CompTIA A Plus Training in 2009
April 28, 2009 by Jason Kendall
Filed under Online Colleges
There are four A+ exams and specialised sectors, but you only need to get certified in 2 to qualify for your A+. Because of this, a great number of colleges simply offer two. Yet learning about all 4 will equip you with a more confident perspective of the subject, something you’ll discover is a Godsend in industry.
If you decide to become a student on the A+ training course you’ll be taught how to build, fix, repair and work in antistatic conditions. You’ll also cover fault finding and diagnostics, through both hands-on and remote access. If you feel it appropriate to add Network+ to your CompTIA A+ training course, you’ll also have the ability to assist with or manage networks of computers, allowing you to expect a better remuneration package.
How do we make an educated choice then? With all this potential, we’ll need to know where to be looking – and what we should be looking for.
With so much choice, there’s no surprise that most potential career changers don’t really understand the best career path they will follow. After all, without any background in IT in the workplace, how can you expect to know what some particular IT person fills their day with? And of course decide on what training route is the most likely for your success. Contemplation on many areas is important when you want to reveal the right answer for you:
* Which type of individual you are – what kind of jobs you really enjoy, and conversely – what you hate to do.
* What time-frame are you looking at for your training?
* What salary and timescale needs you have?
* Many students don’t properly consider the time demanded to achieve their goals.
* Taking a proper look at what commitment and time you’ll make available.
The bottom line is, your only chance of understanding everything necessary is via a good talk with an advisor or professional that through years of experience will provide solid advice.
Traditional teaching in classrooms, involving piles of reference textbooks, can be pretty hard going sometimes. If this describes you, check out study materials that are multimedia based. Memory is vastly improved with an involvement of all our senses – educational experts have expounded on this for years now.
Courses are now available in the form of CD and DVD ROM’s, where your computer becomes the centre of your learning. Video streaming means you can watch instructors demonstrating how something is done, and then practice yourself – in a virtual lab environment. Be sure to get a training material demonstration from the training company. The package should contain slide-shows, instructor-led videos and fully interactive skills-lab’s.
It’s unwise to opt for on-line only training. Because of the variable quality and reliability of your average broadband company, it makes sense to have physical media such as CD or DVD ROM’s.
Often, students don’t think to check on something that can make a profound difference to their results – how their company actually breaks down and delivers the physical training materials, and into how many parts. Trainees may consider it sensible (with a typical time scale of 1-3 years to pass all the required exams,) that a training provider will issue one module at a time, as you achieve each exam pass. But: What if there are reasons why you can’t finish every section? And what if you find the order of the modules counter-intuitive? Through no fault of your own, you might take a little longer and not get all the study materials as a result.
In a perfect world, you want ALL the study materials up-front – giving you them all to return to any point – at any time you choose. This also allows you to vary the order in which you complete each objective if you find another route more intuitive.
Most trainers only give support to you inside of office hours (typically 9am-6pm) and sometimes a little earlier or later; It’s rare to find someone who offers late evening or full weekend cover. You’ll be waiting ages for an answer with email based support, and phone support is usually just a call-centre which will take the information and email an instructor – who will then call back sometime over the next 24hrs, at a suitable time to them. This is not a lot of use if you’re lost and confused and have a one hour time-slot in which to study.
As long as you look hard, you will find professional companies which recommend and use direct-access support around the clock – even in the middle of the night. Never compromise when you’re looking for the right support service. The majority of IT hopefuls who throw in the towel, are in that situation because of a lack of support.
Consider only learning paths which will progress to industry recognised accreditations. There’s a plethora of small colleges suggesting ‘in-house’ certificates which aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on when it comes to finding a job. Only properly recognised certification from the major players like Microsoft, Cisco, CompTIA and Adobe will be useful to a future employer.
One crafty way that colleges make extra profits is by charging for exams up-front and presenting it as a guarantee for your exams. It looks impressive, till you look at the facts:
They’ve allowed costings for it somehow. One thing’s for sure – it isn’t free – it’s simply been shoe-horned into the price as a whole. The fact is that when students fund each examination, one after the other, the chances are they’re going to qualify each time – because they’re aware of what they’ve paid and their application will be greater.
Go for the best offer you can find at the appropriate time, and avoid college mark-up fees. You’ll also be able to choose where to do your exams – so you can find somewhere local. Paying in advance for exams (and interest charges if you’re borrowing money) is bad financial management. Resist being talked into filling the training company’s account with your money just to give them a good cash-flow! There are those who hope that you won’t get to do them all – so they get to keep the extra funds. Re-takes of any failed exams with training companies with an ‘Exam Guarantee’ inevitably are heavily regulated. They will insist that you take pre-tests first so you can prove to them you have a good chance of passing.
Paying maybe a thousand pounds extra on ‘Exam Guarantees’ is naive – when study, commitment and preparing with good quality mock and practice exams is what will really guarantee success.
When did you last consider how safe your job is? Typically, this issue only becomes a talking point when something dramatic happens to shake us. Unfortunately, the painful truth is that true job security is a thing of the past, for most of us. But a marketplace with high growth, where staff are in constant demand (because of a massive shortage of properly qualified staff), provides a market for lasting job security.
Offering the IT industry as an example, the most recent e-Skills analysis showed a skills deficit across the United Kingdom in excess of 26 percent. It follows then that out of each 4 positions that exist in the computer industry, employers can only find certified professionals for three of the four. Appropriately skilled and commercially certified new employees are as a result at a resounding premium, and in all likelihood it will stay that way for a long time to come. Surely, it really is a critical time to consider retraining into the computer industry.
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