by Matt St. Amand

Created on: February 18, 2009

In 2000, I spent an outlandish sum of money to obtain my MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) certification. It's a notoriously tough course, and from my experience, a glutted IT "genre," if you will. After the intensive 12 week course, I ultimately found a job in which I used none of my newly acquired skills. Rather than hiring into a company as the network administrator who'd be on call 24/7, Christmas and New Years inclusive, I became a technical writer who worked eight to four each day with weekends off. Far from this being a negative review of the MCSE certification or any other IT certification experience, I highly recommend that anyone eyeing technology as a employment field research what area of IT they're interested in, and then to dive into a certification course.

Why? Certification courses immerse you in IT scenarios. Most instructors come from industry - and in my experience, the older the instructor, the better - so they have a plethora of real-world experience. Textbooks paint "perfect world" scenarios, in which all PCs in a network, for instance, all use the same, current operating system and are run by attentive, observant, conscientious users. In the real-world, networks are dotted with a myriad different operating systems, hampered by hardware shortcomings and deficiencies, and users who are clueless, incompetent and devious. Not that instructors stand before a class conducting their own therapy sessions, venting their traumatic experiences in industry, but they give an accurate snapshot of what awaits IT professionals.

One of my instructors, a guy named Bill, had worked in IT before anyone had ever coined that acronym. He started with Bell Telephone in the 1960s, and by 2000, Bill had seen everything. His knowledge of the "old days" was invaluable to my understanding why current IT architecture was set up as it is. And what came through in every class were examples of the types of personalities we'd soon be dealing with in the workplace. Troubleshooting systems almost always involves dealing with people - people who are stressed-out because their workstations stopped working; people looking for someone to blame for the outage; people who are not particularly articulate when describing what they were doing just before the outage. "Nothing," is the most common reply to the question.

On a more practical level, IT certification courses teach students discipline, hone problem-solving skills, and exercise all of those atrophied study habits.

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>