Thinking about becoming an IT professional

lengend876

im kind of new to the IT world I'm thinking about going to school to study it i would like to know what kind of cources should i study and certifications how important do they they play in job searching.

Jon_Cisco

You have found a great site and if you spend a little time reading what has already been posted you will see there is lots of information and helpful people here.

What interest do you have? Why are you considering school? In order to provide useful feedback we need a little more of a back story.

With that said a lot of people start off with A+ certification to get a feet wet.

Good Luck!

SixtyCycle

Go for it! Lots of resource in this forum, you just need to dig in.

SteveFT

I do not regret starting with the A+, Net+, and Security+. You might consider holding off on school until after you are hired (depending on your age). If you are 18-20 years old and you can get the loans, then school might be worth it now. Otherwise, try to get hired and have someone else pay for it.

lengend876

I just graduated from college with an associates and i have been trying to figure out what i wanted to do for my bachelors,i have always spent huge amounts of hours on the computer. Always reading about little bits and pieces of information so i could be computer literate. I have never really seriously considering becoming an it professional until now because i used to hate math but after college i realized that if i just applied myself i can master it. Now I'm not scared anymore the only thing is i didn't want to waste my time and go to college when i can learn just fine online or start sooner I'm worried about the cost of the test and how i can get appropriate study material so i can take the a+ certification.i am interested in programming ,hacking and security. i would like to also learn about the cloud and virtualization I'm not really sure what other aspect are out there to learn.

W Stewart

That's a lot to learn. I'd recommend starting off with your A+ and then applying to WGU. It's an on-line school and you'll pick up other certifications while completing your degree. They have a security specific degree that has a few programming classes as well.

Virtualization is something you'd probably have to pick up on your own. It's not really that complicated but in order to really understand the concepts you'll need to have an understanding of a lot of other components in an IT infrastructure such as storage and load balancing. I'd recommend tackling it after you've already got a little work experience.

The best piece of advice I can give you is to keep on learning and not to stay in the low-level roles for too long. Get your foot in the door and then get out as soon as you can into a more advanced role. Small businesses are great for getting exposure to a lot of different sides of IT since they'll probably have you supporting just about everything. They probably won't pay as well as large companies so get into a small business early on in your career to learn something and then move on.

Nemowolf

Since you don't have a strong foundation in the technical, start with the A+.

Deathmage

I Concur start with A+

lengend876

thanks guys

Nemowolf

Something to keep in mind is that "IT Professional" is about as vague a concept as joining "the military" as it doesn't give specifics as to what you do in IT.

Keeping with the analogy of joining the military, it doesn't specify if your joining Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force and any of the sub-sets of things like Military Policy, Quartermasters, Clergy, Finance, etc. Likewise you can go down the CIS/Software Programming path, Engineering/Building from the ground up, Networking, Technical Support, Management, Databases, etc etc etc … There are literally endless possible paths as each individual here on the forums can share their own story and no two will be identical.

Quick background for example: I have an associates degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing, a long background in retail ending with a six month stint in the Geek Squad and got lucky with a corporate Help Desk job that started me down the path of doing phone support for the next seven years. I now work for a local government agency doing a bit of everything and working from the bottom again. It wasn't until six or seven years in that i started my WGU path for a bachelors in IT.

In the nearly decade of doing this work, I have changed my mind on what I wanted to do career wise but have found that Business Admin and Project Management is probably where I will end up focusing my time to end up in a Management role.