Getting My A+ Certification

jryantech

Hello

I'm 19 years old, I go to college and I'm working on my A+ certification, I just passed the 601 exam and going to take the 602 in about a month. I was wondering how I should go about searching for an entry level PC Technician job.

Commercial places around me are: Best Buy(GeekSquad), Circuit City(Firedog) and Staples.

If I can not land a job in one of those because they are currently not hiring, where do you think I can go?

Thanks.

Grynder

Does your college provide any assistance? If you do not need to have a paying job just looking for experience, non-profits are always looking for help.

brad-

Start with the classified ads under Computer, Data processing, or Professional/Technical.

Put your resume on the employment websites too.

While you're in school, make sure you get to know people....social networking is probably the biggest boon to finding a job there is.

Talic

Try finding out about an internship at your school. Paid internship if you can. Volunteer work if that fails.

Check newspaper every Sunday under the computer job listings. Anything with Help Desk, Computer Technician, or anything else that seems IT entry level IT related.

Put your resume on Monster or any other employment websites. Even if you don't have any experience to write about look at some resume examples and write about how much your willing to learn and what you can already do.

The only thing bad about stores like Best Buy and Circuit City is they'll want you to be a sales person first rather then go straight for a computer tech job. I've had them pass up me for employees that have been there longer then I have, even though I was more qualified then they were. That was Circuit City, Best Buy is worse from what I've heard. They make their Geek Squad sell computers and only the high ranking Geeks do actual IT related work.

Good luck, it might be tough to get a entry level job so you might end up doing the internship or volunteer work. But keep looking around, stuff should pop up.

ULWiz

I recently starting adding my resume to monster.com. And from what i saw most helpdesk jobs only require a A+ cert. Wish you the best of luck.

AmpdChaos

Best thing in my recent experience to to talk with the career services at your school. THey got the hook ups because they're always talking with recruiters. If you have a career services center might as well use it.. ITS FREE!

Slowhand

I'm going to go with the statements of the other posters and say the same two things: get a resume together and post it up on sites like Monster, Careebuilder, Dice, and even Craigslist. Then try to get any experience you can, even if it's unpaid. Volunteer to do some troubleshooting for computers at your school, for your friends, family, etc. Any experience is good experience.

The next piece of advice I can give you is to continue studying, growing your skills. (This'll be especially helpful if you don't want to work for minimum wage as you make your way through college. ) From A+, a good path to take is to go for Network+. With those two certs, you definitely won't have trouble landing a Geeksquad or Firedog job, (although for Firedog, you may also want to think about something like DHTI+ as well). From there, you can either continue with CompTIA certs to round out your knowledge, or continue on with higher-level things. If you want to really give yourself a good foundation of skills, I can recommend Linux+ as well, and maybe even Convergence+ since I've been hearing some positive feedback about that particular cert. Server+ would give you some good knowledge about server hardware, things like various RAID configurations and backup strategies, but it's not as popular of a cert as the others.

If you're itching to get on with more advanced certs, you're in a good position to start off on the Microsoft track(s). The MCSA/MCSE path is still very much in high demand, but MCITP: Server Administrator and MCITP: Enterprise Administrator are the certs towards Windows Server 2008, the newest release of the product. If you're more interested in working with users, helpdesk type of work, there is also MCITP: Enteprise Support Technician, which deals more with Vista and resolving issues on the client-end, rather than the server side. (One thing to keep in mind, and take it from someone who's worked for several companies as the "Microsoft guy", learn to love Exchange. Everyone will assume you know it, if you study Windows administration.)

That's just your options from Microsoft. If you find that you like networking better than systems administration, there's a whole array of things to study from Cisco, there are several certs in the Linux/Unix area, such as LPIC, as well as offerings from Red Hat and Sun.

The point here isn't to overwhelm you with certs, but to give you an idea of what options are available. Start looking for a job with your A+ and your current level of experience and knowledge, but don't be afraid to branch out and learn more. Who knows, maybe while your friends are taking summer jobs at Starbucks to pay for college, you'll be working IT for your school, part-time for a local company, or picking up one or two-month contract-gigs for more money than those same friends will see in all four years they're studying. Good luck.

stlsmoore

My best advice is to look for opportunities everywhere possible, for example I found my current job searching on craigslist. Also focus on good interview skills and a killer resume layout...best of luck!