Pick Your Path

OK, show of hands: Who out there reading this post remembers those old Choose Your Own Adventure novels? There were 184 of them published between 1979 and 1998. The first in the series is The Cave of Time, written by Edward Packard, who pioneered the concept. There was a spinoff series for younger readers, and themed series for both Walt Disney and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

The idea behind the series is that you would read a few pages and then the viewpoint character would be faced with a decision. To find out what happens next, the reader would decide which course of action the character(s) should follow and turn to the corresponding page. Then you would either read into a dead end (oftentimes literally so), or you would keep reading until a new decision point is reached.

It's just like real life, right? Well, OK, most of the choices that you make in real life don't lead to an untimely death, or other horrible end to your story, if you happen to choose "poorly" (as the old knight once put it in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade). Life is about making choices, however, and the choices that you make — some to a greater degree than others — do determine where you ultimately end up.

One choice that can have a big impact is deciding to pursue a career in information technology (IT), and then picking a path to follow. There are many different directions that IT can take you, and many career outcomes to envision. A great way to set your course is to get an IT certification. It's not as costly or time-consuming as completing a college degree program, and the right cert can give you work-ready skills.

That's the goal of all our certification training here at TestOut Continuing Education. Once you choose the path to follow, we want to be sure that you understand how to deal with real-world tech scenarios. We want you to be ready to get things done in an actual IT workplace. Also, our courseware doesn't have any built-in "bad endings." Which is always nice when it's time to choose your own adventure.