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Thread: Google IT School

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    Senior Member Mobile PC's Avatar
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    Google IT School

    https://blog.google/topics/grow-with...aign=IT%20Cert

    49.00 a month. 8-12 months. Any thoughts??

  2. #2
    Senior Member CeeBee's Avatar
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    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...
    Last edited by CeeBee; 01-17-2018 at 06:17 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mobile PC View Post
    https://blog.google/topics/grow-with...aign=IT%20Cert

    49.00 a month. 8-12 months. Any thoughts??
    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.....

    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.....

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    Senior Member Tekboy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by CeeBee View Post
    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...
    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.

    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!

  5. #5
    Senior Member CeeBee's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tekboy View Post
    plugged it in on the bench, turned it on, it literally caught fire
    I've witnessed one instance, floppy connector shifted by 1 pin and old style power supply - instant smoke and wires catching on fire.
    But that was just an accident, not lack of knowledge.
    Last edited by CeeBee; 01-26-2018 at 04:01 PM.

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    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.

  7. #7
    Senior Member CeeBee's Avatar
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    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...

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    Quote Originally Posted by CeeBee View Post
    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.


    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.....

  9. #9
    Senior Member CeeBee's Avatar
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    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.

  10. #10
    Senior Member Mobile PC's Avatar
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    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.

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