Good Place to Ask Questions! (Advancing my Career)
As the topic suggests, I assume this is a great place to ask the questions I seem stuck on. I'm a technician by trade, but tech enthusiast at heart. My passion is technology, always has been, started at an early age. I've never went to school for it, for anything really. Self taught myself much of my foundation - learning excelled and grew from various jobs I managed to obtain, starting at Apple. I consider myself very knowledgeable as a break/fix technician. This applies to Desktop/Laptops, Mac OS X/Windows. I've always wanted to learn more, further my career and knowledge, I've just never really knew what the next step was.
The one thing that really interests me is networking. The first time I walked into my first enterprise server room, I was mesmerized and lost. Switches, routers, hubs, server racks, CAT5/6 wires galore. These concepts were never available for me to learn simply because the way I learned wouldn't allow it. I learn from doing, I learn off of people I trust - not very traditional, it's part of the reason I never went to school. Being in the break/fix world, I stayed close to the consumers, the average users who would never need me to go deploy an infrastructure that was secure and operationally sound. But I want to. I know I am capable. I know I can push myself to be great. My customer service skills outshine most, and I'm not saying that to brag. They've brought me to a job where I make $80,000 a year. I don't care about money, if I did, I'd go down this road I'm traveling now and be financially sound. I care about learning more, I have this desire to not stop here. I will not be happy unless I continue.
So the inevitable questions to follow - Where do I go from here? CompTIA A+ and Network+ seems like a good idea, just to start off on a sound foot, but do I really need to start there? Is it a wise choice? How do I determine if this is the right step forward? I know in the near future I want to be actively pursuing my CISCO certifications. I've even thought about RedHat certs because I'm vaguely comfortable with Linux just from my knowledge of Mac OS X. It all interests me. I'm just lost. I'm afraid to make the wrong costly mistake. I don't want to jump into something that is over my head, but I don't want to be bored by material I already understand. Please don't assume anything in your answers, ask me questions. I appreciate any help I can get on the subject.
