What is the reason why academic qualifications are being replaced by more commercial certifications? With 3 and 4 year academic degree costs spiralling out of control, plus the industry's recognition that key company training often has more relevance in the commercial field, there has been a great increase in Microsoft, CompTIA, CISCO and Adobe accredited training programmes that create knowledgeable employees at a fraction of the cost and time involved. Many degrees, as a example, often get bogged down in a lot of loosely associated study - and much too wide a syllabus. This prevents a student from learning the core essentials in sufficient depth.

When it comes down to the nitty-gritty: Authorised IT qualifications give employers exactly what they're looking for - it says what you do in the title: i.e. I am a 'Microsoft Certified Professional' in 'Planning and Maintaining a Windows 2003 Infrastructure'. Therefore employers can look at the particular needs they have and what certifications are required to fulfil that.

IT has become amongst the most stimulating and innovative industries that you can get into right now. To be working on the cutting-edge of technology is to be a part of the massive changes affecting everyone who lives in the 21st century. We've barely started to get a feel for how technology is going to shape our lives. Computers and the Internet will massively alter the way we regard and interrelate with the world as a whole over the years to come.

If making decent money is high on your wish list, you will be happy to know that the average salary for the majority of IT staff is much higher than salaries in other market sectors. Demand for appropriately qualified IT professionals is assured for many years to come, because of the substantial development in IT dependency in commerce and the very large skills gap still present.

To a lot of people looking at getting into IT as a profession, basic networking is the starting point. Until you understand exactly how a Computer functions and 'communicates' with other Computers, anything else is probably nonsense. If you have got effective literacy skills, you'll find packages like CompTIA's A+ & 'N+' provides you with an ideal grounding to start out on your career path. They're covered under the CompTIA pages on this website.

Moving forward you can choose to follow the MS MCSE or MCSA track if you're focused on 'software', or the Cisco CCNA or CCNP path if you're interested in hardware. Although, it must be noted that a thorough understanding of MS networks is basically essential for most network environments, mainly because of MS's dominance in this market. Again, these qualifications are discussed in depth on their respective pages within this web-site.

Equally of course you could possibly fine tune your Wi-Fi (wire-less) skillsets by taking qualifications such as the 'CWNA' and 'CWNP', or keep going along the 'CompTIA' route with Server+, Security+ or Linux+ .

Quite often, students have issues with one aspect of their training very rarely considered: The method used to 'segment' the courseware before being delivered to your home. You may think that it makes sense (when study may take one to three years to gain full certified status,) that a training provider will issue one section at a time, as you complete each part. Although: How would they react if you didn't complete everything at the speed they required? Sometimes their preference of study order doesn't work as well as some other order of studying might.

For the perfect solution, you want ALL the study materials up-front - so you'll have them all to come back to at any time in the future - irrespective of any schedule. This also allows you to vary the order in which you attack each section if you find another route more intuitive.