https://blog.google/topics/grow-with...aign=IT%20Cert
49.00 a month. 8-12 months. Any thoughts??
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https://blog.google/topics/grow-with...aign=IT%20Cert
49.00 a month. 8-12 months. Any thoughts??
No hands-on = worthless as far as I'm concerned.
I've had to swap CPUs myself once because the tech sent couldn't do it...
Through some miracle he managed to swap a mobo, but then he couldn't insert the CPUs in the sockets and asked for help...
And then he tried to install the heatsink. Oh boy, nobody taught him how to do that, he put thermal paste like tooth paste on top of the CPUs and tried to spread it with a plastic knife, at which point I had to stop him and teach him how to clean the old paste and how a tiny dot of paste is enough. He didn't believe it would be enough to cover the entire CPU and I had to take the sink out and show him the coverage.
I swear I'm not making this shit up...
that's really interesting. I have a helper who is lacking in some of this level one support knowledge (though he's helpful in other ways) I'd really like to get him up to speed on this stuff, but I don't have time to really train him because I'm still handling a lot of the level one support stuff along with everything else I'm supposed to be doing as sysadmin.....Quote:
Originally Posted by Mobile PC
So I may pitch this to our supervisor as something to enroll him in......
then I just have to teach him our particular procedures....like how and why we network things a certain way not explain to him what a 24 bit subnet mask is.....
I once (about 20 years ago) did a hardware upgrade on a Win98 machine on this mid-20's hottie's kitchen table, and she watched with a keen eye. Having watched everything I did, she decided she was a PC Repair Tech now, and proceeded to flirt her way into a corporate level IT Dept. job. She worked on one computer which ended up actually needing a new mouse, and by the time she finished with it, plugged it in on the bench, turned it on, it literally caught fire! She was a legend among techs in Fairbanks, Alaska for quite some time.Quote:
Originally Posted by CeeBee
So yeah, I know about not making stuff up. Real life has enough real weird going on without having to even embellish it. Gotta love it!
I've witnessed one instance, floppy connector shifted by 1 pin and old style power supply - instant smoke and wires catching on fire.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tekboy
But that was just an accident, not lack of knowledge.
I agree about hands on being important, but what I think you guys are missing here is this - at least to me - does not appear to be a course for a bench tech PC technician. This is a course for level 1 corporate support. That's a job that primarily happens over the phone and these days most level 1 corp techs don't touch hardware other then to replace a keyboard / mouse / monitor or perhaps the whole PC tower. Most enterprise corporate environments rely on service companies, contracts and extended warranties to have hardware physically worked on.
We are in the middle of a big transition from operating in a small to medium business mode to full on enterprise. My team has been discouraged from touching hardware. I'm actually in the middle of a negotiating process to get our vendor to install upgraded SSDs, Video Card, and RAM in the PCs we purchase, tag them with our asset tag number, image them, warehouse them for us, package and ship them directly to our end users.
In a corporate environment if a CPU goes bad, you're not swapping it. Your imaging a new pc, putting it in place and logging the user in. Folder redirection, exchange and other GPOs give them the exact same experience as the pc you took out.
Then you're calling your service company to come onsite and replace the CPU on that bad PC.
I agree you can't learn to be a bench tech or a technician for one of those aforementioned maintenance companies through courses, but I do think you can learn to troubleshoot and work fairly effectively in a corporate helpdesk setting.
The lack of hands on experience leads to a shitty tech support person who has no clue what to do outside a script - or can't understand an already diagnosed or obvious (to anyone who knows) issue because it's not in the script. The obvious "i can ping the first ISP gateway but can't get further" comes to mind, and they start by rebooting the modem, router, computer...
I agree but without a basic understanding of what a ping is, what it does, how gateways work etc that doesn't mean a whole lot. A basic understanding of the OSI layer, and hardware layer, subnetting etc - just general understand of theory and "how things works" that's what this course seems like it's offering especially when looking at the course outline.Quote:
Originally Posted by CeeBee
In my case I've got a kid working on my team who is lacking this kind of networking understanding. he's doing a lot of hands on and he's able to fix things he's done before because he's been taught to fix that specific scenario. What he lacks is the basic understanding underneath that allows him to troubleshoot problems he hasn't received help with before.....
He can install and adopt wifi APs but when I start talking about how we are routing them and the acls we are going to put in place on the router he is lost.....
He is the ideal candidate for such courses. However their main target is the crowd looking to get started in the field, zero previous experience... And that's guaranteed to produce bad results.
I learned backwards. Went to work part time for a buddy who had a retail repair shop. Had some corporate customers also. I learned how to repair computers, hardware first, then the operating system. Then I had to teach myself subnets, networking, and everything else. If you put me in an corporate enviroment with Active Directory, I would be lost. I'm sure I could grasp it, but with my customers, I have no need.
Doing work for Onforce, we get 3 to 8 jobs a week from them. They pay 24-48 hours after completion. Walmart, Pet Supplies Plus, other retail outlets. Just setup a laptop in Ohio Media School.
And I agree with Cee Bee, you can't learn without hands on.
absolutely, you need hands on to be effective at anything...be it IT or architecture, engineering...basically anything....Quote:
Originally Posted by Mobile PC
I learned the same way you did. I went back to school to get an associates degree in networking and for the most part I was miles ahead of everyone in my classes from having some bench tech type experience and pc support helpdesk stuff under my belt....at the end of the program I felt like there were only a small handful (like 3-4) people who I thought could step into a sysadmin / netadmin job and that was including myself. But I did feel like they could get on a level one support position learn the ropes, get some hands on experience and work up from there.....
that's kinda how I view this course...
Man, this is almost exactly how it went down for me. I lucked out and had a great mentor.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mobile PC
I was driving delivery truck and really wanted to build myself a computer. Not knowing the challenges back in the day, I built an AMD K6-2 machine with an Nvidia video card. Back then that was no bueno as Nvidia did not play well with non-Intel chipsets.
I went to the local PC repair guy for help. He was kind enough to help me and not charge me, to the dismay of his minion that mocked me for not knowing. We chatted for a while and had a friendly conversation. One day I thought, I would offer my services part time for free if he trained me. He took me on part time, paid me and showed me the basics. A couple weeks later he fired everyone working for him and offered me a full time position. I was still very green but learning. I accepted the job. I started taking in computers while he was on the road doing repairs. I took it upon myself to start the repairs or at least the diagnostics. I read some stuff online and after about a month, I was training him and designing builds.
He handed me the keys to shop and some networking books and told me that was next. I learned on the go, and started getting certifications after the fact. I don't do so well with book learning but hands on....all day any day. That is the way I prefer to train people at my current job. I can make a list and instructions but hands on always wins.
I've been through training in several fields, my experience is that all training must have an existing foundation to build on.
College was electronics engineering, we had a couple of guys who aced all courses (think the 4.0 GPA kind if there was an equivalent). And one day one of them asked for some help with a TV amplifier he built that wasn't working, and the "hobby" crowd had a good laugh at the crap he built. We did however have a good amount of hands-on lab courses which more or less evened the field between those of us who started as hobbyists and those who just went for the degree.
I started programming BASIC as a hobby in a club when I was 12-13, having your own computer back then was unheard of. It was mostly trial and error with instructors trying to teach some core stuff as a condition to being allowed to play games, but being able to try and fail then repeat until success was key to learning the very basics. And later there was the fun of breaking copy protection from tapes and tweaking code to transfer to floppy... It did help a lot as a start, having to learn c/c++, a bit of Pascal and few microprocessor languages in college was extremely simple when having a foundation.
I started tinkering with computers because I had to, taking out a hard drive and going to a friend was common practice. Once I moved to US I could more easily build and upgrade and help a friend here and there. And I needed to set a small network and share a dialup to 2 computers, that was my entrance to networking.
From that point I wanted to set a real network, with a "server", $50 for NT server administration books and many instances of falling asleep on the closet floor next to the "server" at 5AM helped me have no issue setting up a domain and clients from the scratch. Fast forward few months and the network admin of the company left and I was offered the possibility to help the consultant they brought in with taking care of the 100+ machines and servers. And in a couple of months I was splitting between being network admin and engineering roles. And the learning process never stopped, got into AD environments, performed domain migration, integration with the big corporate etc etc.
At some point I was asked to set up a small intranet website where they had to post some ISO docs, and so web programming began, jumping from c++ to php was piece of cake.
And then there was the day when a colleague asked me to fix his computer with a fried mobo, and I had to decline since fixing it (including my labor) was more expensive than him buying a newer and better machine. That's when I knew I had to look elsewhere, realized that a properly set network will just keep working unless hardware breaks and computers were becoming disposable. At that point I started to shift my focus to software, and luckily enough my then-boss decided to leave and I was offered his position, with the string attached that I had to learn company's ERP and programming for it in the next 2 weeks - which I did, at least enough to handle most of it alone. And then requests to create pages and reports kept coming, and it was mostly web development for me... along with the ERP system and the network and taking care of all computers.
And then I moved to a full programming job that required being a backup network admin, and at my current job it's purely coding. ...Although having the network background was useful to force the network admins to admit that they were messing with the network and screwing some applications in the process of preventing some DDoS attacks, but only when presented with the Wireshark evidence, also useful in being able to make production iOS apps hit my local machine services for debugging instead of the www servers...
Paragraphs save lives.
Oh yeah, I'm in the Grow With Google program. I completed Phase 1 and now in Phase 2. I should probably start a new thread and catch up on all this.
I went to collage for precision sheet metal fabrication so I could get at computers that were more advanced than my old TI-99a. Sucked that collage dry, did 116 credits in 4 quarters with a 4.97 gpa. left there and got a job programming lasers and punches whiles repairing their sneaker net cat-2 NETWORK. Took them through the Windows variations, NT servers and small business servers while building and maintaining the databases, purchasing all softwares, cad/cam drafting, and training all 80 users in their specific software's and hardware issues. If it could have a problem it did and I fixed it. I learned to wire the building, build specific use servers, repair my working machines and our computers and interpret what the users were trying to tell me. Your printers are all mine!
Exciting work with a lot of variables, but they thought they could outsource me, foolish people. So I went to work for a world class gaming company for 5 years as an associate network admin. It was an amazing thing to suddenly have a budget, an amazingly large budget and to be a piece of the pie that served and installed that wonderful world class data center. my dirty little fingers in everybody's pie. Having been out of the field for 6 years now I sometimes miss it greatly, on the other hand it's not rattling around in my head 24/7. But I certainly miss the intellectual challenges greatly. the current job is successful mental suicide...