Hello, all!
I apologize in advance for the length of this post… I am wanting to make sure all of the relevant details are included.
So, I’ve come for advice on how to proceed with my career. I have absolutely no certifications or education in the area (the only technology-related classes I’ve taken were a high school computer class, and two 100-level computer programming classes (which at this point I’ve forgotten all of the information from). I do, however, have a relatively good amount of job experience for my age. When I was 16 (I’m now 21) I spent a summer volunteering at a non-profit retirement center in their 1-man IT department (a great experience doing a bit of everything), and was offered a job at the end. That went part-time through my last two years of high school, and full-time every summer during that time and since then (I’m 21 now). My freshman year of college I worked at the IT department there just running errands like swapping UPS batteries, and did a crapton of cable pulls and AP installations. After my freshman year of college, I went through my school’s student missionary program to a mission school on a small island in the Pacific as the high school computer teacher/1-man IT department. That transitioned this second year to being the IT guy for both of the schools in the school system.
One of the reasons I decided to take the missionary position here was to take a break (at the time I was unsure whether it would be a temporary or permanent break for school) from school, but at this point I am 100% certain I do not want to return. I’ve always done very well in school, but have hated every moment of it. It’s just not how I learn; everything seems so un-applicable and un-interesting. With that said, I absolutely LOVE learning. There’s nothing more satisfying to me than seeing a problem, remembering hearing about some topic that I don’t fully understand that might fit there to fix the problem, learning about it, and implementing it. I cannot even begin to describe how much I love on-the-job learning. It’s why I decided to come back for a second year (it sure wasn’t the missionary pay!).
My current idea is once I return home after my contract is up this school year, get a job in a small- to medium-sized business with a small but organized IT department to get some more “formal” experience (I would try to get a full-time job at the retirement village that I’ve been working at, but a couple months ago my family relocated to the other side of the country, so will need to find a new job in order to live near them). What I mean by that, is to learn about things like best practice, high availability setups, backups, setting up actual servers with SANs and reliable backups (not just setting up and configuring server OSs on desktop hardware) and stuff like that. At the retirement village I worked at, best practice wasn’t a super high priority at all times, and here at a low-budget mission school where I’m the only IT guy best practice is nowhere near a priority (mainly due to budget limitations, a lot of this stuff I’m setting up is pretty ghetto (old Athlon 2200+ computers with extra RAM used as servers and such), but also because I just don’t know what the best practice for things is… I kinda just put them together the best I know how, and they (usually) just work). At this job I have learned a huge variety of topics, from VLANs and routing (pfSense mostly) to setting up and configuring a domain/group policy/group permissions to SSL certificates to pretty much any other topic I can think of in IT, simply because when I arrived everything had fallen apart over the previous couple of years, and I needed to set everything up from scratch (the previous guy they had in the position knew very little about computers, and was just there to fill the position of “computer teacher”). My problem is that I don’t feel confident that my implementations of said knowledge would be completely up-to-par with the standards required in a business setting.
At this point I have not been able to settle on one aspect of computers that I enjoy… My interests change quite frequently, typically following along with the current needs of the school. Back home when I was trying to decide on an IT career path I found this very frustrating, but I’ve recently begun to embrace this and have been leaning toward the idea of a career in a small, everybody-does-everything IT department as a long-term plan.
Since I have about 6 months between now and the end of this school year when my contract is up, I have been considering the idea of spending some time studying for some certifications. As for which ones, I am not sure. CCENT/CCNA look good on resumes from what I’ve read, but I don’t necessarily want to set myself up as a “networking guy,” as my interests are very diversified. I had thought that A+ would be good as a simple “I know about computer hardware” cert, but from what I’ve read it doesn’t really count for much, so I don’t know whether I should spend the money on it (time studying for it isn’t a concern, as I’ve taken a practice test online without studying and did well). Network+ I’ve heard is just basically like a bit lower level CCENT. Security+ would probably be good for me simply for learning the subject matter, as I have not had much exposure to that. Microsoft certs would always be good (I’m very Microsoft-leaning for the most part, but am fairly comfortable with to linux commandline), and I suppose a linux one would be good as well.
What cert(s) would you recommend for me in my situation? I’m not only wanting them for a resume-booster, I’m also wanting them for peace of mind in what I know (and obviously for learning the subject matter as well). Also, are there any well-rounded, general certifications out there?
Thanks!
Nate
