I'm battling with myself right now. I'mm 22 years old and have 2 years of IT experience on my hand. This includes dealing with systems on a daily basis.
My problem is education. I don't know if to get certified in as many systems as possible, or if to sacrifice a few years and get my Associates or Bachelors.
To be honest, I hate school. I think it is the best thing for you if you have the time. If you are already working in your career the last thing you want to do is go to school to write essays. On top of that there are people that graduate and can't find jobs. I think the work field is about knowing people and networking.
I interact with professionals on a daily basis and they have degrees. However, I'm a technology person and I just want to crunch my information.
I look forward to becoming a network engineer one day. Would you rely on just certifications to keep your career moving up?
Certifications will get you the job as a tech, possibly Supervisor/Manager, but if you want to move up in most companies, you need that degree. In my job, I wouldn't be able to become a Director without a Bachelors. Go for the degree if you can. Aside from the IT course you'd take, you'd take other courses to help you develop social and writing skills. I'd make the sacrifice for the degree. The dividends in the long run will make it all worth it.
High dollar certifications would be a good thing for sure..plus experience plays a major role in a hiring process. I guess it just depends on the company you work for and those requirements they ask for.
I started out with pretty much no schooling for computers, self taught..and then once I worked for some places I went through courses and certs on their dime.
IMO experience/hands on is key. I see way too many "paper certs" people in the field..yeah they passed tests by doing braindump sites...but then it comes to sitting in front of something and doing it they're as dumb as a leaf that fell off an oak tree.
I got my foot in the door at a big computer chain years ago..just in their break/fixit service department. Quickly after that I started helping out one of their senior engineers that did big projects...basically became his assistant. Doing wide area networks for towns, networks for companies, etc. After a while ..gaining experience....they started putting me through some courses, and started giving me smaller clients to have for myself.
There are TONS of IT consulting companies out there which provide VAR consulting for small to medium businesses... it's a very rapidly growing field.
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I've found that it all depends on what your goals are. if you just want to be the tech guy, then certifications and the trianing that goes with them is a good idea. if you want to get into upper management (director or higher at a company) then you'll need to have a degree, at least a bachelors.
I'd suggest you look at some of the degree programs at schools in your area. I'm enrolling in one now and thier program includes the general studies necessary for the degree, but the tech classes are actually the Microsoft and Cisco cert classes. so long as I pass my classes they provide me with vouchers for the tests and I'll end up with both a degree and certifications.
Well I was pondering the same exact thing for a while...
So what you're all saying is that if we wanted to go up into the management positions we'd need a degree but to be the tech guy you'd only need the cert?
Depends on which area of IT you wish to be in.
Department heads/management are often college degrees in business management, they're not necessarily IT propeller heads, they manage the IT staff. That's college degrees.
If you want to actually be in IT...like fiddle/build/manage/deploy stuff yourself...that's different. Those are on experience and certs.
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YeOldeStonecat wrote:
Department heads/management are often college degrees in business management, they're not necessarily IT propeller heads, they manage the IT staff. That's college degrees.
90% of those clowns don't know anything about Technology either.
So Certifrycation (chowder reference) it is!
I like to get down with the Knitty Gritty.
As Ms. Frizzle always said "Take chances, make mistakes and get messy.".
