I have been thinking about my life a bit more deeply these days since I am not working right now. Many of the positions that I have seen are now requiring some sort of extra certification that I do not have. I have a business degree with a focus on Information Systems but no experience in my field.

I have experience in other fields like retail, banking and of course education but zilch when it comes to formal IT experience. This has been a big barrier to me lately and I am wondering if I should go ahead and try to scrape together the money to get my Cisco certification so I can get a leg up on the competition.

Since it has become more widespread for people to go into some sort of technical field it is becoming even more competitive for those of us who have business and IT related degrees. This means that in order to stay up to par with everyone else I would need to get some kind of certification so that I can use that on my resume in lieu of all the experience that I don’t have because no one will hire me.

There is a  list of different certifications that you can get and they are all at varying levels of expertise in the area that you want to study. The first step that I would have to to take is to get the CCNA which is the basic requirements for the Cisco certification program. From there I could move on to higher levels of the program and end up with Expert certification in an area such as network security.

I am not ready to take that plunge yet but it is certainly something to look at for now so when the time is right I will be well prepared to make the best decision for my future.

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