on the network side? Do you think that A+ would also be of use, or would this cover a lot of the same ground as my degree some years ago where we studied computer architecture?

On the technology side, I think I would like to also follow a Microsoft route and get more familiar with IIS and Active Directory. To that end what qualification would you recommend I aim for? MCTS, or are better options available?

My knowledge at present is very broad but very general. I'd like to keep the breadth, but make the depth a little deeper

Any suggestions or advice would be gratefully received! Thanks in advance.