What certs for a career in telecommunications/research

Hi,

I have never worked in the industry and would like to know some ideas from you guys.

I am currently doing my PhD in Wireless broadband in the PHY layer (OFDM).
I am hoping to join telecommunication company for a position as a researcher or a provider company (preferably WiMAX/LTE company).

I will be passing out in less than a year and this is not the best time to look for jobs. So I want to increase my potential by doing some certifications. I am currently studying for LPIC-1 and have done CCNA and SCJP. But I will not need these skills. Hopefully, because I really like to do a job that is related to my research.

There are few certs that I am considering but I want you guys opinion.

1) CWNA
2) CompTIA Convergence+

I like to do PMP but I do not have the necessary project management hours (never worked before).

Any suggestion is welcome.

Cheers.

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Comments

Solaris_UNIX

m26k9 wrote: »

Hi,

I have never worked in the industry and would like to know some ideas from you guys.

I am currently doing my PhD in Wireless broadband in the PHY layer (OFDM).
I am hoping to join telecommunication company for a position as a researcher or a provider company (preferably WiMAX/LTE company).

I think having a Phd degree in an electrical engineering related subject trumps any CompTIA certifications.... just my opinion.

Some people I knew who used to do sysadmin work for Telcos worked on various UNIX operating systems like Solaris and what not. AT&T and Sun Microsystems collaborated many, many years ago to write an operating system together that was called "UNIX System V R4" (see link below):

UNIX System V - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and Sun later rebranded SVR4 UNIX as "Solaris 2" and then kept on developing it over a decade as it gradually evolved in to Solaris 10 and now there's the snapshot developer preview builds of OpenSolaris. My Telco buddies tell me UNIX is still kicking around out there. It might be worth getting familiar with it if that's the field you want to get in. I've heard the "Erlang" language is popular with telcos as well. So it might be worth a try hacking on some Erlang, or C code, or Java Code or Ada code on a Solaris Express box just to see what it feels like.

Have you ever thought of getting a basic entry level Solaris / Unix related certification? Maybe SCSA? I think there's a new "Solaris Associate" cert that Sun just made up that they're giving away for free (don't know if it's any good as I never researched it).

Some people I know who work at ISP's and/or telcos also work on Juniper stuff as Juniper seems to be moderately popular with service providers and core routing although CISCO still totally dominates the enterprise / business networking marketplace. The basic JNCIA certification for Juniper is now free as well; here's a link:

http://www.techexams.net/forums/juniper-certifications/45404-hurry-free-juniper-certifications-available-2009-a.html

You can build what's called a Juniper "Olive" simulator out of an old computer with FreeBSD installed on it and use it to learn the basic commands and configurations. The Juniper course text books can also be downloaded for free from their web site.

m26k9

Thank you very much Solaris_UNIX.

SCSA seems very interesting although it is completely foreign to me.
I will also have a look in Juniper. Honestly didn't knw about it before.

Cisco is a good option but it needs lot of preparation and in this final year of my course I do not have the time nor the energy to invest in such a difficult drill.

Thank you again.

Solaris_UNIX

I just noticed that you live in Japan, so you might want to check out this Japanese web site for something to play around with:

Project Jaris

It's a special variant of OpenSolaris that was re-written by Japanese Unix programmers so that it would be optimized for a Japanese environment (i.e. it has special drivers for popular Japanese hardware and peripherals, special turn-key Microsoft compatibility features, etc.) You can download Jaris (I think the Japanese call it "Yah-ri-soo") as a DVD ISO and burn it on a live DVD and run the live DVD on your computer to learn Unix without having to install anything.

You might want to check out this Japanese site as well:

no solaris ... no life ! - Life with Solaris

the guy who runs the site is a Japanese Unix programmer. I think he maybe does telco related stuff for his work, I'm not sure. Maybe you can talk to him in Japanese and find out.

Give Jaris a try and please let me know in this thread what you think about it.

darkerosxx

Guy... with a Ph.D. in Wireless Broadband, you're thinking way too small. You should be looking for Subject Matter Expert positions for ISPs. With all the purchases of wireless spectrums last year, I'd bet you can find one and be a SME for a company either already in the wireless business or moving into it.

m26k9

Dear Solaris_UNIX.

Thank you very much for that information.
I study in Japan but I am not Japanese. My level of Japanese is very poor and also I also I plan on working in an international company (based in Japan). Atleast that is my expectation. So I would like to do something for international.

I like SCSA but I am a little reluctant as it is unknown territory for me.

Thank you very much for the input. Greatly appreciate.

Cheers.

m26k9

darkerosxx wrote: »

Guy... with a Ph.D. in Wireless Broadband, you're thinking way too small. You should be looking for Subject Matter Expert positions for ISPs. With all the purchases of wireless spectrums last year, I'd bet you can find one and be a SME for a company either already in the wireless business or moving into it.

Thank you darkerosxx.
The competition is very high over here for me mainly because my Japanese is poor so I mainly have job potential in international companies based here like Ericsson. So I need to do everything in my potential to make myself (or my resume) attractive. I know they will not be fooled by the number of certifications I have if they have no use from it, but this is the least (and most) I can do at this moment.

I am working in the PHY layer and hope to find a job related to that too. But I see no certification programs in that field.

Thank you very much again.

Solaris_UNIX

m26k9 wrote: »

Dear Solaris_UNIX.

Thank you very much for that information.
I study in Japan but I am not Japanese. My level of Japanese is very poor and also I also I plan on working in an international company (based in Japan). Atleast that is my expectation. So I would like to do something for international.

I like SCSA but I am a little reluctant as it is unknown territory for me.

Thank you very much for the input. Greatly appreciate.

Cheers.

Well, do the companies that you are thinking about working for use Fujitsu or Sun hardware at all? If they're not in to Fujitsu hardware then maybe you're wasting your time playing with Solaris, but if they do use it (and a lot of Japanese companies do use it) then learning it is worth while. I think Solaris 10 is still Fujitsu's preferred O.S. of choice to run on their hardware AFAIK.

I'm sure you'll do fine though, really, a Phd in an electrical engineering field trumps almost anything. I suspect you probably won't be doing much sysadmin work.

Solaris_UNIX

m26k9 wrote: »

I mainly have job potential in international companies based here like Ericsson. So I need to do everything in my potential to make myself (or my resume) attractive.

Ericsson is the corporation that invented that "Erlang" programming language that I told you was popular with phone companies. Check out this wikipedia article (you can click over on the bottom left to read the article in another language besides English if you prefer):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)

m26k9

Solaris_UNIX wrote: »

Well, do the companies that you are thinking about working for use Fujitsu or Sun hardware at all? If they're not in to Fujitsu hardware then maybe you're wasting your time playing with Solaris, but if they do use it (and a lot of Japanese companies do use it) then learning it is worth while. I think Solaris 10 is still Fujitsu's preferred O.S. of choice to run on their hardware AFAIK.

I'm sure you'll do fine though, really, a Phd in an electrical engineering field trumps almost anything. I suspect you probably won't be doing much sysadmin work.

Thank you very much Solaris_UNIX.

I think recently rolled out WiMAX network here mainly uses Fuijtsu base station equipment.
Thank you for that information. I didn't know that.

The WiMAX equipment from NEC uses Linux from what I heard.

I will consider SCSA. Didn't really think about it before.

Cheers.

Solaris_UNIX

m26k9 wrote: »

The WiMAX equipment from NEC uses Linux from what I heard.

Keep in mind. If it's embedded equipment (i.e. an appliance) then it almost certainly runs Linux or some kind of BSD based operating system.

When I said Fujitsu used Solaris internally and advocated it as a preferred O.S. for their customers, I was talking about servers, not networking appliances.

m26k9

Solaris_UNIX wrote: »

Ericsson is the corporation that invented that "Erlang" programming language that I told you was popular with phone companies. Check out this wikipedia article (you can click over on the bottom left to read the article in another language besides English if you prefer):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)

Thank you.
I already learned quite few things today

Didn't know there existed a programming language by name Erlang.

I just had a read through and it seems quite widely used.
This book says it's been used by Amazon, Yahoo, T-Mobile, Motorola, Facebook, etc.

This one really got my attention. Seems they use this in SMS, signaling, etc.

Thank heaps for this.

Solaris_UNIX

m26k9 wrote: »

I will consider SCSA. Didn't really think about it before.

Cheers.

Actually, the SCSA might be overkill for your situation and take to much effort to get. There's an easy to get Solaris certification called the "SCSAS" that might be better for you because there is less difficulty involved in getting it. Check out this link for it:

Sun Certified Solaris Associate (SCSAS)

It should be very easy to get this certification and it should bolster your resume nicely. Learn how to do some very simple Erlang as well and I think you'll be on the top of the resume pile.

Solaris_UNIX

The SCSAS just shows basic knowledge of Unix, which is probably what you want anyway as a resume booster, since you're probably not going to be a full time Unix sysadmin. You'll probably be in R&D and interact with Unix indirectly as part of your R&D job.

m26k9

Solaris_UNIX wrote: »

Keep in mind. If it's embedded equipment (i.e. an appliance) then it almost certainly runs Linux or some kind of BSD based operating system.

When I said Fujitsu used Solaris internally and advocated it's for their customers, I was talking about servers, not networking appliances.

Thank you.
I also mentioned about the NEC's WiMAX NMS running on Linux.
Although I am not familiar with any more details.

m26k9

Solaris_UNIX wrote: »

The SCSAS just shows basic knowledge of Unix, which is probably what you want anyway as a resume booster, since you're probably not going to be a full time Unix sysadmin. You'll probably be in R&D and interact with Unix indirectly as part of your R&D job.

Exactly.
Thank you very much for the input Solaris_UNIX.
I will definitely consider this option.

Solaris_UNIX

m26k9 wrote: »

This one really got my attention. Seems they use this in SMS, signaling, etc.

Thank heaps for this.

Well, hey, there's a "scale" button on the bottom left corner of my posts next to the green light that you can click on to give me good karma points if you really want to.

I was just throwing out whatever random ideas happened to pop in to my head. I'm glad you found it helpful.

m26k9

Solaris_UNIX wrote: »

Well, hey, there's a "scale" button on the bottom left corner of my posts next to the green light that you can click on to give me good karma points if you really want to.

I was just throwing out whatever random ideas happened to pop in to my head. I'm glad you found it helpful.

I am happy to mate. Definitely. Did not know about it too

as you might have noticed I just started posting here although joined a while back.

Thank you very much again. Honestly did not know about the Erlang and the Juniper.

Cheers.

Solaris_UNIX

Thought you might find this article from O'Reilly called "Erlang for Five Nines" (of high availability) to be interesting as it talks a bit about the development of the Ericsson AXD 301 switch, which is a 160 GBps ATM switch that is built on Erlang:

Erlang for Five Nines: A non technical introduction to Erlang: OSCON 2009 - O'Reilly Conferences, July 20 - 24, 2009, San Jose, CA

As you mentioned earlier, Amazon's "Simple DB" also utilizes Erlang as does T-Mobile's SMS. This article also gives another good example where Erlang is used for "Telephony Gateway Counters" that mediate between legacy telephony and multimedia networks.

To get Erlang going on Solaris, you need to install the SUNWerlang package. In older / traditional versions of Solaris up through Solaris 10 and Solaris Express you would use the "pkgadd -d" command to install it, whereas some of the newer OpenSolaris stuff has IPS package management, so you could just use "su" to get root priveleges and install it by typing in:

pkg install SUNWerlang

dynamik

I'd contact the companies that produce and/or use that equipment and see if they say there are any relevant certifications for those types of technologies. There probably are, but that is sort of outside the scope of these forums. The CWNP certifications are probably the closest to what you're looking for as far as IT certs are concerned.

m26k9

Solaris_UNIX wrote: »

Thought you might find this article from O'Reilly called "Erlang for Five Nines" (of high availability) to be interesting as it talks a bit about the development of the Ericsson AXD 301 switch, which is a 160 GBps ATM switch that is built on Erlang:

Thanks heaps for that Solaris_UNIX.
I will read a little bit more in to that. Appreciate the information.

m26k9

dynamik wrote: »

I'd contact the companies that produce and/or use that equipment and see if they say there are any relevant certifications for those types of technologies. There probably are, but that is sort of outside the scope of these forums. The CWNP certifications are probably the closest to what you're looking for as far as IT certs are concerned.

I'm not sure if that is possible Dynamik. For starters I do not speak enough Japanese and also i do not think they will just disclose those information.
I think I can try to find somebody through my university though.
Thank you for that mate.
Cheers.

dynamik

They're don't have any other locations where English is spoken?

Gambette!

Lamini

get you a japanese girlfriend or wife = you can eliminate the japanese language barrier, but its not required.

as easy as learning SPOKEN japanese is, if you were my friend, i would tell you to "get over it, you got a phd and you cant learn basic japanese, you got issues."

it took me TWO hours to learn /memorize katakana and hiragana, as in, to this day i can read and write it, and i did this on my first two hours in japan, in 1997. i know that just scratches what kanji you'll have to deal with, but its not like there isnt any japanese/english;english/japanese translating software in every computer store there.

m26k9

Thanks guys.

Well it's not just the Japanese right. I mean they have lots of formalities and I cannot just go up to a company and ask about their technical details, right?
I haven't done that would you think a company would give out information?

I do have a normal conversation in Japanese but does everything in English in uni. So hardly need to use any Japanese.

Well I'm guessing even if I find out some details about their technology, I doubt there will be any certification for them..

Right now the only cert I can think useful in CWNA.

Cheers.