IT Certifications and Careers (Official Discussion Thread)

[Apollo Creed]

Once you get your 1st gig, you can take any path you want. Think of Help Desk as boot camp. Once you get out of boot camp you get to pick your specialty. The most important part is getting that 1st job. The 2nd most important part is getting the fukk outta help desk

This. To dudes in school go volunteer with the schools IT department ASAP.

Do that during your time in college and you will have an easy 1-3 yrs experience under your belt. I did it for a yr in college and then that got me a job at best buy in the computer department which led to my next two jobs in wireless. I mainly was chasing the paper but all of my jobs have been tech related from sales to help desk and all of this gave me the skills that helped me as a BA today, primarily being able to present technical information to non technical stakeholders/customers.

 

[No Homo]

Once you get your 1st gig, you can take any path you want. Think of Help Desk as boot camp. Once you get out of boot camp you get to pick your specialty. The most important part is getting that 1st job. The 2nd most important part is getting the fukk outta help desk

Also desktop support is another place not to stay long at....some roles will pay you nicely but that shyt is IT purgatory also.

I've always met older dudes in desktop who were smart yes but lazy and comfortable with doing simple tickets and getting a check.

 

[kevm3]

i'm going hard this semester with the networking we had a STEM career fair but the only agency to show up for what i was interested in (MIS) was NSA and their representatives looked like they hadn't taken a bath in a while

rackspace is giving students a tour of their facility soon so i'm going to sign up for that. my school has a couple help desk positions open so i'm going to apply for that today.

Rackspace is a pretty cool company. Their only downside is that they pay a bit less than the market rate, but they have excellent benefits. Their main office in San Antonio is in what was once a mall.

 

[se1f_made]

Posting on the coli. And no I'm not bullshytting.

But it depends on your role. Sometimes you'll be doing tickets all day. Sometimes you'll be doing project work. Sometimes you'll sit on your ass all day and do nothing. In my current gig (not a security role) I literally don't do shyt all day. I show up 10-1030. Go to lunch at 12. Then break out and go home at 330-4 (sometimes earlier). I'm making 125k to not do shyt and it's starting to get boring

My last security gig I was on bout 15 projects and had meetings all day. I actually enjoyed that job a lot because of all the shyt I was involved in. Other jobs I've worked for 6+ months and put in MAYBE 40 hours of actual work.

Either way make sure you invest in a gym membership. This cert life will leave you

No doubt. I was hired at my current gig to support a PLM software called teamcenter. I spend about 3 hours a week actually do work related to that. A few hours spinning up vms, working with UCS hardware, a little SAN work here and there but mostly I'm sitting on my ass watching CBTnugget videos. My dream is to eventually do some consulting or even contract work (maybe with security). I know u get tired of hearing it but salute for dropping these gems here. If it only even helped 1 brother (gotta be plenty more)

 

[Mainevent_7]

Yeah, it's definitely interesting. This not the type of shyt you can pass on a 1 month cram session tho.

I need to get a windows laptop so i can start fukking with this powershell too. My Macbook too at this point for a virtual machine

I need to upgrade the RAM from 8gb to 16gb, hopefully that helps. Running Parallels puts my macbook into status.

 

[↓R↑LYB]

No doubt. I was hired at my current gig to support a PLM software called teamcenter. I spend about 3 hours a week actually do work related to that. A few hours spinning up vms, working with UCS hardware, a little SAN work here and there but mostly I'm sitting on my ass watching CBTnugget videos. My dream is to eventually do some consulting or even contract work (maybe with security). I know u get tired of hearing it but salute for dropping these gems here. If it only even helped 1 brother (gotta be plenty more)

Have a plan, stay focused, and you'll get there breh. My mission is to make IT a black industry so we can take over the cert game

And I didn't even know Cisco started selling server hardware

 

[acri1]

Have I ever mentioned that I hate having to deal with VOIP? How did I get stuck with this.

My job is to basically find out a way to make all our shytty old analog fax machines work with our VOIP system because management decided they shouldn't have to pay for analog lines anymore, but a lot of users are still stuck in 1980 and insist on sending faxes. Had some success with an ATA, but it's still kind of a crapshot. The thing that sucks about it is that it's not exact...it's not a case of it working or not, I can get most of them to go thru but some still occasionally fail due to packet loss/jitter/latency/noise on the line/a telephone pole down somewhere/a crappy fax on the other end/shytty phones lines somewhere/etc. Sucks.

 

[se1f_made]

Have a plan, stay focused, and you'll get there breh. My mission is to make IT a black industry so we can take over the cert game

And I didn't even know Cisco started selling server hardware

Yep, it's a game changer. Memory/cpu, network interfaces, drives and fans are all built into seperate blades that all fit into a chassis makes swapping hot spares easy as hell. No more extended downtime for failed hardware

 

[se1f_made]

Have I ever mentioned that I hate having to deal with VOIP? How did I get stuck with this.

My job is to basically find out a way to make all our shytty old analog fax machines work with our VOIP system because management decided they shouldn't have to pay for analog lines anymore, but a lot of users are still stuck in 1980 and insist on sending faxes. Had some success with an ATA, but it's still kind of a crapshot. The thing that sucks about it is that it's not exact...it's not a case of it working or not, I can get most of them to go thru but some still occasionally fail due to packet loss/jitter/latency/noise on the line/a telephone pole down somewhere/a crappy fax on the other end/shytty phones lines somewhere/etc. Sucks.

I know what u sayin breh, I'm glad I don't have to support that stuff anymore. Easily worst part of IT

 

[GollyImGully]

My mission is to make IT a black industry so we can take over the cert game

The position i'm about to start one of the guys who interviewed me was black soon as he saw me he went like

Told me straight up "I can tell you already know your shyt. I'm putting in a good word for you either way cause we got to look out for each other. So forget all this lets kick the shyt for a while, did you see the Knicks game last night?"

I was like Because I've had a network security admin just straight me at an interview before and I just couldn't understand why.

 

[BiggWebb79]

Have a plan, stay focused, and you'll get there breh. My mission is to make IT a black industry so we can take over the cert game

And I didn't even know Cisco started selling server hardware

 

[Julius Skrrvin]

@bdizzle @Silkk @krexzen i'm going to go for my Security+, what's a decent hard book?

Darril Gibson seems good

 

[↓R↑LYB]

@bdizzle @Silkk @krexzen i'm going to go for my Security+, what's a decent hard book?

Darril Gibson seems good

Never went for my Sec+ so I don't know. Just by the one with the best reviews. Or download the PDF.

 

[princeofhaiti]

Never went for my Sec+ so I don't know. Just by the one with the best reviews. Or download the PDF.

compTIA is the best cert to start with right @bdizzle? in terms of looking to get into entry level jobs.

 

[↓R↑LYB]

compTIA is the best cert to start with right @bdizzle? in terms of looking to get into entry level jobs.

First off sak pase breh

And yeah start with the A+. It's the main requirement to get a help desk job