IT Employment

Certs are nice to have, but without actuall real work knowledge and experience, you won't stand a chance at the interview and they will see right through you. The 1990s' were so plagued with "paper certs" from MCSEs' to CCNAs' who simply remembered the textbook answers to the exam questions and got their certs, but couldn't fix a broken server or corrupt routing table if their lives depended on it. With this in mind, employers are now seriously grilling individuals on the interviews with non-texbook technical questions based on ever day scenarios and require a minimum of 3 to 5 years experience for junior level positions. Unfortunately, on the job training and entry level positions are things of the past and are a rarity these days. Unless you know your stuff, no employer will be so generous as to take you in, train you at their expense, and then have you jump ship for another company that pays higher. Not long ago, I had an interesting conversation with a reputable technical recruiter who told me about a 19 year guy who sent in his resume. The guy had certifications up the wazoo from MS, Novell, Cisco, Oracle, etc. and was demanding a $150,000 a year salary, yet had little to no professional work experience, but thought he was worth that much because he was certified. Yes, you can be certified with enough certificates to wallpaper your livingroom with, but age and work experience also factors into how much you are worth and how much others think you are worth.

If you want to move into the security field, you may want to go for the cissp certification in favor of the CCNA cert.

Neither assures anything, because while some places require certs to consider you, experience rules - especially when you show up to work. They're not going to be throwing multiple choice questions at you, they're gonna ask you to configure a switch or figure out why the network is slow every tuesday and thursday at 3 PM.