CERTIFICATION OPTIONS 1

[ElijahBaley]

Hello

Circa August 1999 I set myself the task of studying for the then NT core MCSE exams before the (then) expiry date of 31st December 1999, I had had about 1 years general IT and network experience and had hoped to acheive this goal.

It proved a little more difficult than I had anticipated and I only passed the Network Essentials exam which did not even constitute a MCP status.

Fortunately, since then I have remained in employment and have gained knowlege and experience and am quite pleased with my progress - however, I feel that I should now look towards gaining some professional qualifications to suppliment my experience, the problem is that I seriously doubt the MCSE path and have misgivings about investing so much time and energy into one product family - how long before 2000 is dropped in favour of XP ?

I am thinking of alternatives and only A+ and Cisco CCNA seem to be options, the problem I have with these is that (with all due respect to A+ certified) A+ seems to be relatively easy and not widely respected (in the UK) and CCNA would be very difficult without access to Cisco routers, which I do not have.

I would have to home study and obviously invest a lot of time doing it so I am keen to set out on the right course. my interest is in the wider area of communications and networking so the Cisco route appeals, but it is expensive and difficult, can it even be done from home study with limited hardware?

I would appreciate any comments and or advice on this,

Best Regards

Graham
"r tape loading error"

 

[Sithl0rd]

at the moment all the XP and .NET exams count towards your 2000 MCSE. Microsoft seemed to have intergrated both platforms into the one qualifcation. So for example, if you only get your Windows2k Pro and and Windows 2k Server exam before they retire all the 2000 exams, you dont have to do WindowsXP Pro or Windows .NET Server exam.
Microsoft say they keep each exam for a minimum of 3 years

 

[MasterRacker]

Cisco certs are great if you will be mostly working deep in the guts of networks.

http://www.comptia.org

is the home to a number of vendor independent certs. A+ is only one of them. They also have certs in networks, servers, Internet, etc. One advantage of going down this path is Micorsoft now accepts some of these as for elective credits in the MCSA course.

If you want to live in databases Oracle also has DBA certs for their product.

CIW certifications are probably the fastest growing at the moment. They are also vendor independent. You can find them here:

http://www.ciwcertified.com

Jeff
I haven't lost my mind - I know it's backed up on tape somewhere ....

 

[ElijahBaley]

Thanks for your advice

It seems that all routes are pretty positive - I was not aware that Microsoft would append new exams (based on new products - XP) to the existing MCSE and presumably drop other "modules" when they are deemed to have expired - this seems pretty reasonable as long as the exams do not change so dramatically so quickly that no-one has a chance to keep up.

Graham
"r tape loading error"