Almalieque wrote:
My bad. I assumed the tech geek audience would be more familiar of IT/IA exams and certifications. Long story short, it's one of the top certs in the IT world and is usually considered one of the top paying certs.
Yeah. It's a biggie if you're going into the security side of IT. The importance of any one certification really depends on what kind of job you're looking for and quite honestly the size of the enterprise itself. At a smaller shop, where there might just be one or two IT guys wearing a lot of different hats, having a security cert is going to be a big plus (although security+, A+, etc would probably be sufficient in that case). At a larger shop, specialization becomes a bigger deal. Which is where the more in depth certs come in.
I'd also recommend taking one of the basic Cisco certs if you can. It's unfortunate that about the only network specific training is also vendor specific (in terms of the routers/switches, but it is what it is). Having a good understanding of network architecture and configuration is useful for anything you're likely to do in IT. Knowing the details of obscure commands to configure routers is not (unless you're specifically going into network installation and configuration obviously), but all the other stuff really is useful. Of course, back in the old days, we'd just drop an O'Reilly's book on you and tell you to read it.
Other areas you might look into would be virtualization and cloud computing. Both of those areas have grown massively in the last decade and likely will continue to. Knowing how to configure VM servers and how to build and maintain abstraction code for cloud use is increasingly beneficial. Of course, understanding the hardware layers involved (SAN/NAS/etc) can help too. I've seen more than a few environments fail utterly because someone did the equivalent of crossing the streams at the hardware layer without thinking about how the data would need to move across it later on. There's a ton of cross connected subfields in IT work. Get's confusing sometimes, but if you can get your foot in the door, and then take every opportunity to increase your knowledge along the way, it's pretty darn rewarding.