I am a Network Administrator at my company. I have my MCSE NT 4.0, and am currently working toward my CCNA and hopefully my CCNP (boy ccnp classes are expensive!!!). Recently my younger cousin (who is crackerjack at PC systems) is finishing high school and wanted advice on which college to go to. He wanted a technical college but wanted to learn stuff he can use in the field. He didnt want to waste time taking too many stupid classes that had absolutely NOTHING to do with his goal.
Sowe sat down and hit the net. 4 hours later, we sat very dissapointed, staring at the computer screen. Pretty much it comes down to this:
College courses as so far behind the times that I was FORCED to tell my cousin to skip it. I told him to hit some high quality technical schools that can take him through his OS training (MCSE, LINX, UNIX) and his network training (CCNA, CCNP, NETWORK+) and pc training (A+), and light programming (C++, Java, etc).
This really makes me sick to my stomach. I was very very dissapointed with the class offerings in these “technical” colleges. I really felt that there was probably 3 or 4 classes out of 4 years of college that would help him get ahead in today’s IT environment. What the hell is going on here? Do colleges really expect my cousin to sit through 80% classes that add up to garbage only to get to the 20% that really matter?
My personal feelings are this: (after the intensive search on the internet for colleges in the NYC areathat my cousin can go to) Colleges are institutions that just act too slow to keep up with IT today (except maybe really specialized ones that I haven’t been able to find). And because of this, I feel technical schools (not really colleges aftera all) will RULE the training of IT personnel for the far future.
Just my 2 cents worth.
-public@lipan.org
Ginel Lipan