What cert's should I go after?

[Calibuilt99]

Hi guys, so basically i'm graduating high school pretty soon here, and I had a few questions. To start, i'm not interested in going to college or anything, but trade school isn't completely off the table if I have to do that in the future. I am currently studying to get my A+ certification, and to be honest I'm not sure what to do once I get it. I have a passion for computers, and it's what I want to have my job revolve around when I graduate, and I wanted some advice. Do I apply for jobs like help desk where people call with questions regarding their computer? Do I work on getting other cert's like S+ or N+? And if I do go after S+ or N+ what do those jobs entail? I like computers, and I'm not familiar with networking besides the basic at home stuff. I know some jobs in the government like the DoD require the S+ cert, but what are those jobs like? Any insight would be super helpful, thanks!

 

[Kenneth Barker]

If you want to get a job that will take some serious work (studying an awful lot for the next year or so), but will get you in line to land 6 figure pay. Go and work on getting certified with AWS/Azure cloud infrastructure certs. These are were the jobs are at, and are all moving in the direction of. You can quite literally leap frog yourself from nothing to a rather large something pretty quickly.

I did something very similar when I started working freshly out of HS, and deciding not to go to college. Learn these upcoming skills like AWS and Azure, and you will be on the path to a seriously awesome career with amazing pay and growth potential.

To give you an idea, I worked with electronics for around 3 years (Retail commission based) making around 25-30k a year. Around the age 21/22 I decide I wasn't going to take the low pay low skill work any longer and I jumped on a few lucrative certs at the time (around 5-6 years ago) and landed a 120k/yr contract gig which I was eventually hired on to at full time. It can be a really surprising shift in your skill value when you focus in the right areas. Right now, that area is AWS and Azure.

This will not be an easy path, but a certainly rewarding one if you are ambitious and driven enough to pick this stuff up, learn it, and pass the cert exams. The jobs are literally waiting out there for those with these skills.

P.S.- When I got my killer career start, I got my certification in HP monitoring tools, SiteScope and BSM9.x. At the time, these certs were in very high demand, and the jobs were just all over the place with little to no experts in the market that companies desperately needed.

Just like how business works in the real world, in order to launch yourself into a lucrative and magically successful IT career, you need to find what the market is lacking, and fill it. A network cert/CCNA or Microsoft cert is just too common, and not really in demand these days. Do some research on whats out there, and think outside the box, and specialize. Specialize and you will be able to land work and jobs that will make your friends jealous, and asking you your secrets

 

[Calibuilt99]

If you want to get a job that will take some serious work (studying an awful lot for the next year or so), but will get you in line to land 6 figure pay. Go and work on getting certified with AWS/Azure cloud infrastructure certs. These are were the jobs are at, and are all moving in the direction of. You can quite literally leap frog yourself from nothing to a rather large something pretty quickly.

I did something very similar when I started working freshly out of HS, and deciding not to go to college. Learn these upcoming skills like AWS and Azure, and you will be on the path to a seriously awesome career with amazing pay and growth potential.

To give you an idea, I worked with electronics for around 3 years (Retail commission based) making around 25-30k a year. Around the age 21/22 I decide I wasn't going to take the low pay low skill work any longer and I jumped on a few lucrative certs at the time (around 5-6 years ago) and landed a 120k/yr contract gig which I was eventually hired on to at full time. It can be a really surprising shift in your skill value when you focus in the right areas. Right now, that area is AWS and Azure.

This will not be an easy path, but a certainly rewarding one if you are ambitious and driven enough to pick this stuff up, learn it, and pass the cert exams. The jobs are literally waiting out there for those with these skills.

P.S.- When I got my killer career start, I got my certification in HP monitoring tools, SiteScope and BSM9.x. At the time, these certs were in very high demand, and the jobs were just all over the place with little to no experts in the market that companies desperately needed.

Just like how business works in the real world, in order to launch yourself into a lucrative and magically successful IT career, you need to find what the market is lacking, and fill it. A network cert/CCNA or Microsoft cert is just too common, and not really in demand these days. Do some research on whats out there, and think outside the box, and specialize. Specialize and you will be able to land work and jobs that will make your friends jealous, and asking you your secrets

Thanks for the reply Kenneth, could you maybe explain a little what it is I would most likely be doing if I took this path? I.e sitting at a desk doing work on a monitor, field work, that type of thing.

 

[Calibuilt99]

*bump* would like to hear from more people about this