Computer IT career certifications?

Microsoft. That's just considering it's the most in-demand. The others are cool, but MS would let you help orders of magnitude more clients.

 

I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but I'm inclined to agree.

CCNA is more of a network administrator thing. But what are you looking for? Are you a systems administrator or a software engineer?

 

I tend to agree with the Microsoft certification. I let my CCNA lapse because it wasn't useful to me, and didn't make sense to put up the funds to renew. Though, I would fully recommend A+ and Net+ for anyone going into IT, but those are more base certifications, not the only ones to get.

 

Another thing to look out for is some hiring managers are still super bigoted against people without a four-year degree.

I had a co-worker, who was senior team lead, and on my interview panel, tell me the following: "I get kinda scared when a guy gets a lot of certifications and feels the need to put all those letters in his email signature. I mean, what's the guy hiding?"

After a while... I picked my jaw back up off the floor, and pointed out to him that not everybody can afford college, and in any case, some people didn't take high school very seriously, went to work a service job, and then found later on that no college wanted to accept them...

I happen to believe that someone who gets a lot of certifications shows a lot more initiative than people who plagiarized their way through computer science (and let's face it, probably 20% of people with CS degrees don't have the first ejaculate of an idea what they are doing...)

 

I'm halfway through a computer science degree, and I can't fully agree with Pret's comment. It's near impossible to graduate with a CS degree without having good knowledge of the material, plus you have a broad idea of how to do a lot of things.
Like everything though, you need to put in a lot of effort yourself with a CS degree. Want to work in web dev? Learn the languages and dev environments yourself.
Anyways, in regards to the main question, yeah, MS is probably the way to go in terms of job demand.

 

i'd say go for microsoft, but a lot of trends have been leaning in towards linux/unix

 

I'm with Tetra as well. In my time job hunting, most HR departments wanted 4 year degrees, and my only having an AAS meant I'd get passed over quickly.

 

You must have a rosier view of things than I do. I was in a 300 level Intro to Operating Systems class, and there's a guy who's like "man, arrays are hard."

I know he's only one guy, but I found myself pretty discouraged by the general laziness, willingness to plagiarize before asking for help or making an attempt to demonstrate any understanding of one's own, etc.

And so these are now the people writing shitty code for $20+/hr until they get fired or whatever, and burning the companies so bad that they stop hiring entry-level people.

 

This summer, I'm working in web development to get my foot in the door. I can guarantee that someone who doesn't know how to do simple arrays will NOT be sticking around for very long. Don't base anything off of this idiot you heard in class.
That being said, if it was an intro to OS, I doubt there was TOO much code involved. Thus, this guy probably didn't know what the hell he was doing with his life anyways.
There's no way someone's going to be able to get to even second year without having a good grasp on not only arrays and arraylists, but the syntax behind it, unless they got someone else to do their assignments for them.

 

uhh shit i just finished second year and i have no idea what an array is

 

Just finished second year of a CS degree and never heard of an array? Are you sure?


Arrays (Java Platform SE 7 )

 

absolutely
granted i haven't had a programming class yet besides HTML/CSS and basic SQL from database concepts
also thanks for the link! i'll check it out.

 

Oh, okay. We do java in my university, but I've learned HTML/CSS. Probably one of my favorite languages, actually.

 

i love html/css. it's a really great way to get started, i think.
mine offers quite a few options but their prerequisites are set up really weird. i can't wait to get into them though.
my web markup class offered a bit of scripting, but it was like.. "use this code we've already typed out for you" and yeah.

 

I love web development (I should since that's my job)! If that's the path you want to go down I highly recommend you learn at least the basics of a back-end language. I prefer .NET/C# but PHP is good too) It will be so helpful to know how your markup will be integrated with server-side code (even if it's not you who ends up doing it) and will make you a much more valuable resource on the job market.

 

An array is the location of the first slice of cheese that you find on a party plate, provided that all the slices of cheese have been laid out touching each other. If there is specially-marked cheese, you know how many slices there are. If not, someone needs to be kind enough to tell you how many.

 

Interesting analogy! Kind of sounds a bit more like a linkedlist though, because of the statement "location of the first slice of cheese". The first item in an array is the same as any other item in the array. One can always find an array's size by calling a simple method. Linkedlists, on the other hand, will be connected to one another. There's usually a Next() and Last() method in linkedlists pertaining to what each element is attached to (making it harder to remove and add elements, but they have their advantages).

 

I was trying to avoid confusing people with terminology and just give them a physical notion of what it is. And it still is an array, not a linked list. I think a linked list in my analogy would be more like pieces of cheese tied together individually with string (how ever that's supposed to work). I was trying to be specific in capturing the notion that an array is not all of the cheese. It isn't even the first cheese. It's the place of the first cheese. And, all the cheese has to be together. That's a property of the data structure. In an array, we don't need Next or Previous, because of the contiguity property.

Regardless of how I explain it, until people understand types in a formal way, they are never going to understand the notion of references, (Typename vs Typename*), and are therefore likely to struggle with arrays.

I think many people like cheese and will therefore feel empowered by this example.

 

Learn Unix or linux. Being a *nix system admin can make you six figures pretty early in your career. Experience trumps everything in IT so setup a lab at home if you can. Cisco is alright if you're interested in a network administrator career. If you want to be a generalist for an SMB then get your MCSA/MCSA as those certs are noticed more by HR types who will be filtering resumes. Remember that paper can only get you so far, when it comes down to it you need to know your stuff as that matters most.

Like Pret says, a degree isn't necessary and most IT professionals I know do not have one. I wouldn't want to work for a company that requires a degree as if it was some sort of difficult achievement- it's not.