Of course the question is, which Apple certifications are the best? Well that depends on what you’re going for. If you work for a company that is considering transitioning to a Mac based workforce, then get the Mac Integration Basics Certification. This certification specializes in integrating a Mac machine into a Windows based network and confronting the issues that may present themselves during the process. Or maybe you’re wanting to change jobs and you’re looking to be valuable to a company that has already made the shift. Then go for the Apple Certified Macintosh Technician (ACMT) Certification. A ACMT certification shows prospective employers that you’re not going to get hired and start complaining about how compact and “busy” the inside of a Mac is. You’ve seen it all before!. You could also go with one of the three OS X Lion Certifications offered.

Of course I’m not saying that the you should get an apple tattoo, build a shrine to Steve Jobs and start going to Starbucks. As Ryan Faas points out in his article the Apple certifications are best as only part of your certification collection.

These three new certifications center around the fact that HP has made so many advances in their CloudSystem platform recently. Of the three of them, only one of them is actually available at the time, but the other two will be available in early/mid 2012. Here is a list of the certifications, each with a short description of that they will actually do for you:

HP ASE Cloud Architect – This is the one of the three that you can go ahead and get now, and is probably the most important of the three. According to HP, this certification “verifies that the individual has the ability to specify and architect a spectrum of cloud services.” Individuals will have a vast working knowledge of HP CloudSystem and be able to specify the specific needs of their customers. This knowledge will cover an array of environmental situations including IaaS, PaaS, SaaS. And Private/Public/Hybrid cloud environments.

HP ASE Cloud Integrator – This certification is more about actually being able to set up these services for the customers. It implies to ability to “build, install and integrate a private or hybrid cloud solution based on HP Cloud Service Automation for Matrix and provisioning software.” Basically they will be able to go through the entire installation process themselves without much grief.

HP Master ASE Cloud Integrator – This one is similar to the other certification, but it is for Master ASE’s. It shows that the individual will be able to “build, install and integrate a robust cloud solution built on an HP Converged Infrastructure foundation and the full HP Cloud Service Automation software solution.” If you are gonna make a living off of HP cloud products for a while, this, along with the others, would be a fantastic investment.

All of us in the field have seen that pages and pages of job listings asking for all kinds of certifications with silly acronyms. Sometimes it seems almost impossible to find one that doesn’t require some kind of certification, which could make many people question why they went to college in the first place when these little certificates are all they needed. While this may seem like a pain, things will most likely stay this way for the foreseeable future, so it might be a good idea to jump on the bandwagon now.

According to some, it is not only a good idea to go ahead and get the certification you want for new jobs, but they are also leading to promotions and raises. In fact, a survey featured in a networkworld.com article asked 700 neetworking professionals whether a certification led to a raise, a promotion, a new job, or something else. 60.5% of professionals said their certifications got them a new job, 56.0% said that they got raise, 28.8% said that they got a promotion within their current company, and 10.8% said that they got some other type of reward for their certifications. However, there is a catch to all of these numbers, because they don’t take into account professionals that don’t have any certifications, and also doesn’t make an effort to account for the fact that not all certifications are equal. Some certifications have been clearly shown to be more beneficial than others, such as the Cisco family of certifications and some Microsoft ones.

Although these are very helpful fro some people, they may not be right for everybody, as there are many it professionals out there in the world who are extremely successful without certifications. What that really means is that success in this sector (usually) is equivalent to the effort that you put into it.
Some people put in the effort in the classroom, and others just work harder than everyone else, but either way the are just doing more.

This certification is to be a Cisco Certified Technician (CCT) to perform on site installation on maintenance of the products that they offer. There are three tracks that you can choose from when going for this certification: Routing & Switching, Data Center, and TelePresence, and there is a separate exam (priced at $125) for each track which you must pass to gain the certification. Apparently, you must have the Routing & Switching certification before you can apply for either of the others, which means that if you want either of the other two, you will have to throw down at least $250. This certification lasts for a total of 3 years and to get re-certified, you must pass one exam from the list given here. On Indeed.com, there are a considerable number of jobs available for those with Cisco Certifications, so if you are in this field, it might be a good bet.

Good luck!

So is programming easy or hard? When the people around you accept it as hard, then although it may take a while, it doesn’t have to be painful or a mess. But when the people around you think it is easy, they get impatient and take really bad short-cuts to avoid the necessary work, so it becomes increasingly difficult to get anything finished properly within the chaos. Thus it all depends on whether the people around you get that in order for it to be easy, they really have approach it like it is hard. Or slightly restated: it is easy right up until you fall into the trap of thinking it is easy …

Yep, programming is easy up until the point you think it is easy. The reason this happens is really a false sense of security. In the beginning, you learn about the data structures and syntax of a language. Eventually, you start learning more things like common algorithms, binary search and merge sort are good examples. Slowly, you learn more complicated things like creating and modifying a binary search tree. However, after learning these things, you eventually get a job building applications and you realize that much of what you learned is handled by frameworks. So, you start ignoring the basics of programming as you learn more about translating business requirements and technical specifications into code.

Suddenly, you start dealing with weird problems like memory constraints or memory leaks, large-scale search problems,  and data aggregation. What you don’t realize is that as you have grown in your career, your tasks have gotten more difficult but they do not seem as difficult because you have slowly gotten used to the level of difficulty. However, this is where the contradictions arise. You are dealing with a class of problems that requires you to question some of your fundamental assumptions.

In many of these types of cases, you need to revisit some of you basic knowledge. For memory issues, you need to see how many objects are being retained in memory. It could be that some of your data should be serialized to disk. For search, you may need to change your search algorithm, or you may need to build search indexes. Data aggregation, which has become very important with all of the social data that is available, requires you to revisit how you are storing data and how you are querying that data.

Retaining your basic skills is something our industry tends to forget because of the wide adoption of various frameworks. Are sites like Programming Praxis, which help you practice programming, really useful? In some cases, they absolutely are. Forgetting how to create a binary search tree is not catastrophic, but remembering that these basic data structures and algorithms are critical to your career. The only time that you can really ignore some of these foundations is when your career is focused on creating administrative applications, like form based data entry, with a limited number of concurrent users. There is a large segment of the programming population that does this type of work, but there are a lot of programmers that create all sorts of interesting applications.

There are some people that believe you need to be working on side projects, meaning applications that you are building outside of your current employment, in order to be a good hiring candidate. I am not a fan of this opinion, but I do value the idea of side projects. Typically, people will work on side projects that have only a limited relationship to what they do at work. The benefit is that these side projects will broaden their skill set because they are dealing with different types of problems than they normally see. I find side projects to be better than programming exercises because they have meaning to the person doing the work. Would you rather write another binary search or create an application that you and others may find useful? Obviously, I prefer side projects for this type of work. These side projects are also a useful way to learn new technologies and languages if you are not learning about them at work.

How are you keeping your skills sharp?

Wireless technologies are booming. Rice University implemented Super Wi-Fi that can reach up to 100 km (62 mi) at speeds of 22 Mbps. To put that into perspective, imagine getting internet 10 times faster than DSL from your ISP in Louisville when you’re living in Lexington. That’s just looking at the macro level. On the micro level, wireless technologies are finding their way into all kinds of devices from entertainment to medical. As said, now is a prime time for getting into the wireless technology field.

Wireless technology is very complicated. As such, it makes sense to get a wireless certification. There are wireless certifications other than the CWNP, such as the CCNP Wireless, but here we will look at just the former. There are several tracks in becoming a CWNP:

CWNA – Certified Wireless Technology Specialist
CWNA – Certified Wireless Network Administrator
CWSP – Certified Wireless Security Professional
CWDP – Certified Wireless Design Professional
CWAP – Certified Wireless Analysis Professional
CWNE – Certified Wireless Network Expert
CWNT – Instructor Certification

The next class in the US will take place in Denver, Colorado on the twelfth of this month on Wi-Fi fundamentals. They have a blog and plenty of resource materials online. One person who took the exam writes that the resource materials CWNP provides were very helpful. Time will tell just how soon and how far wireless technology will become an everyday part of the IT field.

CCNACERTIFICATIONGUIDE.COM

This website is quite comprehensive. The site lists a large number of topics and each article focuses on the concepts involved. The major sections are:

• Networking Fundamentals
• Routing
• IP Addressing and Subnettingy
• IP Access Control List Security
• Wide Area Networks (WANs)
• Virtual LANs and Trunking
• Link-State Protocols
• Advanced TCP/IP

Each section focuses on large sections of networking and then breaks down the fundamentals.

Tech Exams

Tech Exams has a site similar to CCNACERTIFICATIONGUIDE.COM in that it offers explanation of core networking concepts. Although it does not have as much information it is more concise. The major sections are:

• Basic Router Configuration and Management
• LAN Technologies
• OSI Model
• Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN)
• IP Access Lists
• Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP)
• The Hardware
• Configuring a RIP network
• Configuring a Frame Relay network
• Switch Configuration Basics
• Cisco Discovery Protocol

The sites also has practice exams

and other resources.

PacketLife.net

may actually be the most valuable resource. The website is run by Jeremy Stretch, a DoD contractor. The site is a collection of articles, wikis, forums, and other tools related to networking. He achieved CCNA at 17. He runs the Packet Life Community Lab where people can register to get hands on experience in networking. The lab is located in Fairfax, VA. Even if the lab isn’t located nearby, the site resources are enough to find a nearby lab or use your own equipment to get the experience you need to excel on the CCNA.

If you are preparing to take the CCNA or plan to, hopefully these resources will help you achieve your goal. Take time to study each section carefully until you understand it and if you have the resources available take time to do live testing to get hands on experience.

CompTIA A+ certification is considered one of the basic, and classic all-time certifications to get in the Information technology field, and any new additions to the test are important focal points that need immediate attention. Test preparatory companies and sites were lacking in Windows 7 materials, but new tools are emerging in time for the 2012 testing season. The Windows 7 addition came much quicker than anticipated, and Microsoft believes it reflects the growing adoption of Window 7 in the enterprise; while most likely most workstations remain on Windows XP; but higher-end users such as graphic artists, videographers and executive-level managers, and servers will have migrated to Windows 7 to utilize the newest software, and therefore the need exists for the A+ certification to cover managing Windows 7.