Posted: 4/16/2007 6:34:59 AM EDT
|
Team, I am considering growing an admin position into a technical position. This person will make the jump to technical rather easily. With that said I'd like to start them out by getting them A+ certified. For those of you who are A+ certified; what learning methods did you use and what would you recommend? Anyone have an opinion on A+ certs in general? Good or bad? This position is going to have remote support/help desk responsibility as well as dispatch/scheduling other technical resources. I would be particularly interested in any of you who have the remote support track under your belt. Thanks! |
|
A+ was openly and mercilessly ridiculed a few years ago when I was in IT. I hope it's changed. As an IT Director I always thought poorly of them, and I had the advantage of being a technical (not just management) person. I had a MCSE and CCNA. It was my opinion (and experience) that if you didn't already know the material in the A+ curriculum you were not going to be worth a crap to me as a tech. Anyone who would truly be good in this field likely had a few servers at home already and routinely built their own machines, etc. I will dare say I used the A+ as a red flag to help weed out the people who got into the field for the pay rather than the work. An operating system specific cert is going to be more valuable to them unless the A+ has been drastically overhauled in recent years. Even 5 years ago, the A+ was obsolete due to operational realities on the dekstop - no one cares about troubleshooting hardware issues anymore, for a variety of reasons. |
|
Hmm, I think you'd be better off just having someone that knows the material and has (most importantly) experience troubleshooting and maintaining the PC platform and MS OS's. The exception might be if you were going to use CompTIA certification as a marketing tool for your tech support folks. |
You have an "admin" that isn't already technical? I don't understand how that could be unless you created a job description for an Administrator that doesn't really have any thing to do with actually administering anything. Regarding the A+: In my opinion the A+ is a very basic cert. But since it looks like the target job is tech-support the cert is about right for that level of expertise. I would say that any intermediate to advanced admin or IT person could pass an A+ without much effort as it is pretty basic small systems stuff. Would I make it a requirement for the position? Probably not, you may want to encourage it after the hire though. Do I have one, want one or need one? No. My certs are industry specific and I get them from GIAC. |
I mean "admin" as in business administrator; office worker, not "admin" as in server admin. |