sec: unclassified - CCNA vs 'traditional' study at college

[jeremy at itassist.net.au]

Peter,
  when I was in yr11 at school my father recommended that I should do a
Novell networking course.  I dimly recall he may have even offered to
pay for it.

Somehow I never found the effort to pursue it further, and spent all my
time trying to write arcade games in QuickBasic (there.  my dirty secret
is out). I haven't programmed basic since I left school but I still
think I made the better choice at the time.

Ditto later when everyone was doing the trendy thing and getting their
MCP.  

The things I feel left out on are things like program design and system
architecture, because sometimes you don't even realise that such things
exist until you stumble across the right mailing lists and start
wondering what capabilities are.

The only experience I have had with CISCO gear was when we got a CISCO
router secondhand and in an afternoon we had broken into it and
reconfigured it using our 'generic brand' network training.  This may
not be a complete intro to CISCO.  I know if I had to run a room full of
CISCOs I would want the training course, but the company you are with
will pay for that as necessary.

To illustrate Karun's point a bit more dramatically, only one of the
eight people in the room where I work has an IT degree.





On 31 Oct, Ellis, Peter R. wrote:
> 
> Karun, (and others)
> 
> I have seen reference in your postings to the Cisco course (CCNA) at
> College.
> 
> My son, David, is going to Hawker College next year for years 11/12.
> It has a similar Cisco scheme there, but he is (or is it I am)
> somewhat confused as to the usefulness of the Cisco 'major' versus
> doing more 'traditional' IT subjects best summarised as "programming
> languages" and "systems analysis", when looking at going on to
> university study in IT.
> 
> He is about 7-10 days from an enrollment interview to nominate his
> subjects.
> 
> 
> Please comment on your understandings and feelings about this.
> (Anyone else with an opinion? But... please keep opinions to under 300
> lines and/or 5,000 words.....)
> 
> Thanks,
> Peter
> 
> 

-- 
I/O, I/O,
It's off to disk I go,
A bit or byte to read or write,
I/O, I/O, I/O...

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 240 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.samba.org/archive/linux/attachments/20011031/afb69cac/attachment.bin