Am I crazy?

chopsticks

Hi, it's been a while since my last post (been studying privately). Today, after chatting with my course consultant in inquiry of some courses I'm interested in, I somehow feel, from the way she speak, that even she thinks I'm crazy to take up IT Certification courses after courses. Looking at my signature, I suddenly realise that too. But, I can't help it because I'm very interested to learn all the fine and in-depth technical knowledge in them. Really, am I crazy?

scaredoftests

No, you are not crazy.

iBrokeIT

Pick a role and stick to it if you actually want to earn a return on the time and money spent studying and obtaining your certifications

I hope you also realize that a lot of those certifications expire and you will have recertify if you want to continue to claim the credential. The VCP expires in 2 years, Cisco certifications expire in 3 years ec...

kurosaki00

You are crazy, but the good type of crazy.
Good luck!

Expect

you are not crazy, however, you need to be more focused on the field you want to have expertise on.

N2IT

Certs are a like a degree, in the sense that one really well placed one of value is > a conglomerate of certs.

To answer your question, I don't think you are crazy, I do think there is a high probability you are addicted which is not healthy IMO.

markulous

If it makes you happy and you're just trying to learn, I don't see how it's a bad thing. I'd be bored if I didn't always have some type of cert/school/project going on.

dave0212

Definitely not crazy, but I would say you don't need to get all the badges. If you want to go and learn something go for it, but only get the cert if it adds value, I collected badges over the first half of my career but I only do the ones that either add value to my career or my boss tells me to do

Always something new to learn, its very rare I am not learning something.

chopsticks

Hi guys, just want to say thanks.

jones551

Am proud of you ! Keep learning.......

paul78

Ha! - I agree with jones551. Crazy isn't the right adjective - Motivated is a better one.

chopsticks

Hi jones551 & paul78, thanks!

Simrid

Not crazy, clever though! Although.....You may want to change it from Comic Sans :P

chopsticks

Simrid, haha is the font ugly?

verbhertz

i don't think you're crazy, but I do think it's rather silly to have all that in the pipeline so to speak. I can't fathom going through all that in a relatively short period and gaining any real useful deep lasting knowledge. But - that's just me.

Do you work in an IT related field now?

chopsticks

Hi verbhertz, thanks for your comment and yes I am working in IT now.

I agree with you if we are just studying all these technologies in a relatively short period of time, it isn't going to be as long lasting than it should be. However, due to the nature of my job, I should have the opportunities to apply the knowledge I learned from these different courses in my work.

To cite two recent real-life examples:

1. I have been studying for CCENT/CCNA for many months now (because the topics are profound and huge!), using materials from CBT Nuggets, Wendell Odom and Todd Lammle. Just today, I got an IT Ticket where an user is having problem connecting to his backup device using a specific IP address to the user port his device is connected. Upon checking and verifying, I realised several mistakes made. The first being, the user has "illegally" hoarding a dynamically-assigned IP address (from DHCP pool) as a static IP address to use for his backup device. Secondly, the user port/switch port his device is connected to is configured in a different VLAN for that IP address he is using, so no matter how he tries, it won't work. Thirdly, in order to rectify this, a new static IP address has to be issued to him but that will cause inconvenience to the users of the backup device as they have to reconfigure and memorise the new IP address. So a solution to this is to register his new static IP address to the DNS server and all his users can now easily remember the FQDN regardless of any future change in the IP address. All these I thank to the knowledge I gained from studying CCENT/CCNA courses.

2. I am currently completing a classroom delivery of PMP course. And so happened that I am assigned to participate in a new project just days ago. In the kick-off meeting, the PM presented his PM Plan to us and immediately I can understand the structure of his work - about the sponsor, schedules, deliverable, PM Tools like one-to-one meeting, etc. For this, I am very happy that I can relate all these to my PMP course and study.

Also in my job, I cover a portion of IT security and virtualisation technology. So this is why I am so interested to understand and learn more about IT security and attending a new classroom delivery of VCP6 - ICM course later this month.

All in all, I too hope that by applying what I learn from my self studies, they can become part of me and part of my experience. :>