Considering a career move

I'm currently freelancing graphic design as my "day job" while working on learning IM on here as my most recent endeavor.

I was looking at taking some courses offered at a local technical school. The course is called "CISCO/ Networking Academies" but the website hasn't been updated in some time and is woefully brief on what the class actually entails.

Three major questions for BHW:

* Anyone have a guess what the course might actually entail, and what skills I might need going into it? (good at math, whatever)

* Any idea what a resulting job likely entails?

* Is a certification (which is what they are offering) enough to actually land an entry level position in said profession? Or am I wasting my time if I'm not going after a degree?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Cisco certifications are usually pretty broadly accepted and should be able to help land you a job.

Personally unless you enjoy network maintainence and troubleshooting I'd stick with graphic design until you have your IM business underway.

I have passed three CISCO Networking Academy courses (one course per one year in the University) and I personally found them extremely boring. If you want to work with command line and hardware configuring routers and switches all day long, go ahead!

Your math skills are of course a good asset but you won't need them much. The hardest stuff you'll face in the first courses is calculating sizes of subnets, subnet masks, IP address ranges and so on. In the first three courses you will work countless hours simulating different kinds of networks using CISCO Packet Tracer:



If you take a few of the first courses you will most likely be able to work as some sort of network technician in a small company but you will need a few years of studying and experience to get more responsibility and work as a network engineer or architect. Here's a great page for you to see what courses you need to take and how long they take:

http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/netacad/get_involved/careerPath.html

I have finnished a Cisco course IT Essetials or something like that , almost all the things they were presented to me I already known them , but there were some interesting things I learned there.
Skills you will need: you just need to know basics about computers.
A future job after this courses will be IT technician
The certifications you will get (in my case the national house of insurance in my region offered me a job to take care of their computers).

Dr_Scythe said:

Cisco certifications are usually pretty broadly accepted and should be able to help land you a job.

Personally unless you enjoy network maintainence and troubleshooting I'd stick with graphic design until you have your IM business underway.

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I don't think I'd be bothered by it. I like puzzles, personally, but at the same time this is less of a "what I fully intend to do for a career" so much as it is a "what the rational part of my brain has promised it will do as a backup plan" move. I wanted to go to school before I decided I was going to jump into IM. Now I think the plan will be to do the school thing and make it a goal to have my business up and running so well that I won't need to actually use said education.

Thanks everyone though. I'll go ahead with the class then and hopefully, I'll never actually need to look for a job.

JacksonMalloy said:

Thanks everyone though. I'll go ahead with the class then and hopefully, I'll never actually need to look for a job.

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That's really a wise thing to do, you shouldn't rely on IM because everything changes and some day you might realize that you'd need another job but without education it would be hard to get a decent one!