Working in IT has been popular for a long time. This is not surprising, given a number of advantages in IT. Thanks to the constant flow of new technology, people with up-to-date skills are almost always in demand. The salaries in IT are often generous, especially once you get passed the entry-level. Lately, the possibility of working from home has become an option for many people.
Getting one or more IT certifications is one of the most popular ways of advancing your IT career. Nowadays, almost every vendor of importance has their own certification program. Novell was the first company with a popular certification, the CNE (Certified Novell Engineer), back in the early 1990s. Before Novell launched UnixWare CNE stood for Certified Netware Engineer.
Today, the two most popular vendor certification programs are the Cisco and Microsoft certifications. A number of vendor independent certifications have been launched, the CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) is very popular in IT security. But almost every role in IT has its own certifications, e.g. project management.
A number of studies have showed that certified IT professionals earn significantly more than their non-certified colleagues. But it still worth remembering that if you only have an IT certification without any relevant work experience, you are unlikely to get hired. Employers prefer people with relevant work experience. And if you are certified as well, your chances of getting hired are in most cases very good.
Is it difficult to become certified? It depends, both on the certification and on your knowledge. Some certifications require that you have attended (and paid) some specific training while some others require that you have a number of years of relevant work experience. Fortunately, most certifications don’t demand such things. All you need to do is to pass one or more exams, sometimes also lab exercises, to get certified. So as long as you some knowledge about the subject and do reasonable preparations for the exams you should pass most exams. In most cases, if you get a self-study book about the certification and buy some exam questions, your preparations are good enough to get certified.
All the popular IT certifications have study guides, often both in paper format and electronic format. Many of them have training videos or CBTs as well. Generally, the most valuable preparation you can do is to get as many potential exam questions as possible and go through the questions. Once you understand the questions, and the right answers, you are well on your way to the certification.
