Hey y'all,

I recently started to work as a support desk technician for a managed services IT company. What are my best certifications to work towards early on? Our company highly encourages that we go out and get pretty much any certs, and they will expense testing costs. I'm a relatively skilled beginner, but my schedule doesn't really provide me time to take long college courses so it'll need to be me studying on my own and going in to take the test when I feel ready.

Is MCTS the best ground level certification series for me to work on? A+ is good to have on a resume I suppose, but I hear that it's really dated. Thanks for the help.

A+, N+ or pretty much anything ran by CompTIA may or maynot be outdated but you have to ask yourself a few things.

1. Will you be working at your current job forever?

2. If so, what IT environment is it?

If you answer to number 1 is no than you have to think bigger than where you're at now. You may be somewhere now that is strictly Microsoft bases so MCTS, MSDST, MCSA, MCSE etc... seems worth it but what happens when you leave there and go somewhere else that is limited in Microsoft products?

My advice to people I work with or my friends that are into IT has always been to get a good foundation down that will be attractive to all employees. Don't stick to one environment or series of certs over the other.

This is unless of course, you stay where you're at and you know what certs will benefit you while there.

I think I'll be at this company for several years for now. The thing is we work with all manner of problems because we're a managed services company with well over 40 clients, some of whom are hospitals and large car dealerships. I'm thinking that getting some Microsoft office certificates would be extremely useful, because outlook issues come up often and we're migrating most of our clients to Office 365.

We deal with a pretty big umbrella of issues, the ones that we pretty much never encounter are Windows 9x issues or Mac issues. Past that our clients all have their own little specialized programs like ADP, Dealerspeed, Peachtree, et cetera. The only thing that all of our clients seem to have in common is Microsoft office.

Again, without knowing your level of job or specific area (application, network, etc... ) I would imagine a base M$ Cert or 2 would do fine for you.

Regardless of A+ being or not being outdated, it is still one of the most wanted Certs by employers. Wouldn't hurt and its not that bad of a cert to self-stufy for. Especially if you're not fronting the cost.

But like you said, if a majority of your clients, if not all of them, have Microsoft Office in common than it wouldn't hurt. But then it goes back to what you do as a job. You said Desktop Support Tech. but is this more application based or do you dable in Network issues, etc...

I work as a Security Administrator for a large Chemical company. The programs/applications we use here just to configure our environment (even though Microsoft) has no mention in any M$ Cert. It's not as simple as RDP'ing into the DC to access AD here.

So it depends on the situation my friend.

Again, without knowing your level of job or specific area (application, network, etc...) I would imagine a base M$ Cert or 2 would do fine for you.

Regardless of A+ being or not being outdated, it is still one of the most wanted Certs by employers. Wouldn't hurt and its not that bad of a cert to self-stufy for. Especially if you're not fronting the cost.

But like you said, if a majority of your clients, if not all of them, have Microsoft Office in common than it wouldn't hurt. But then it goes back to what you do as a job. You said Desktop Support Tech. but is this more application based or do you dable in Network issues, etc...

I don't really mess with network issues. I go into the dc and exchange servers to do things like adding/changing/removing user accounts, but mostly I troubleshoot printers, slow machines, Microsoft office programs, and manage our spam filter.

I guess mostly what I'd like is to know where to go from here in terms of learning. I don't feel ready to jump into NOC/Network Operations stuff yet, I still have a ways to go on the more advanced and tricky functions of windows. I just feel like I should be working towards something, which I guess is why I was considering something more basic and foundational like A+ or MCTS.

I would imagine Microsoft has some certs that are right up your alley then. Beings you think you will be at your current position for awhile, and they're paying the cost, might as well learn as much about your environment as possible.

But keep in the back of your mind that you might not be there forever and the next environment you go to could be completely different and your M$ Certs have no bearing.