ITProTV,
I wanted to share with you the last three months of my life.
I have been in IT as a Network Engineer for the last 18 years. I go my start in the civilian market thanks to my experience in the military and I have been continually employed since…. until in May I was laid off from my position due to a down turn in the market. When this happened, I thought no big deal, I have 18 years of experience I will just get a job with another company. Boy, was I wrong, every job that I looked at that I thought I was qualified for required some sort of certification. I had never worried about certifications in the past, I had a job, the networks I worked on were multi-vendor and it was hard enough keeping all the command lines straight without deep diving into one vendor’s equipment. But it became painfully obvious that without certifications my resume was never going to land on the hiring managers desk.
I started looking around for a way that I could get certifications without spending a small fortune and still get a good quality education. I was not interested in just getting the certification to put it on my resume, if I was going to invest the money and time I wanted the knowledge that I could use for any future job I may get.
When I found the ITProTV site I didn’t know if this was something I would be willing to pay for…. oh, how wrong I was. I started with the free CompTIA course IT Fundamentals, just to see how the site worked and what kind of information I could get out of it. After the first episode, I decided to get that certification just to get my feet wet. I ordered the Sybex book to go along with the ITProTV content and dug in. By the end of May, I had my first certification.
Don and Ronnie provided such an outstanding experience that I decided ITProTV will be my launching platform for the rest of my certifications. I signed up for a year subscription and started the CCENT course and ordered the Sybex book by Todd Lammle. I watched all the videos, performed the labs, and read the book. Then I found the CCENT Accelerated videos…. imagine my surprise when I clicked on the first video and found the author of the book I just read as a guest instructor, this was great, the guy that wrote the book is going to teach me what I just read!! So, in June, with the help of Don, Ronnie and Todd Lammle I became CCENT certified.
This led of course to the ICND2 videos and wouldn’t you know it, there was an Accelerated CCNA course with Todd Lammle as well. With all the great material that Don and Ronnie presented in the CCENT course that Todd skimmed by (it was an accelerated course), I decided to take the same track with the CCNA that I did with the CCENT. I started with the course with Don and Ronnie, read Todd’s book and then watched the CCNA Accelerated course to reinforce what I read in the book. Today I passed the ICND2 test and have a CCNA Routing and Switching certification.
I firmly believe that I would not have three certifications in three months without the outstanding work of Don and Ronnie (Todd too). I have found that the videos are packed full of information you could never get out of a book, they are sometimes funny, and always entertaining. They are presented in a manner you can understand. They are in blocks of 30 minutes so you don’t get distracted and miss something important. With all that said, I know that I owe a portion of any success that I have in the future to the staff at ITProTV!!! Now on to the next certification!!
Jeffrey Dawson
