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Solve : IT training, certifications and qualifications? |
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Answer» CompTIA A + ...you'll be done in 3o minutes... Quote from: DaveLembke on April 24, 2015, 12:28:31 PM Congrats ... the more the better. Do you have an employer who is covering any of the costs or are you paying all out of pocket for these? They're covering the books and exams so far - the MTA exams have cost £91 each and the books were roughly £60 (2 books, the MS one is rubbish by the way) so approx £600 so far. If I was paying myself I would probably not have bothered with the MTA exams as they're not hugely recognised, I would however have still bought the Sybex books as they're not expensive and I have learnt things from them, to the point I'm keeping them for reference whereas I'll be selling the MS books on. In other words I don't think the ROI is there, on the other hand though I do now have MCP status which has to be worth something. They've said they will pay for whatever exams I want to do, within reason, which is why I'm starting at the bottom and working up for a broader coverage. If I was paying my own way I'd have likely started studying for an MCSA certification instead, which would take me a lot longer but would be worth a lot more by itself. While I'm here, I may as well get what I can - they sure get whatever they can out of me! Quote from: patio on April 24, 2015, 12:53:47 PM CompTIA A + ...you'll be done in 3o minutes... I passed the old exam fairly easily so I hope this should be more of a refresher...I've heard the exam is more modern these days so there should be less memorisation of obscure and obsolete cables and standards required. "Should" being the key word...I'll see what it looks like when my books arrive. I'll post later with the materials I used to study for each of the MTA exams in case anyone else might find it useful in the future, as well as a quick roundup of how I felt the exams went in terms of questions and content (without breaking the NDA of course).Finished my A+ on Tuesday, did the 220-801 last Monday and the 802 on Tuesday. I found it much EASIER this time around, in part I'm sure because I have a lot more experience but to me the exam was also very different and a lot more relevant to the real world. I don't think I had any questions on pinouts of legacy connectors which was nice. I don't want to go into too much detail and break the NDA so I'll probably stop there. I took a bit longer to do this exam purely because I had to wait for a convenient time, I was ready for it weeks ago. Network+ is next on my list, I was going to go for Server+ but there aren't any relevant study materials for some reason, other than a Kindle BOOK which gets great reviews but I don't do Kindle.I'm trying for an MSCA:Server 2012 and am planning on taking the first exam next month. I've been using CBT Nuggets for the training (my work pays for training and *passed* exams), and part of the subscription pays for practice exams. I took the practice exam a couple weeks ago and got a whopping 40%! I guess I know where to focus my studies, anyway. The parts that got me is the Microsoft technology that nobody uses. (I failed most of the teredo server stuff and routing/remote access.) But there are some other technologies that I learned about and am excited to start using. DSC (Desired State Configuration) will be the first on my list to implement on my network. I was a bit surprised by how much powershell you are required to know for the MSCA. Every aspect of Windows Server can use powershell in some way and Microsoft really wants you to know how to do it. So I've been learning powershell and am loving it. Makes stuff so much easier once you know the commands and how to use them and pipe them. Calum, how was the MTA test? what format was it? was it multiple choice? find the best answer? how much of the allowed time did it take for you to finish? I thought about doing an MTA cert, but was talked out of it because it's not as valuable as the MSCA. But I am still considering it because it would be easy and nothing motivates you to study like passing an exam.Yeah, I've heard the MCSA exams feature a lot of Powershell, makes sense as MS are really pushing that way these days. The MTA exams are mostly multiple choice, with some drag and drop fill in the blank type questions (e.g. what word fits best in the sentence), and some where you match terms to their meanings, that sort of thing. I think they took me between 15 and 30 minutes each to finish, and that was with me checking each question carefully twice, so not very long. I scored around 95% on each exam, too. As you say, the MTA isn't anywhere near as valuable as the MCSA as it's nowhere near as difficult, but if you're not going to have to pay for the tests then I think it could be a decent primer to get you into the swing of the MS exams - 98-365, Server Admin Fundamentals, is probably the one to go for. There's almost no Powershell covered on the MTAs I have done, just the basics of what Powershell is and the basic syntax of a command.By the way, I forgot to mention this but it may be useful for you, michaewlewis, and anyone else interested in the MTA exams - if you join the CSTA (Computer Science Teacher's Association) you should get a voucher for a free MTA exam and a HP ATA exam, at least I did though my offers expired and I'm not sure if they were valid outside the US anyway. There's no fee and no prerequisites to join the CSTA and there are other benefits available (mostly US-focused so I can't recall full details). One other major perk is you'll have the option to become a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) fee-free which INCLUDES (directly quoting from a post elsewhere which I'll link below) "include Free access to Safari, books24x7, and skillsoft. Email forwarding and filtering through postini with an acm.org email, access to their digital library and tri-weekly news emails keeping you up to date" so well worth joining up! Info above is in part copied from this incredibly useful post over on TechExams.net - http://www.techexams.net/forums/general-certification/94746-free-reduced-certifications-free-reduced-training.htmlSo, haven't updated here in a while...I started a new job in August last year, I had been studying to take the CompTIA Network+ but left my last job before I took the exam and have since been too busy to brush up and go take it. It's still in my plan though, not least because it'll renew my A+. I've had a change of plan and I'm shortly going to start studying for the Microsoft 70-695 exam, "Deploying Windows Desktops and Enterprise Applications". This is basically because I'm doing a LOT of deployment work at the minute, and essentially my new employer feels that me taking this exam is a lot more relevant than me going ahead with, say, Network+, although I will probably come back to that at some point. This exam doesn't give me a certification in itself, it's more to validate my knowledge to support the work I'm currently doing. Interestingly, the exam has been updated from focusing on MDT 2013 and Windows 8.1, to include Windows 10 - however the study materials haven't. I think a lot of home labbing will be required so that I can be confident of the differences between deploying 8.1 and 10 and Office 2013/2016.You will be fine...but brushup is a good idea... That being ststed...when you pass then you can talk your employer into payin for and achieving the Network + Certs...If you're doing a lot of system deployments, make sure you look at Windows Deployment Services. I had a bit of a rocky start with it, but recently was able to upgrade 35 systems, with all of the apps preinstalled, in two weeks time and still had time for my normal tasks. I still haven't taken any of my cert tests yet. I took two practice tests and completely bombed both of them for the MS 70-410. Now I'm considering going for a CCNA instead because I randomly (no studying) took one of those practice tests and got a 65%. Maybe with a little studying, I could pass it..... Yeah, we're working with WDS and MDT 2012 at the minute, the deployment system was set up by someone who was working his notice period about 2 years ago so it's...not the best, shall we say. I've spent a few months fixing various bugs and getting a handle on the little quirks of our setup, next on the list is rebuilding all of our deployment images, followed by a round of improvements to the system to help ease the burden on our team. I'm hoping to implement some helpful little things like getting notifications when a build has finished deploying, updating the BIOS during the task sequence, and scripting a lot of the management side of things so that it's easier for others to manage. Regarding the images themselves, it's all about striking a balance between flexibility/easy of management, and the total time taken to deploy a system. We deploy "fat" images here with most applications integrated, we can do this pretty easily because most of our software is quite static but my BIGGEST frustration is that we can't include Office as, bizarrely, we license it per system with an OEM license, so we can't just deploy the latest and we have no set standard, just whatever that particular machine shipped with. I do have an idea to make the best of this but it'll take some time to set this up. I had some knowledge of WDS etc from my last job, we used MDT and WDS when I started but then implemented ConfigMgr - although that's a lot more fully featured, the deployment and task sequence side of it is very similar to MDT, ConfigMgr just has some more bells and whistles but MDT is a lot more capable than I initially thought. I've learned a lot from this and I'm looking forward to upgrading to MDT 2013 at last, too, which will be needed for when we eventually start deploying Windows 10 - that's mostly waiting on a lot of other upgrades though for compatibility. I think deployment is a valuable skill to have and I'm surprised nobody at my work has focused on it a little more up until now. The way I see it is how can you hope to have any kind of consistent environment if your deployments aren't up to scratch? It's imperative to start from a known good position otherwise you're fighting a losing battle and it creates more work for everyone. Back to the topic at hand...did you use any other materials than CBT Nuggets to study for the 70-410? I really struggle with online materials, videos and such, I find I just don't retain the information, so I've been going for study books. I see there are several resources for the 70-410 exam - there's one by Craig Zacker that has some pretty lacklustre reviews, but there's a weighty tome by Dan Poulton that looks more promising, and a combined 70-410/411/412/417 book by William Panek which also looks good. I don't own any of these and I haven't read them so I'm not speaking from personal experience, just reviews and feedback from other forums. They're around £30-40 so not massively expensive, it might be worth investing in one to supplement your other studies if you're not already book-studying. Even if you don't read it all cover to cover, it might help to read through any sections you struggled with on the practice tests just to get a different perspective on things. I know I struggled to grasp subnetting for ages, I used a different resource and it just clicked for me, maybe it'll be the same for you Having said that, the CCNA is also a pretty useful cert to have, although obviously it's a different path to the MCSA. There's also the CCENT below the CCNA which might be a good introduction, I don't know how familiar you are with the cert paths so forgive me if I'm teaching you to suck eggs! I also don't know how au fait you are with the Cisco side of things, if you're already pretty good then it's probably worth going straight for the CCNA.Yeah, you've got a good point. I read through both of the CCNA books, so that might be why I'm better with Cisco than MS. I still don't quite understand ip ADDRESS to binary conversion, though. Partly because I don't see the point. Why do it yourself when the computer does it for you? Also, there is a bunch of stuff with Microsoft 70-410 that I don't see myself using at my current job. It's a lot easier to learn stuff that you think you might actually use. I'm pretty good at the hyper-v/vmm stuff because I've built my hyper-v infrastructure from scratch. I haven't had any desire to use Windows for an NPS server. Yeah, it's definitely easier to learn by being hands-on with stuff, I have a VM lab environment but I'm planning to expand this to a dedicated box very shortly to assist with future certification stuff as well as general messing around. I'm still frustrated that Technet subscriptions got taken down, I understand the reasons but it leaves a huge gap as I can't afford an MSDN subscription and there isn't a downloadable trial of everything that I may want to set up. As for IP address to binary conversion, I always saw that as more of a learning aid than anything else, it's a way to easily write the subnet mask down and visualize it to see if a certain IP address "fits" in that subnet or not. I agree it seems counter-intuitive, though. |
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