IT Insights Blog — TestOut Continuing Education

In the modern business world, many people communicate via text, or by using any of a variety of different chat apps. It's often more convenient than a phone call, and usually quicker (if inevitably sloppier) than sending an e-mail. It's likely to be a long time, however, before e-mail entirely disappears as a means of communication and sharing information. And as long as e-mail continues to exist, if not precisely flourish, it will remain a potentially dangerous point of entry to your workstation and, more problematically, your employer's network.

Let's have a show of hands: Who out there remembers being an elementary school student and going back to school each year in the fall to have one of your first assignments be a picture/show-and-tell/report/essay about how you spent your summer vacation? "This is me, my sister, my brother, my mom, and my dad standing next to Old Faithful in Yellowstone." "I got these Mickey Mouse ears when we went to Disneyland." "For my summer vacation I played Little League baseball and hit a home run."

An oft-debated question among aspiring IT professionals is: Which will help me better land a job? Should I focus on one specific domain, or on developing a broader range of skills? Like so many of life’s questions, there is no one-size-fits-all answer, and frequently the solution is a combination of both options. While the decision is very important, and will influence the sort of jobs you will land in the beginning of your career, here are a few thoughts to consider when deciding between a targeted or shotgun approach.

Sometime this weekend — just before midnight on Saturday, to be precise, quite literally at the eleventh hour — the next potentially winning combination in the Powerball lottery will be announced. The current jackpot stands at roughly $435 million, with a "cash value" (whatever that means) of $273.1 million. Maybe that's the after-tax payout? Maybe it doesn't really matter to the winner? What's a quarter of a billion dollars between sweaty-palmed suckers hoping to turn a multi-tens-of-dollars investment into a multimillion-dollar American Dream?

First there was Amazon. Now everyone is doing it. Amazon Echo, the home assistant "smart speaker" that offers you a voice-activated connection to the web, as well as to various internet-enabled devices in your home, lit a tiny consumer fire at the end of 2014 as a special offering to Amazon Prime members. (The cheery program that responds to Echo commands is named Alexa.) Then the gizmo caught on, fueled by a general release in 2015, and Amazon's first-ever Super Bowl ad (featuring Alec Baldwin) in 2016.