<p>Hey what's going on folks? I am an IT major and I'm going to a University. Anyway, I'm pretty broke so I plan on picking up some IT certifications along the way. So my question is: Which college classes prepare you for which certifications? For instance, I know that once I take hardware configuration and software configuration, then I can apply to get my A+ certification. This will enable me to at least get a standard help desk job. My eventual goal is to get into networking, and I definitely want to learn Cisco so I can get that certification. So which classes would enable me to get the cisco cert? Also any other information on which other classes would allow me to get various certifications would help. Thanks.</p>
<p>In many bachelor’s degree granting schools, there are no certification-specific courses.</p>
<p>CS courses in operating systems, networks, and databases will teach general principles and ideas which you should be able to apply in order to quickly learn and understand the specifics of each operating system, network equipment, or database. Knowledge of the general principles and ideas will help you handle difficult or unusual problems and new technologies more easily than many IT people whose education is only certification-specific.</p>
<p>You will have to either:</p>
<p>1) Attend (and pay for) vendor training for a certain skill (Oracle, Red Hat, Sun/Java, etc)
2) Attend/Co-Attend a community college…which would have a higher probability of teaching skills specific to a certification</p>
<p>or</p>
<p>3) Look at the exam objectives for a certain certification exam and try to get the answers/explanations while in a certain college course. Example: If you are taking a operating systems/Linux course in college, ask additional questions that relate to the objectives of the Linux certification exam. The issue there is that a general Linux-slanted operating systems course will go over non-vendor-specific Linux, which is more in line with the LIPC or Linux+ certs. It may not help with a vendor-specific Linux flavor like Red Hat.</p>
<p>Well guys I had an hour long chat with my professor today about this and I think that he has convinced me to stay in information science, and not to switch to IT. He told me that most of the classes wouldn’t really get you any certs. He said if I really wanted to work and go to school, to stay in information science, and to make sure and take database classes, internet programming classes, HTML, and more programming languages. So that’s what I think I will do.</p>