I passed both 801 and 802 last week, Monday and Friday respectively
Now I am certified A+. I'm starting this process at 50, deciding to do so after my wife and I became pregnant with our youngest child, a beautiful baby boy born on January 1, 2014! I am approaching this with three masters degrees, (finance, poli si, and education). I was very unsatisfied with all of those career paths and embraced my passion, the land of geekdom, as my wife calls it.
So, I started in October, studied straight through until a week before my son was born, and took off 5 weeks after, enjoying him with my wife on maternity leave. I studied sub sections of A+ by going to full cert books, in other words I used Network + books to learn the A+ sections, Windows 7-680 for OS, Security + for security, you get the picture. I feel it helped me conceptualize things better, and I feel ahead of the game of my next certs: Network + (in a week probably), MSCT 70-680 Windows 7, ( probably about three weeks) and security + ( in about six weeks). I also had already done the MSFT Office suite, getting expert in word and excel, and passing the access exams. When I pass powerpoint, I will have the Master designation.
I'm loving this, its exciting learning this, and it is fun to do this all day. I am fortunate where my wife could support us for a few months (she's a physician) and I could do this all day most every day. I will be a stay at home dad until I get the right job to learn and grow (I'd love to get in network administrations and info sec) and we have a nanny ready to start as soon as I get a job.
I kick myself every day for not doing this 15 years ago and avoid the grad school crap, and a more than a few jobs I hated. I am working on learning Powershell, and love using the command line. I am excited and look forward to more good news from me on the certification front, very soon.
Best of luck to all of you working on the exams! And any advice for this grey haired newbie would be appreciated.
