Looking for friendly careers advice - CCNA onwards

Hi everyone,

I am looking for careers advice in the IT and networking industry and following some web searches stumbled upon this forum. If you aren't overly interested in my background and reasonings skip the next two chapters and proceed from there.

Firstly a bit of information about myself. I am 18 very soon, and i live in England, looking to lay the foundations and hopefully succeed into the networking field. I am currently 1 years through a 2 years course at college which has provided me with information such as basic PC maintaining, basic programming and web design and touches slighty in communications technologies. Also bundled in m course is a CCNA, i am currently about to start summester 3 of 4 and should finish in June/July 2009.

Studying the early parts of my CCNA have intrigued me and i am eager to pursue a career in networking. I am a hard worker and intelligent, especially with mathematics, i strive to succeed and therefore would like to progress to higher levels in my career. I am aware of CCNP/CCIE etc etc.

Enough jibber jabber, my reasoning for advice is i am at the stage where i need to decide whether i move to University or not. Before i do i'm doing some research (hence this now). It is easy to speak to a careers adviser locally but i can't imagen them knowing much about networking so i seek specialists and professionals.

I would like to know peoples opinions as to what is the best method of career progression once i am CCNA Certified. To me university doesn't seem ideal, IT qualifications seem better. What to you think i should do, work and train for other qualifications, a CCNP maybe, or go to university and study a networking degree or maybe and IT based degree.

Any advice is well recieved and i thank everybody who takes the time to help in advance.

Daniel Cooper

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Comments

networker050184

Why not both?

You shouldn't limit yourself to one or the other, especially at such a young age. You might not even end up liking this career field (its not for everyone that's for sure). If that turns out your certifications are useless but a IT degree would be semi applicable to other fields.

dynamik

Yea. It can be difficult to get your foot in the door and there will always be competition. Why not do everything you can to set yourself up for success? Do it now while you can. It will be much more difficult if you decide to go back for it later.

Daniel333

School first.

Finish that up and maybe snag a couple entry level certs as you seek out work.

MCTS:Configuring Vista, A+, CCENT and Linux+ are great starting points.