I have no job, I can’t find a job, so I decided to take a course on something that seems to me that I could find interesting, and so, here I am about to begin my CISCO online certification program given by a local college here in my area. I was just wondering what you guys thought of this.
Will it be as usefull to me as I’ve been led to believe? Will this alone possibly qualify me for new jobs which could prove worth my time in taking this class? I love computers, and I am really interested in things like this, so I’m praying that this will help me!
Are any of you guys certifed in CISCO, and if so, what do you think of it?
IT as a whole is really bad right now. Do you have any other experience that’d be relevant, or just the Cisco cert?
What do you mean it’s bad right now? No, I have no other experiance about this sort of thing.
The IT job market is rather tough right now, and a Cisco cert is sadly not an automatic ticket for a job. Then again, nothing is.
However, if you’ve decided you want to go the networking route, the certs are good to have - gives your resume a better chance. And even if you end up doing other stuff with computers (I’ve never met anyone in IT who actually did what he thought he’d be doing when he started), knowing networking is useful.
If you’re trying to land your first IT job, you have to bring something to the table. If you consider networking interesting, Cisco certs seem a logical choice. Plus the academy class is a chance to get contacts, to network in the non-Cisco sense.
If this seems less than overly optimistic, well - the job market is pretty tough now. OTOH, I’m seeing indicators that technology investments have been put off for so long now that things will have to change.
FWIW, I’ve done Cisco networking for about a decade, and I never even thought about certs until a few years ago (except for the CCIE, which has been a project on-and-off for far too long, now…).
S. Norman
(CCNP, CCDA, written CCIE lab qualification.)
Spiny said it better than I could, but I’d like to add that there are quite a few certification mills still churning out students, so getting some other experience would be a good idea. The market is tough because the implosion of the dotcoms and general badness in the economy have turned a lot of very qualified people loose on the street and the demand isn’t there to meet them.