CompTIA A + has a total of four exams and areas of study, but your only requirement is to get certified in 2 to be considered A+ competent. Because of this, many educational establishments restrict their course to just 2 areas. But giving you all four options will provide you with a much wider knowledge and understanding of it all, something you’ll discover is essential in professional employment.

A+ computer training courses cover diagnostics and fault finding – remotely as well as hands on, in addition to building, fixing, repairing and working in antistatic conditions.

Perhaps you see yourself as the kind of individual who is a member of a large organisation – fixing and supporting networks, you’ll need to add CompTIA Network+, or consider an MCSA or MCSE with Microsoft to give you a deeper understanding of the way networks work.

Many training providers still use the rather old-fashioned idea of classroom attendance. Often sold as a benefit, after discussion with someone who has first-hand experience, you’ll most likely hear about many or all of the following problems:

* Lots of round trips – quite often hundreds of miles each and every time.

* Workshop accessibility; usually weekdays only and two or three days in a row. It’s never convenient to take the required days away from work.

* Holiday days lost – most trainees only get 4 weeks annual leave. If over half of it is swallowed up by study days, that isn’t going to leave much vacation time for the family as a whole.

* ‘In-Centre’ workshop days invariably become way too big.

* Tension is often caused in mixed classes because the right pace for one student is not the same as another.

* Let’s not forget the extra expense of arranging transport and bed and breakfast for the night either. This can run to hundreds and even thousands of pounds extra. Take some time to add it all up – you may be surprised.

* Maintaining the privacy of our training can be very important to most trainees. Why would you want to lose any lift up the ladder, wage increases or achievement in your job because you’re getting trained in a different area. If your employer knows you’ve committed to accreditation in a different industry, what will they think?

* How many of us have avoided putting our hand’s up, because we wanted to look smarter?

* Living away for part of your working week – a fair few students need to live or work away for part of their training. Days in-centre are therefore impossible at that point, but the monies have already been handed over as part of your fees.

It would be better to simply watch and gain knowledge from tutors one-to-one in videoed classes, studying them when it’s convenient for you, not someone else.

You can study from home on your computer or why not in the garden on a laptop. Any questions that pop up, just make use of the 24×7 support (that should’ve been packaged with any technical type of training.)

Note-taking is gone forever – you have the lessons and accompanying information ready-made for you. If you need to cover something again, you’ve got it all.

Basically: You save time, hassle, money and completely avoid killing more trees.

Quite often, students have issues with a single courseware aspect usually not even thought about: How the training is broken down and delivered to your home.

Trainees may consider it sensible (when study may take one to three years to gain full certified status,) for your typical trainer to courier the training stage by stage, as you pass each element. Although:

How would they react if you didn’t complete all the exams at the proposed pace? Often the prescribed exam order doesn’t come as naturally as an alternative path could be.

For the perfect solution, you’d get ALL the training materials right at the beginning – enabling you to have them all for the future to come back to – at any time you choose. This allows a variation in the order that you complete each objective if you find another route more intuitive.

OK, why ought we to be looking at commercial qualifications instead of the usual academic qualifications obtained from the state educational establishments?

With a growing demand for specific technological expertise, industry has been required to move to the specialised core-skills learning only available through the vendors themselves – for example companies like CISCO, Adobe, Microsoft and CompTIA. This frequently provides reductions in both cost and time.

Many degrees, for example, become confusing because of too much loosely associated study – and much too wide a syllabus. This prevents a student from getting enough specific knowledge about the core essentials.

In simple terms: Authorised IT qualifications let employers know exactly what you’re capable of – everything they need to know is in the title: for example, I am a ‘Microsoft Certified Professional’ in ‘Designing Security for a Windows 2003 Network’. Therefore employers can identify just what their needs are and which qualifications will be suitable to deal with those needs.

(C) Jason Kendall. Look at LearningLolly.com for the best career tips on Comptia Certification Course and Comptia Courses.