hello.

slacr

hi i am new to the forum discovered it last nite and decided to join. i am half way through my ccna course and was looking to the forums for inspiration. i want to do something in IT/Telecommunications but have vague career goals, other than to make a decent comfortable living. i found the cisco netacad forums to be really boring and pertaining to a narrow spectrum on topics (example: cisco and cisco products). what and where else would be good for me to supplement my knowledge so when i go on an interview there not saying "oh, heres another kid with a cisco cert".

dtlokee

If you want to stay vendor neutral go look at the CompTIA certifications and read RFCs and IEEE documents. You'll find the latter to be pretty borng and they don't offer an RFC or IEEE certification. I would say to go look at some other vendors but you'll find their certs will focus on their equipment/software. You can enroll in the Juniper FastTrack program (it's free) to see how JunOS does thing. Also there is a lot of free documentation on all the websites of the network vendors (Cisco, Juniper, Nortel, Extreme Networks, Foundry...)

HTH

c0d3_w0lf

Welcome to the forum! As dtlokee said, the CompTIA certs are a good way to go if you're looking to stay vendor neutral. However, if you really want to get far in your career, I think it would be a mistake not to specialize (Cisco certs, Microsoft certs, or even both - they go pretty well together.) Naturally, you don't have to specialize right away, and the CompTIA certs can be a good way to get your foot in the door, but I think eventually you'll definately want to think about "stocking up" as it were on some of the vendor-specific certs. They do look nice on a resume.

If you're halfway to a CCNA cert, DEFINATELY keep up with it though. That's a great cert to have, and you'll be sitting pretty good if you've got that along with a couple of CompTIA certs.