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Thinking of taking an MCSE? If the answer’s ‘yes’, there’s a good chance that you’re probably in 1 of 2 situations: You’re someone with a certain amount of knowledge and you’d like to consolidate your skill-set with the MCSE qualification. In contrast you could be completely new to the computer workplace, but it’s apparent to you there’s a huge demand for certified networking professionals.

As you do your searches, you’ll come across training companies that reduce their costs by failing to use the most up-to-date Microsoft version. Steer clear of such training providers as it will create challenges for you at exam time. If you are studying an old version, it will make it very difficult to pass. The focus of a training company should primarily be on the absolute best they can for their trainees, and the whole company should care about what they do. Career study isn’t just about passing exams - the procedure must also be geared towards guiding you on the most valid way forward for you.

A successful training package will undoubtedly have Microsoft (or key company) exam preparation systems. Don’t go for training programs depending on unauthorised exam preparation questions. The way they’re phrased can be completely unlike authorised versions - and this could lead to potential problems once in the actual exam. A way to build self-confidence is if you verify how much you know by doing tests and practice exams to prepare you for taking the actual exam.

It’s important to understand: the training program or a qualification is not what you’re looking for; the job or career that you want to end up in is. A lot of colleges seem to over-emphasise just the training course. You may train for one year and then end up doing a job for a lifetime. Ensure you avoid the fatal error of taking what may be an ‘interesting’ training program only to spend 20 years doing something you don’t even enjoy!

Prioritise understanding the expectations of your industry. What particular certifications they’ll want you to gain and how you’ll go about getting some commercial experience. It’s definitely worth spending time considering how far you wish to build your skill-set as it will present a very specific set of exams. It’s good advice for all students to speak to an experienced industry advisor before they embark on a training course. This helps to ensure it contains the commercially required skills for that career path.

Ensure all your qualifications are commercially valid and current - don’t bother with courses which lead to some in-house certificate (which is as useless as if you’d printed it yourself). Only nationally recognised certification from the likes of Microsoft, Adobe, CompTIA and Cisco will mean anything to employers.

We need to make this very clear: You have to get round-the-clock 24×7 instructor support. We can tell you that you’ll strongly regret it if you don’t. You’ll be waiting ages for an answer with email based support, and telephone support is usually to a call-centre who will make some notes and then email an advisor - who will call back over the next day or so (assuming you’re there), at a time suitable for them. This is all next to useless if you’re sitting there confused over an issue and only have a specific time you can study.

Top training companies have many support offices across multiple time-zones. Online access provides the interactive interface to seamlessly link them all, no matter what time you login, help is just a click away, with no hassle or contact issues. Search out a company that is worth purchasing from. As only round-the-clock 24×7 support truly delivers for technical programs.

An important area that is sometimes not even considered by potential students weighing up a particular programme is ‘training segmentation’. This basically means the method used to break up the program for delivery to you, which vastly changes where you end up. By and large, you will purchase a course that takes between and 1 and 3 years and receive a module at a time. It seems to make sense on one level, but consider these issues: Maybe the order of study insisted on by the company won’t suit you. It may be difficult to get through all the elements within their timetable?

In a perfect world, you’d get ALL the training materials right at the beginning - giving you them all to come back to in the future - at any time you choose. Variations can then be made to the order that you complete each objective where a more intuitive path can be found.

With an abundance of IT and computer courses on offer these days, it’s best to take advice from a company that can help you decide on the right one for you. Reputable organisations will talk thoroughly through the different job roles that could be right for you, before offering you a training program that can take you where you want to go. Why not try Microsoft User Skills packages, or take a career track and specialise. Plain speaking courses will help you achieve the goals you set yourself.

By taking advantage of the latest training methods and getting rid of wasteful procedures, there’s a new style of course provider supplying a better brand of teaching and assistance for very competitive prices.

If there’s any chance you’ll be enrolling with a training provider who is still using workshops as part of their program, then consider these issues encountered by the majority of trainees:

* Constant travelling - hundreds of miles most times.

* Asking for frequent time off work - typical companies provide weekday availability and group several days in a chunk. This can be hard for a lot of working people, especially if travelling time is added into the mix.

* If we get 4 weeks annual leave, giving half of them to training classes means we’ll be hard-pushed to get a holiday with our families.

* Workshop days often end up over full.

* Tension can run high in many classes where students want to progress at their own pace.

* Many students report that the (not inconsiderable) costs of getting to and from the training centre whilst paying for accommodation and food gets very expensive.

* It’s important to maintain privacy. We shouldn’t risk throwing away any advancement that we’re owed while we retrain.

* Most of us feel awkward about asking questions in a room full of other trainees - because none of us wants to look like we don’t understand.

* Working and living away - a fair few students need to live or work away for certain parts of their training. Classes become very difficult then, yet the money has already changed hands with your initial fees.

Why don’t you simply watch and be taught by tutors one-on-one from pre-filmed lessons, studying them when it suits you - not somebody else. Do them at home on your PC or why not in the garden on a laptop. If you’ve got questions, then logon to the 24×7 support facility (that we hope you’ll insist on with any technical courses.) No matter how often you have to re-cover a topic, filmed instructors will never get annoyed or frustrated! And remember, with this method, there’s no need to take notes. Everything’s laid out there for immediate use. Could it be simpler: No wasted time or money, travelling is avoided; and of course you get a much more stress-free learning environment.

Watch out that all exams you’re considering doing will be commercially viable and are up-to-date. The ‘in-house’ certifications provided by many companies are usually worthless. Unless the accreditation comes from a conglomerate such as Microsoft, Adobe, CompTIA or Cisco, then it’s likely it won’t be commercially viable - because it won’t give an employer any directly-useable skills.

Considering how a program is ‘delivered’ to you isn’t always given the appropriate level of importance. How is the courseware broken down? And in what order and how fast does each element come? A release of your materials stage by stage, according to your own speed is how things will normally arrive. Of course, this sounds sensible, but you might like to consider this: It’s not unusual for trainees to realise that their providers ’standard’ path of training doesn’t suit. It’s often the case that a slightly different order suits them better. And what if you don’t get to the end at the pace they expect?

In a perfect world, you want everything at the start - giving you them all to come back to in the future - at any time you choose. This also allows you to vary the order in which you attack each section as and when something more intuitive seems right for you.

Network and computer support staff are ever more in demand in this country, as businesses have come to depend on their technical advice and skills. The nation’s requirement for increasing numbers of skilled and qualified individuals multiplies, as human beings become ever more dependent on PC’s in the modern world.

Trainees looking at this market can be very practical by nature, and won’t enjoy sitting at a desk in class, and slogging through piles of books. If you identify with this, try the newer style of interactive study, where everything is presented via full motion video. Learning psychology studies show that much more of what we learn in remembered when we receive multi-sensorial input, and we get physically involved with the study process.

Learning is now available on CD and DVD discs, where everything is taught on your PC. Using video-streaming, you can sit back and watch the teachers showing you precisely how to do something, and then practice yourself - in an interactive lab. It’s imperative to see some example materials from any company that you may want to train through. Be sure that they contain full motion videos of instructors demonstrating the topic with lab’s to practice the skills in.

Often, companies will only use just online versions of their training packages; and while this is acceptable much of the time, imagine the problems when you don’t have access to the internet or you get intermittent problems and speed issues. It is usually safer to have CD and DVD ROM materials which will solve that problem.

A valuable training program will undoubtedly have fully authorised exam preparation packages. Avoid depending on non-official exam preparation questions. The type of questions asked is often somewhat different - and this could lead to potential problems in the actual examination. Be sure to ask for testing modules so you can test your knowledge at any point. Practice exams help to build your confidence - then you’re much more at ease with the real thing.

An all too common mistake that we encounter all too often is to look for the actual course to take, instead of focusing on where they want to get to. Colleges are full of unaware students that chose a program because it looked interesting - rather than what would get them the job they want. It’s common, for example, to find immense satisfaction in a year of study only to end up putting 20 long years into a job you hate, as a consequence of not performing the correct research when you should’ve - at the outset.

Take time to understand how you feel about career progression and earning potential, and how ambitious you are. You should understand what industry expects from you, what qualifications are required and in what way you can develop commercial experience. All students are advised to speak with a skilled professional before deciding on their training course. This is essential to ensure it contains the commercially required skills for the chosen career path.

Looking at the myriad of choice out there, does it really shock us that a large percentage of trainees don’t really understand the best career path they could be successful with. Scanning a list of IT job-titles is a complete waste of time. The vast majority of us have no idea what our next-door neighbours do at work each day - so what chance do we have in understanding the subtleties of a new IT role. Often, the key to unlocking this question in the best manner stems from a thorough talk over some important points:

* Your hobbies and interests - often these point towards what possibilities will provide a happy working life.

* What time-frame are you looking at for your training?

* What scale of importance is the salary - is it of prime importance, or is job satisfaction a little higher on the priority-scale?

* Considering all that Information Technology encapsulates, it’s obvious you’ll need to be able to absorb how they differ.

* You’ll also need to think hard about the level of commitment that you will set aside for the accreditation program.

For the average person, dissecting each of these concepts will require meeting with a professional who can investigate each area with you. And we’re not only talking about the accreditations - but also the commercial requirements and expectations of industry too.

We need to make this very clear: You have to get round-the-clock 24×7 instructor support. You will have so many problems later if you let this one slide. Many only provide email support (too slow), and telephone support is usually to a call-centre which will make some notes and then email an advisor - who will attempt to call you within 24-48 hrs, when it’s convenient to them. This is not a lot of use if you’re stuck with a particular problem and have a one hour time-slot in which to study.

We recommend looking for colleges that utilise many support facilities active in different time-zones. These should be integrated to enable simple one-stop access together with round-the-clock access, when you need it, without any problems. Don’t under any circumstances take a lower level of service. Online 24×7 support is the only way to go for technical courses. Perhaps you don’t intend to study during the evenings; but for most of us, we’re at work while the support is live.

The CompTIA A+ course covers 4 different sectors - you’ll need exam certification in two of these areas to be considered A+ competent. For this reason, most colleges restrict their A+ to just two of the four in the syllabus. To us, this is selling you short - certainly you’ll have the qualification, but knowing about the others will set you apart in the workplace, where gaps in your knowledge will expose weaknesses. So that’s why you need education in everything.

As well as being taught how to build and fix computers, students on an A+ training course will be shown how to work in antistatic conditions, along with remote access, fault finding and diagnostics. If your ambition is taking care of computer networks, you’ll need to add CompTIA Network+ to your training package. This qualification will mean you can command a more senior job role. Other ones that might be interesting to you are the networking qualifications from Microsoft, i.e. MCP, MCSA MCSE.

Commencing from the viewpoint that it’s good to locate the market that sounds most inviting first and foremost, before we’re even able to chew over what educational program would meet that requirement, how can we choose the correct route? Since having no commercial skills in computing, how could any of us know what any job actually involves? Achieving the right answer only comes via a careful investigation of many changing areas:

* Our personalities play a starring role - what things get your juices flowing, and what are the things that put a frown on your face.

* For what reasons you’re moving into computing - it could be you’re looking to overcome a long-held goal such as working for yourself maybe.

* What priority do you place on job satisfaction vs salary?

* Looking at the many markets that the IT industry encompasses, you’ll need to be able to see what’s different.

* It makes sense to understand the differences across the myriad of training options.

The best way to avoid the industry jargon, and uncover the most viable option for your success, have an informal chat with an industry-experienced advisor; a person who will cover the commercial realities and truth while explaining the accreditations.

Exam ‘guarantees’ are sometimes offered as part of a training package - they always involve paying for the exam fees up-front, when you pay for the rest of your course. Before you get carried away with the chance of a guarantee, be aware of the facts:

You’re paying for it ultimately. One thing’s for sure - it isn’t free - it’s simply been shoe-horned into the price as a whole. It’s everybody’s ambition to qualify on the first attempt. Going for exams in order and funding them one at a time makes it far more likely you’ll pass first time - you put the effort in and are mindful of the investment you’ve made.

Don’t you think it’s more sensible to go for the best offer when you take the exam, rather than coughing up months or even a year or two in advance to a training college, and also to sit exams more locally - rather than possibly hours away from your area? Paying in advance for examinations (plus interest - if you’re financing your study) is a false economy. It’s not your job to boost the training company’s account with additional funds simply to help their cash-flow! A lot bank on the fact that you won’t get to do them all - so they don’t need to pay for them. You should fully understand that re-takes with organisations with an ‘Exam Guarantee’ inevitably are heavily regulated. You will be required to do mock exams until you’ve demonstrated an excellent ability to pass.

Exam fees averaged approximately 112 pounds twelve months or so ago through Prometric or VUE centres around the United Kingdom. So don’t be talked into shelling out hundreds or thousands of pounds more to get ‘Exam Guarantees’, when common sense dictates that what’s really needed is a commitment to studying and the use of authorised exam preparation tools.

Those that are drawn to this type of work are often very practical, and don’t always take well to classrooms, and poring through books and manuals. If you identify with this, go for more modern interactive training, with on-screen demonstrations and labs. Research has always verified that getting into our studies physically, is proven to produce longer-lasting and deeper memory retention.

Fully interactive motion videos utilising video demo’s and practice lab’s will forever turn you away from traditional book study. And you’ll find them fun and interesting. Make sure to obtain a study material demo’ from the school that you’re considering. The materials should incorporate slide-shows, instructor-led videos and virtual practice lab’s for your new skills.

It doesn’t make sense to opt for on-line only training. Because of the variable quality and reliability of all internet service providers, ensure that you have access to CD or DVD ROM based materials.

Can job security really exist anywhere now? Here in the UK, with businesses changing their mind whenever it suits, we’d question whether it does. We could however locate security at market-level, by digging for areas that have high demand, together with shortages of trained staff.

Investigating the Information Technology (IT) market, the recent e-Skills survey demonstrated a more than 26 percent shortfall of skilled workers. It follows then that for every 4 jobs that are available throughout IT, businesses are only able to locate properly accredited workers for three of them. Appropriately qualified and commercially accredited new workers are as a result at a total premium, and it looks like they will be for a long time. Surely, it really is a fabulous time for retraining into the computing industry.

Considering how a program is ‘delivered’ to you isn’t always given the appropriate level of importance. In what way are your training elements sectioned? What is the order and at what speed is it delivered? Typically, you will purchase a course taking 1-3 years and receive a module at a time. While this may sound logical on one level, consider this: What would happen if you didn’t finish each and every exam at the required speed? Sometimes their preference of study order won’t be as easy as some other structure would for you.

To be honest, the perfect answer is to have a copy of their prescribed order of study, but get all the study materials at the start. You’re then in possession of everything in the event you don’t complete everything as fast as they’d like.

Congratulations! Hitting upon this feature means you’re likely to be wondering about where you’re going, and if it’s new career training you’re deliberating over you’ve already done more than most. Are you aware that a small minority of us are fulfilled and satisfied with our jobs - but the majority will just put up with it. Why not liberate yourself and make a start - don’t you think you deserve it.

When looking at training, it’s essential that you first make a list of what you DO want and DON’T want from the career you would like to get. You need to know that you would be more satisfied before you put a lot of energy into taking a new turn. We recommend looking at the whole story first, to steer clear of regrets:

* Do you want to interact with other people? If so, do you want a team or are you hoping to meet new people? Maybe you’d rather be left alone to get on with things?

* Building and Banking are a little shaky today, so which sector would give you the most options?

* Is this the last time you want to study, and therefore, will this new career service that need?

* Are you confident that your industry training course will offer you employment opportunities, and offer the chance to allow you to work up to the time you want to stop?

The largest sector in Great Britain to tick all of the above boxes is the IT industry. There’s a need for more knowledgeable staff in IT, simply have a look at a local job site and you will find them yourself. Don’t let people tell you it’s only geeky nerds sitting in front ofscreens the whole time - there are loads more jobs than that. Most of employees in the computer industry are just like you and me, with jobs they enjoy and better than average salaries.

One crafty way that training companies make more money is by adding exam fees upfront to the cost of a course and then including an ‘Exam Guarantee’. It looks like a good deal, but let’s just examine it more closely:

Of course it isn’t free - you’re still being charged for it - the price has simply been included in the whole thing. Students who enter their exams one by one, funding them one at a time are in a much stronger position to qualify at the first attempt. They are aware of their spending and prepare more appropriately to make sure they’re ready.

Find the best exam deal or offer available at the appropriate time, and hang on to your cash. You’ll also be able to choose where to do the examinations - so you can find somewhere local. Paying in advance for exam fees (which also includes interest if you’ve taken out a loan) is insane. Don’t line companies bank accounts with extra money of yours only to please their Bank Manager! A lot bank on the fact that you won’t get to do them all - then they’ll keep the extra money. The majority of companies will require you to sit pre-tests and not allow you to re-take an exam until you’ve completely proven that you’re likely to pass - which makes an ‘Exam Guarantee’ frankly useless.

The cost of exams was approximately 112 pounds last year through Prometric or VUE centres around the United Kingdom. So why pay hundreds or thousands of pounds extra to have ‘Exam Guarantees’, when any student knows that what’s really needed is study, commitment and preparing with good quality mock and practice exams.

Throw out a salesperson that pushes one particular program without a thorough investigation to assess your abilities as well as experience level. They should be able to select from a wide-enough stable of training programs so they’re able to give you an appropriate solution. With a bit of live experience or some accreditation, you may find that your starting point is now at a different level to a new student. Starting with a basic PC skills course first will sometimes be the most effective way to get into your computer programme, depending on your skill level at the moment.

Many students think that the traditional school, college or university route is still the best way into IT. So why then is commercial certification becoming more in demand? With fees and living expenses for university students climbing ever higher, and the IT sector’s increasing awareness that corporate based study is closer to the mark commercially, we have seen a large rise in Adobe, Microsoft, CISCO and CompTIA authorised training routes that create knowledgeable employees for much less time and money. Essentially, only required knowledge is taught. It isn’t quite as lean as that might sound, but the most important function is always to cover the precise skills needed (with some necessary background) - without trying to cram in every other area (as degree courses are known to do).

Put yourself in the employer’s position - and you required somebody who had very specific skills. What’s the simplest way to find the right person: Go through a mass of different academic qualifications from graduate applicants, having to ask what each has covered and which vocational skills have been attained, or select a specialised number of commercial certifications that precisely match your needs, and then select who you want to interview from that. You can then focus on how someone will fit into the team at interview - rather than on the depth of their technical knowledge.

There are colossal changes about to hit technology as we approach the second decade of the 21st century - and it becomes more and more thrilling each day. There are people who believe that the technological revolution we’ve been going through is lowering its pace. This couldn’t be more wrong. There are huge changes to come, and most especially the internet will be the most effective tool in our lives.

The standard IT man or woman in the UK is likely to receive a lot more money than fellow workers outside of IT. Typical remuneration packages are around the top of national league tables. Because the IT market sector is still growing with no sign of a slow-down, it’s predictable that the need for appropriately qualified IT professionals will continue to boom for quite some time to come.

Many trainers provide a big box of books. It’s not a very interesting way to learn and not really conducive to studying effectively. Where possible, if we can study while utilising as many senses as possible, then we normally see dramatically better results.

Modern training can now be done at home via interactive discs. Instructor-led tutorials will mean you’ll absorb the modules, one by one, via the demonstrations and explanations. Knowledge can then be tested by practicing and interacting with the software. Any company that you’re considering must be able to demonstrate a few samples of their courseware. Expect video tutorials, instructor led classes and many interactive sections.

Many companies provide purely on-line training; and although this is okay the majority of the time, think what will happen when you don’t have access to the internet or you get intermittent problems and speed issues. It’s much safer to rely on actual CD or DVD ROMs which will not have these problems.