Question about Certifications

[naggy.livejournal.com]

What help desk certifications have y'all taken? HDI? Microsoft? A+/Network +?
Do you recommend any?

I'm not worried about it for me (my job title is becoming less help desk, and more Quality Assurance), but training material and certification may be useful for our new folks, who keep having huge problems adapting.

Comments

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Er, MCSE in NT4, in 1998. I keep meaning to do another one. A+ was worthwhile a few years ago - I used to suggest it to all the helpdesk bunnies I worked with - but alas, not so much now. Network+ might still be beneficial.

If I was going to start on a helpdesk now, I'd probably try and spread things around a bit - an MCP in XP, the LPIC-1 (http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/lpi/101.html) Linux exam, and maybe the CCNA if I wanted to get into the networking side of things. The introductory Citrix course would be useful too, since a lot of business environments use it.

[japester.livejournal.com]

I have an OS X server essentials and a filemaker basics bit of paper, jammed in a corner somewhere.
after your first job, it doesn't really matter what qualifications you have. it *does* matter what experience you do have though. Get computers to play with at home. spare network gear, if that rocks your boat. ebay is your friend for old Cisco gear.
Network network network. Conferences are your best friend for that. it also proves you have social skills. :)

at least, in my experience that's what counts. M$ shops might be different.

[jecook]

If you are doing any sort of retail repair where you do any sort of warrenty work for a company, the A+ is REQUIRED in order to get the manufacturer's warrenty certification. At least Pre-merger Compaq required it. HP did not, but that was mostly for their printer products.

Frankly, in my experience, the A+ means that you know your ass from a hot rock. it used to be worth about 6 months experience, knowledge wise. I still challange the validity of the MCSE certification, as I've seen people who had one do patently dumbass things.

Above all, experience, experience, experience. get a spare machine, "borrow" some software, and play with it. (M$ used to have 90 day trial copies of their stuff availible for people to play with. I don't know if that's the case anymore...)

[kayfox.livejournal.com]

And damn, I spend soo much of my time trying to learn the stuff needed for a MCSE.

I hate people sho can remeber inane stuff without drawing connections, working with it and generally immersing themselves in it for a while. Generally dry folk.

[thecrazyfinn.livejournal.com]

A+ because it was required for a Techie job. RSA Securid Administrator, couple other manufacturer bits, but those were all done through work.

Need to do my Cisco Certs one of these days. Too damned lazy though. Maybe a CISSP (I'm doing Security Support now)

[blasphemy.livejournal.com]

I've done a+, network+, server+, MCP in 2000 pro and certificate 4 in IT Helpdesk. Above all I'd recommend network+. I've found the information therein to be very helpful in the greater scheme of things. Although any of the Comptia certs because they're fairly vendor neutral.

[kayfox.livejournal.com]

Im doing the MCDST (http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/mcdst/default.asp), its simple, and easy.

And really cheap ($0.00) for me because fo where I work.

[jdotmi.livejournal.com]

My job doesn't require them at all, and I don't have any. It would be nice if I did have some of the certs, but the only jobs here that require them are jobs that I'd actually have to have had a real computer background (as in, formally educated) before being allowed to apply for. Having been a Music Education major who never finished, that pretty much excludes me.

Some of my co-workers have had A+ and CCNA certs, but they have long since left the company or moved "upstairs" to jobs where people regularly get axed within six to twelve months.

[tecie.livejournal.com]

A good way to get your foot in the door is with A+ for helpdesk (which basically says that you know baseline PC tech stuff), from what I've seen HDI is worse then worthless (it teaches skills that would double the legnth of a helpdesk call. It's tech support, not the party line), and Network + would be a nice intro to networking if you don't know anything about it. IOf you decide you like networking, take the CCNA and a lot of doors will open up for you.
MCSE really isn't worth it in that it's expensive and you would be supporting a shrinking portion of the server market. Instead I'd say go for Linux+ or something where you can learn your UNIX or Mainframe (Z/OS, 3270, MVS, etc) so you can support the higher end stuff.
As far as education in general, see if you can get work to pay for a Resource Kit book for something recent-windows like (anything along the NT line, even XP) and of course learn your DOS commands. The reason is less doing stuff at the console, but more to really know what windows is doing under the covers so you can diagnose problems more quickly.
Also see if your place of work will buy some Indepth books on MS Office. You can do some amazing things with MS Access, Excel, and Word. Make sure you keep an eye on what's going on behnd the scenes on things like Access and Excel, and always try to reproduce any wizard generated results yourself. That way you can learn things like SQL (the simply stuff) and VBA (which is a good intro to Visual Basic.)
Finally, and this one is a realitively low investment these days, get a hosted website (preferably PHP and MySQL) which you can get for under US$50 a year now, depending on the features you want. Program a DB driven website (there's a ton of tutorials out there) so you can get a better idea of how designing websites, and database driven websites work.
Plus you can put more tech speak on your resume.
If you can get a bachelors degree, it opens a lot of doors for no apparent reason. No one cares what your major was.