(August 30, 2016 at 2:04 pm)wolf39us Wrote: Alright so I wanted to hear from those of you who are in IT or related fields. I have worked in IT before as a Technical Support Rep I and II. I've also contracted work for building / ghosting machines for a couple of companies. My personal life has involved the building and troubleshooting of hundreds of computers since I was a child, it's what I'm actually good at.
The sad truth is that years have passed and I haven't received any formal training at all. I'm not happy with the way my professional life has turned and want to get back to what I love, computers.
I have interests in Networking, Programming, Databases, Security, Web Development - pretty much everything.
What I'm looking for is the first certifications I should be looking to get, the most essential things to get me in the door!
It depends on where you are in the world. Either way, if you are interested in Networking for example, take any course with Cisco. They should have numerous colleges around that double for Cisco Networking Academies that give courses like CCENT 1 and CCENT 2. Although the CCNA exists, the CCENT was introduced so that you can study the necessary basics before going onto harder modules. After the CCNA? you could specialise or go further into the networking field such as CCAI (Academy Instructor.) As for databases, that is a tough one, when there are so many to choose from. Same goes for Operating systems, from the basic yet stable UNIX, to the comlexities of Linux which is open-source. You could ideally go the Microsoft route and study the Networking modules (info: when doing the tests, make sure you answer the way Microsoft want you to answer, and not the way Cisco would teach you.) Then there are programming languages, from basic HTML 5 (which isn't really programming), C, C++, J#, C#, ASP.Net, Visual Basic. The world is your oyster. Just make sure that if you want to do HTML web development, use HTML 5, CSS3 and Javascript together. Here is a video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Oggpc9gl5g
Good luck.
