CompTIA A + has a total of four exams and areas of study, but you’re just expected to get your exams in 2 of them to be considered A+ competent. As this is the case, most training colleges simply offer two. But giving you all four options will give you a far greater perspective of the subject, which you’ll find vital in industry.
Once on the CompTIA A+, you will develop an understanding of how to build, fix, repair and work in antistatic conditions. You’ll also cover fault finding and diagnostics, through both hands-on and remote access. You may also want to think about supplementing the A+ with Network + as it will enable you to work with networks, which means greater employment benefits.
Ensure all your accreditations are commercially valid and current – don’t even consider courses which lead to some in-house certificate (which is as useless as if you’d printed it yourself). Only fully recognised qualifications from the likes of Microsoft, Adobe, CompTIA and Cisco will have any meaning to employers.
It’s likely that you probably enjoy fairly practical work – the ‘hands-on’ person. Typically, the trial of reading reference books and manuals is something you’ll make yourself do if you have to, but you really wouldn’t enjoy it. So look for on-screen interactive learning packages if learning from books is not your thing. Memory is vastly improved when multiple senses are involved – this has been an accepted fact in expert circles for many years.
Study programs now come in disc format, where your computer becomes the centre of your learning. Video streaming means you will be able to see the instructor presenting exactly how to do something, and then practice yourself – in an interactive lab. It makes sense to see examples of the courseware provided before you purchase a course. What you want are video tutorials, instructor demo’s and audio-visual elements backed up by interactive lab’s.
Avoiding training that is delivered purely online is generally a good idea. Ideally, you should opt for CD and DVD ROM courseware where offered, so you can use them wherever and whenever you want – it’s not wise to be held hostage to your broadband being ‘up’ 100 percent of the time.
Far too many companies are all about the certification, and completely avoid what you actually need – which is a commercial career or job. Always start with where you want to get to – too many people focus on the journey. It’s common, in many cases, to thoroughly enjoy one year of training and then find yourself trapped for decades in a job you hate, entirely because you stumbled into it without the correct research when it was needed – at the start.
Stay focused on what it is you’re trying to achieve, and build your study action-plan from that – don’t do it back-to-front. Stay focused on the end-goal – making sure you’re training for a job you’ll still be enjoying many years from now. It’s good advice for all students to speak to experienced industry personnel before they make a decision on a particular retraining program. This is essential to ensure it has the required elements for the chosen career path.
Don’t accept anything less than the most up to date Microsoft (or any other key organisation’s) authorised simulation materials and exam preparation packages. Some students can get thrown by trying to prepare themselves with questions that aren’t recognised by official sources. Sometimes, the question formats and phraseology is unfamiliar and it’s important to prepare yourself for this. Why don’t you test your depth of understanding by doing quizzes and simulated exams to get you ready for the proper exam.
Quite often, students have issues with one area of their training very rarely considered: The way the training is divided into chunks and packaged off through the post. Many companies enrol you into some sort of program spread over 1-3 years, and courier the materials in pieces as you get to the end of each exam. This sounds reasonable until you consider the following: What could you expect if you didn’t actually complete every section at the proposed pace? And maybe you’ll find their order of completion doesn’t work as well as an alternative path could be.
For future safety and flexibility, most students now choose to request that all their modules (now paid for) are delivered immediately, and not in stages. That means it’s down to you in which order and at what speed you want to finish things.
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