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Networking Colleges - My Future, Need Advice
So, during this high school year, I will be graduating with a certification in Cisco Networking, certification in Adobe Dreamweaver, and a certification in Adobe Photoshop, all for free. However, after High School, I would hope to some day be a Networking Engineer and work in some type of datacenter for a company. Just yesterday, the college Johnson And Wales came to our school to promote their services and to aware us that now is the right time to start making decisions for colleges. On the brochure, I noticed that Johnson And Wales offers Network Engineering at their campus in Providence, Rhode Island. Providence is about two hours away from New York City and I am originally from Rhode Island, I still have family up there so I could just live with them. Are these colleges for Networking worthwhile or are they not worth it? This is a possible solution for what I want to do with my life after High School graduation. Thanks for your opinion.
Comments
Get a regular four-year degree.. (not a "network engineering" degree)
(possibly whilst working in a hosting/datacenter environment and gaining real world experience)
my 2c
I don't think a bunch of randoms on a internet forum are the right people to make this decission, talk with your parent(s).
And I doubt anyone here has Cisco / Microsoft certificates (small minority may).
I know someone that went to a course to get a microsoft cert, he got £100/week and finished with a microsoft cert and he is 19 now.
You can get a Job pretty easily with a certificate, but then again UK will be different from US.
Agreed, get a two or four-year accredited degree from a recognized institution.
If JW is one of these "career institutes" . . . I can tell you right now, if I'm doing any hiring, those are generally the first ones I throw out of the pile, and I know others that do this as well. If you already have a two or four-year degree they might be worthwhile.
Yeah, get a proper degree. Here they're typically 3 years, also you can get a side job as a network engineer probably, it's probably what I'll do too. Trying to get a highish paid job without a degree, at least here, is quite hard.
An accredited Tech Institute will give you more hands on experience w/o having to take core classes.
Had a CCNA, never kept it up. I do have multiple Oracle certs.
I work for a Fortune 500 company and when we hire, we don't put a lot of value on certs because they're easy to obtain with zero knowledge of the subject matter. Zero. If you don't believe me, just google for "cisco certification dump" or "microsoft certification dump" and find all the questions/answers that will be on the test you'll take. Exact q&a. My 12-year-old could memorize the answers and go become certified.
We do value experience highly, so look for entry level jobs and work up.
Most companies that I've worked for do a team interview so you have to be able to demonstrate some knowledge. The usual process is that your resume gets you the interview (if you have the skills), and the interviews validate it.
A four-year degree is always worthwhile in my opinion. But it's about more than just a career. Then again, your career is a lot more than just technical knowledge...I think I'd rather have someone with B tech skills who can communicate well, write well, manage small projects, think about the big picture, handle disputes, etc. than an A+ technical rock star who's a pain to work with.
BTW, there are about three certs that I do place a value on - Cisco CCIE, Redhat RHCE, and Oracle Master. The reason is that all three require hands-on, live demonstration of knowledge, not just picking multiple choice in a testing room. I don't know about the RHCE, but for CCIE and OCM, they put you in a room with a lot of broken stuff and say "now fix it, we started the clock".
I agree, certs are easy to come by, hands on experience is valuable
Just my opinion, but anything short of a 5 years master degree from a real university isn't worth it and shouldn't be called "engineerer". If you are into practical stuff i'd recommend applying for a job at a DC or so.
If any of you guys have seen what I posted in the Cest Pit, the CEO of Steadfast really sums up pretty well what he looks for in an employee - http://www.ceointronet.com/ceointronet-tv/view/karl-zimmerman/
He also gives some suggestions on doing what you love and stuff like that.
I have a degree in 'Computer Network Engineering' from a UK University. This was about 10 years ago. At the time the course was both good and bad. Lots of Network theory stuff which was interesting, but also a lot of it was out of date. There was also too much programming and electronics stuff, but again it was interesting, and has been useful in recent years.
I've also taken tonnes of Microsoft exams, which again are useful and employers do like them, but ultimately you can easily cheat and get the answers off the net, and any decent employer should realise this.
Both companies I've worked for since graduating put as much emphasis on finding someone with the right personality as they do someone with the right qualifications. It's much easier to teach an intelligent person who you get one with, than try to rely on an idiot who thinks he knows it all.
(possibly whilst working in a hosting/datacenter environment and gaining real world experience)
+1
+1
Wtf is on with you kids thinking there is plenty of work in DCs? You don't need more than like 4 people on-site (per shift).
Why do you think it's called "Engineer" and not "Administratot"? Not just operate it, also automate/fix it in the future.
I bet that's about being able to administrate Windows Server, IIS, Microsoft exchange and Office.
We are in the age of automating tasks, constantly innovating technology. When they ask for a Network engineer they want someone that can program the equipment to go more effecient with resources for example.
Do you honestly think they're going to pay you for sitting in a NOC watching network graphs and telneting into switches all manually? Open your eyes, unless you're innovative/smart/programmer you are most likely not going to find a well paying job in IT.
My opinion is that expensive degrees are being passed over for practical experience and knowledge. Seems to be a growing trend in the US of people paying for expensive degrees from reputable universities and ending up with knowledge barely on par with a high school graduate who went straight into the work field, and a sense of entitlement that isn't compatible with current economic realities.
Whether or not my observation is true in actual numbers I do not know, it is just my opinion based on what is obviously relative observation.
Yep, exactly what I'm going to do. I'm in @Jeffrey's situation right now also. I'm skipping the whole 4 year degree and focus on what I need to know while maybe getting an internship or work on the side.
@gsrdgrdghd
That is true in the most classical sense of the term 'engineer'
Unfortunately there are no long term traditional educations that will teach you real world applicable system administration or network engineering skill sets.
As a hiring manager I don't really look at a college degree as anything more than proof that you can conform to a structure and be trained. That is really all the value it has in IT engineering.
Maybe if you are a pure-play colo facility with remote-hands only services. If you are providing any additional level of services, management, etc and you operate a sizable DC you need way more than that.
IT engineering is learning yourself what you need to know, being able to work in, or run a team but also able to solve stuff on your own.
You may regret this later on down the line. Or it could work out fine, but if you are financially able to get your 4 year degree now while you are young and probably don't have a spouse/kids, then just do it, especially if you have a scholarship etc. (never turn down a paid scholarship!)
To me, it's problem solving. The most skilled employees I have and the most skilled technicians I know are not the ones that are the smartest or know the most about a particular subject. They've simply developed the ability to recognize and resolve problems quickly. If they don't know it they know how to quickly, and correctly, obtain the information needed to resolve the problem.
In today's IT world with systems getting ever more complicated it is becoming harder and harder to be a jack of all trades and I'm seeing an ever increasing trend towards more specializations, even on the smaller sized companies. They will look to hire a few specific skill sets that are most important to keep in house and out-source the more generalized tasks.
Well, yes, you need engineers who maintain the building and the core infrastructure/equipment, but would you call that network engineer? And regarding managed etc can all be done digitally so a NOC will do (or even a virtual one where people work remotely) and funny thing is that you can hire all around the world, no need to pay high wage just because someone attended some fancy-pants university
spot on and nicely said
I quit college my senior year. I was only there for 2 years as I had entered with enough credits to be almost a junior (Joint college enrollment in last 2 years of HS + AP Credits)
I've never looked back. Granted I quit college in 2000/2001 in the dot-com boom days to start my own companies, that didn't really net any positive results until 2005 when I finally landed in the hosting industry. 8 years later we have a very successful company, 30 employees and I've got a wife and 4 kids.
It doesn't work for everyone but if you have the dedication (and oh boy does it take dedication and time time time) you can make a heck of a career for yourself with the knowledge you gain in practical implementations rather than sticking your head in a book for 4-6 years.
Yes I do agree on that point as well. I don't want to throw my parents or myself into too much debt and not have it turn out the way I want it to. I do plan on staying unmarried/without kids for a long time, I have no interest in that.
The way the school that I want to go to works is you take 11 weeks of schooling, all paid for by the Electrical Union. I'll be going to "C Card" Communications route where they teach you how to run fiber, ethernet, security systems, alarms, etc. Then after that 11 weeks, they'll have you intern with a company for a while, and then after that period typically an electrical contractor will hire you on and see that you are a C Card carrier and put you in a datacenter or somewhere where what you learned will be applied.
Eh? Yes you absolutely need a very skilled and competent network engineer(s) to configure, secure, and maintain a network and all of the devices and equipment therein. You can't just press a button and presto all of that gets done.
Out-sourcing gets you suspect quality at best. We have very direct experience with it. We still maintain an office in South America. We do not contract a 3rd party company but instead have our own full time employees and office in Uruguay as we provide both english and spanish language services. We at one time had a very large staff base that handled much of our managed services out of country.
We found that over time there was significant quality improvements to be had in building a local team that worked together directly with our facility support staff would produce higher quality results with only very marginal cost increases.
you will want to go to a legitimate school if you want to go to college. a for profit school = worthless. certs are nice, but it should be something you pursue in addition to your education. remember that what you want right now may not be what you want later on
I think many people don't really understand exactly how complex larger scale networks get once you get outside of the 1-2 network device box and running simple default-route bgp.
Start bringing into the equation more complex equipment like protected path dwdm gear and adding in a dozen high end pieces of ip routing gear at the edges and managing all the prefix lists, peer groups, policies, blah blah blah. Things take intense planning and a huge amount of knowledge and experience to be able to make things work together, as expected. To top that off, thats still a very small network.
I mean, take a look at OVH's network weather map, your head will explode
Honestly I don't regret getting a degree, but like @RyanD said, because it shows that I'm willing to submit to authority and commit to a task. If you'll believe it, my degree is in multimedia.
We'll just leave out the part where I graduated with people who can't read.
I don't know about you but I know plenty of people who can lay and organize cables... The hard part is configuring which can again be done digitally, in a NOC so you have one person controlling multiple datacenter's core network. (and that person can be out sourced)
One of my best techs from the past, whom now works for apple
Had a degree in interpretive dance. Our director of marketing has a degree in archaeology....