If Cisco training is your aspiration, but you’ve not yet worked with routers or network switches, you should first attempt the Cisco CCNA qualification. This teaches you the knowledge you need to understand routers. The world wide web is built up of many routers, and big organisations with many locations also rely on them to allow their networks of computers to communicate.

You might end up joining an internet service provider or a large commercial venture that’s on many locations but still needs contact. Both types of jobs command good salaries.

Getting your Cisco CCNA is the right level in this instance – don’t be pushed into attempting your CCNP for now. Get a couple of years experience behind you first, then you will know if you need to train up to this level. Should that be the case, you’ll have a much better chance of succeeding – as your experience will help you greatly.

If you’re considering a training company which is still using workshops as a benefit of their course, then listen to these difficulties encountered by most students:

* Constant travelling to and from the centre – often very long trips.

* If you’re working, then Monday to Friday workshops cause problems at work. Typically you are facing 2-3 days at a time as well.

* Let’s not disregard lost holiday time. Often, we get 4 weeks annual leave. If half is given up to classes, then we aren’t going to be doing much vacationing.

* Classes usually become quickly full, leaving us with the ‚2nd best‘ solution.

* You may prefer to move at a somewhat more suitable pace – rather than be dictated to by the rest of the class. Sometimes this causes a lot of tension amongst the class.

* The cost of travel – driving to and from the training centre together with several days accommodation can mount up every time you have to go. Assuming just 5-10 centre-days at a cost of 35 pounds for an over-night room, plus 40 pounds petrol and food at 15 pounds, we find an extra four to nine hundred pounds of hidden costs that we now have to fund.

* Training privacy is often very important to many trainees. You don’t want to give up any job advancement, income boosts or achievement in your job because of your studies. If your work discovers you’re putting yourself through accreditation in another area entirely, what do you think they’ll do?

* Who amongst us hasn’t avoided putting our hand’s up, because we wanted to look smarter?

* Working and living away – a fair few attendees need to live or work somewhere else for certain parts of their study. Days in-centre are hard to get to, yet the monies have already been handed over with your initial fees.

Why don’t you simply watch and study with industry specialists one-on-one through videoed modules, working on them at a time that’s convenient for you and you alone. You can study from home on your desktop PC or why not in the garden on a laptop. Any questions that pop up, just utilise the 24×7 Support (that should come with any technical program.) You don’t have to worry about any note-taking – all the lessons and background info are laid out on a plate. If you need to cover something again, just go for it. While this won’t take away every little difficulty, it unquestionably reduces stress and eases things. You also have reduced travel, hassle and costs.

The market provides an excess of job availability in IT. Arriving at the correct choice for yourself is a mammoth decision. Working through a list of IT job-titles is a complete waste of time. Surely, most of us don’t even know what our own family members do for a living – so what chance do we have in understanding the intricacies of a particular IT career. Achieving any kind of right answer will only come through a meticulous study across many changing factors:

* Your individual personality and interests – what work-oriented areas please or frustrate you.

* Are you aiming to realise a specific aim – like working from home as quickly as possible?

* Where is the salary on a scale of importance – is it the most important thing, or is day-to-day enjoyment higher up on the scale of your priorities?

* Considering all that IT covers, it’s a requirement that you can understand the differences.

* Our advice is to think deeply about the level of commitment that you will set aside for your education.

To be honest, it’s obvious that the only real way to seek advice on these matters is via a conversation with an experienced advisor that understands computing (and specifically it’s commercial needs and requirements.)

Many students assume that the school and FE college track is the way they should go. Why then are commercially accredited qualifications beginning to overtake it? As we require increasingly more effective technological know-how, industry has had to move to specialist courses that can only be obtained from the actual vendors – that is companies such as Adobe, Microsoft, CISCO and CompTIA. Often this saves time and money for the student. Clearly, a reasonable amount of associated detail must be learned, but precise specialisation in the areas needed gives a vendor trained person a huge edge.

As long as an employer is aware what work they need doing, then they simply need to advertise for someone with a specific qualification. Syllabuses all have to conform to the same requirements and can’t change from one establishment to the next (as academic syllabuses often do).