Looking for entry level Tier 1 positions

rsj1231 said:

Thanks for the tips, I was planning on getting started with certifications this year but hadn't looked into which I should aim for first. I'm doing my bachelors at Towson but only going part time as I have a 3 year old and one on the way and work full time.

Click to expand...

psusra112 said:

Yeah. On the other side, some of my colleagues have had great success in becoming the "Sharepoint guy". Lots of reqs that I see coming across are for Sharepoint folks, especially at the entry level side.

Click to expand...

babalou said:

The GIAC stuff is expensive if you are looking for security stuff. CEH and OSCP are cheaper. Get an OS or two cert, as well. It is sort of like college, you start off with a range of things and then focus on the particular aspect you like. I have my guys start at A+ and then move into desktop OS, then network. They also need to learn the corporate apps at least to give first level support to end users and know how to talk to vendors and parse the vendor BS. Servers and virtualization far down the road...of course companies all do it different.

Here is an example of what I meant by getting a range of things. one department does Management Accounting Systems for clients. Things like Solomon, Great Plains, etc. They are not really IT folks, even though they say they are. They are app super users. They have no concept of issues outside their app. If the app is crashing, they think it is only the app, never thinking about the other possibilities like the disk drive filling up due to the SQL transaction log not shrinking, the virtual host has a bad disk in the RAID10, or the NIC is flaking out. If you have some sort of a wider base, you can focus on one and then know how to resolve more issues due to the fact that you can look beyond your one thing to try to resolve.

Click to expand...