Market and Investment

Are you toying with the idea of doing an MCSE? It’s very possible then that you’ll fall into one of two camps: You could already be in IT and you should formalise your skills with an MCSE. Or this might be your initial foray into the IT environment, and you’ve discovered there is a great need for qualified people.

As you try to find out more, you will discover training companies that compromise their offerings by not upgrading their courses to the latest Microsoft version. Stay away from training companies like these as you’ll have problems with the present exams. If you’re learning from an old version, it will make it very difficult to pass.

Don’t rush into buying a course for MCSE before you feel comfortable. Set your sights on finding a computer training company that will put effort into advising you on the most suitable training path for you.

Most of us would love to think that our jobs will remain safe and our work futures are protected, but the growing reality for the majority of jobs throughout England right now seems to be that the marketplace is far from secure.

It’s possible though to find security at market-level, by digging for areas of high demand, together with a lack of qualified workers.

Taking the computing sector as an example, the last e-Skills analysis demonstrated a national skills shortage across the UK of around 26 percent. To explain it in a different way, this highlights that Great Britain can only find three qualified staff for every 4 jobs that are available at the moment.

Fully taught and commercially accredited new staff are thus at an absolute premium, and in all likelihood it will stay that way for much longer.

In reality, gaining new qualifications in IT throughout the coming years is most likely the best career move you’ll ever make.

Throw out a salesperson that offers any particular course without a thorough investigation to gain understanding of your current abilities and level of experience. Ensure that they have a wide-enough choice of training products so they can solve your training issues.

With a strong background, or maybe some live experience (possibly even some previous certification?) then obviously the level you’ll need to start at will be quite dissimilar from someone with no background whatsoever.

Always consider starting with a user-skills course first. It will usually make the learning curve a bit more manageable.

Students hopeful to start an IT career generally aren’t sure what path to consider, or even what area to achieve their certification in.

Perusing a list of odd-sounding and meaningless job titles is just a waste of time. The vast majority of us have no idea what the neighbours do for a living - so we’re in the dark as to the intricacies of a new IT role.

Usually, the way to come at this predicament properly stems from an in-depth talk over several areas:

* Which type of individual you are - which things you really enjoy, and on the other side of the coin - what you hate to do.

* Do you hope to achieve an important objective - like being your own boss sometime soon?

* How important is salary to you - is it of prime importance, or does job satisfaction rate further up on your priority-list?

* There are many areas to train for in Information Technology - you’ll need to gain a solid grounding on what makes them different.

* You need to take in what is different for all the training areas.

In all honesty, you’ll find the only real way to investigate these areas tends to be through a good talk with an advisor that understands IT (and more importantly the commercial needs.)

Many people are under the impression that the state educational track is the way they should go. Why then are qualifications from the commercial sector becoming more popular with employers?

With fees and living expenses for university students climbing ever higher, plus the industry’s increasing awareness that accreditation-based training most often has much more commercial relevance, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in Adobe, Microsoft, CISCO and CompTIA based training programmes that educate students at a much reduced cost in terms of money and time.

Clearly, a necessary degree of associated information has to be learned, but precise specifics in the required areas gives a commercially trained student a distinct advantage.

The crux of the matter is this: Authorised IT qualifications provide exactly what an employer needs - the title says it all: for example, I am a ‘Microsoft Certified Professional’ in ‘Planning and Maintaining a Windows 2003 Infrastructure’. Therefore companies can identify exactly what they need and which qualifications are required to fulfil that.

You have to make sure that all your accreditations are commercially valid and current - don’t bother with studies which lead to some in-house certificate (which is as useless as if you’d printed it yourself).

Only fully recognised certification from the major players like Microsoft, CompTIA, Cisco and Adobe will open the doors to employers.