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Learn yourself hireable: Top tips for improving your tech appeal

No time? No budget? No problem – get yourself skilled up

Self-learning

The good thing about associate exams is that they can be had for a modest sum and can be accomplished with self-paced learning and modest financial and hardware requirements. An example of this the Cisco CCNA exam, which has no course attendance requirements, but is extremely well-regarded on CVs and can act as a differentiator amongst potential candidates. The hardware and learning materials are plentiful and can be ideal to give that CV a bit more “stand-out ability”. The typical cost for acquired course material for introductory courses is less than £300 per course when you factor in books and the outlay for the exam itself.

Vendor-agnostic courses and exams

Depending on your situation, specific vendor-provided courses and accreditations may not always be the best choice. Sometimes, the smarter money is spent on less technical, but more strategic courses. Organisations, especially larger ones, tend to see value in some industry-wide but fairly non-technical certifications. The big ones in this arena are ITIL.

Most people have at some point heard of ITIL. ITIL's strength is that it is vendor agnostic and is an open methodology of infrastructure process management.

The great thing about ITIL foundation level is that it well regarded and achieving the required level of experience isn’t too onerous. This is especially true if you currently work in an ITIL environment. ITIL is very popular, is seen as quite an easy exam to take and it is often explicitly asked for in many job adverts. It gives you the advantage. The cost for ITIL accreditation? Not a lot.

There are several books on the subject, including the definitive one produced by HM Stationery Office, which costs less than £20 delivered from the likes of Amazon. There are even online training courses that are very inexpensive.

As ITIL is a completely vendor-agnostic system, the exam is refreshingly cheap at a rather reasonable £145. An hour and a bit later – if you have done all your swotting up – you can be the proud owner of an ITIL Foundation certificate. It is a straightforward electronic exam with no real complexity or devious questions, just a simple multiple-choice structure to test your understanding of the subject matter.

A lot of getting new certifications is about applying yourself and committing your own time and resources in the short term in order to gain a better-paying job or a better position.

Even if you are not really the self-learning type, then the options I’ve outlined here should help you get some early wins to bolster your experience and confidence. For those that don’t like book learning, there are other options, including local colleges, which tend to offer at least some courses useful to IT administrators – it isn’t all Word processing. A quick scout around my local colleges shows they offer several Microsoft Administrator courses as well as Cisco and general IT.

The world, as they don’t say, is your classroom. ®

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