Debating on which Cert to concentrate on: MCITP:SA, SQL, or something else

XiaoTech

I'm looking for a little career advise, like everyone else in this forum. This will be a little lengthy, so I would appreciate anyone who has the time to read through and give me some advice. I have a BA in Asian Studies (intermediate Japanese ability) and A+ with about four months of helpdesk experience. The company enviroment I am working in is good for now. Basically I take calls, activate phones, troubleshoot them, walk end users through e-mail setup with their active sync settings and/or an MDM (Mobile Device Management). Go into servers and set EAs for customers with Blackberries, and go into other servers for other MDMs that we support. This my first IT job, so I'm not complaining. My coworkers are great and ~most~ customers are bearable. But I know I don't want to be stuck answering phones 40 hours a week...and I don't want to stagnate for a second.


Now, during these four months, I haven't been studying for one cert. I've been grabbing what I can for free and studying a little of Net+, CCENT, MCITP:SA, and SQL. Now, when I say that, obviously I'm not going deep into any one subject...I'm trying to find a field that I enjoy before I go all out into one subject. So far I've found myself getting bored with networking concepts, but I found some labbing with Active Directy was kind of cool. I like SQL, but when I was studying from a book "Joes to Pros: SQL1", it felt like the material was a bit above me. So I think I'm debating on either SQL or MCITP:SA.


Also, I tried programming in Java and Python a year ago, but I honestly couldn't get myself to grasp the "why" concepts. It seems like everything I read always said "This will allow you to _____" in your program, but never any real examples why I would use it or show the code in a real program (outside of the command line). I think I like the idea of being a programmer...working on projects within a self contained group and nowhere near the phone (for the most part). I'm not sure if I'm reading the wrong books or if it was the right thing that I just pushed it to the side.


So based on the background I have and the things I've tried, any suggestions on what I should aim for? I know I made a thread about CCNA lab when I first joined last year, but I never got around to it since the more I read into it the less interested I got. I feel a bit lost in what I should be concentrating on.


Thanks for reading.

DigitalZeroOne

Since you seem to primarily focus on Microsoft, I would make sure that Powershell is in there with the rest of your learning. You can use it with Windows, SQL, Hyper-V, and there a snap-ins and modules that will extend functionality to other products. Getting that out the way, and speaking generally, it's always good to have a good level of knowledge in Microsoft Server technologies, whether it's AD, SQL, or their other suite of products like System Center, etc. You should just find out what you really like, because that makes the difference on how fast you learn, and how much you get out of it.