IT Insights Blog — TestOut Continuing Education

The shortest distance from point A to point B is a straight line. When talking about the fastest way to get from point A to point B, things aren’t so cut and dried. For instance, if you wanted to go from Paris, France to New York City, USA in a straight line, you would have to drill a tunnel through the surface of the earth beneath the ocean. That would, of course, take longer than hopping on an airplane and flying a curved route over the Atlantic Ocean.

I’m a newcomer to the field of IT. My background is publishing and I confess that I’m little more than an ink-stained hack. My job mainly entails reading about and listening to people much smarter than I, and then hammering out articles on various IT topics. Think of the fabled 1,000 monkeys banging away on 1,000 typewriters. The more I learn about the field, the more amazed I am at how pervasive IT is in all aspects of our modern world. There are literally tens of millions of people learning about and working with IT. Since I also work in IT, I figured that I ought to learn something about the field.

March Madness is here and, with regard to the NCAA basketball tournament, March has been just that — madness. There have been game winning buzzer beaters, a comeback of epic proportions, and one of the biggest upsets in tournament history. (That game didn’t just bust my bracket, it decimated it.) When watching these tournament games, one can’t help but notice the effort that is being put into every possession. These players are fighting for their chance to be put in the history books, clawing their way to the coveted national championship. Why, it’s enough to make me want to bust out the old NCAA Tournament theme music.

You have to break some eggs to make an omelet, and you have to spend some money to get a certification. Or do you? Whether or not you spend a nickel to acquire study and review materials, or take classes, or use online training tools, there's an unavoidable fee for taking a certification exam. Or is there? Our friends at Certification Magazine have been gradually releasing data from their annual Salary Survey since early February. They also conduct smaller, more targeted salary surveys throughout the year, and one item of data that turns up over and over again is that there is a fairly large portion of people who pursue and earn certifications without making any out-of-pocket investment. Zippo. Zero dollars spent. Total withdrawal from personal accounts: nada.

I recently read an article about Dominic Eldridge, a certification student who earned nine certifications, but along the way failed five times. Failure can stop a lot of people, but this guy used his failures as motivation. “I think a lot of people are worried about failing the test. That’s a waste of mental energy. It’s no big deal if you fail. I’ve failed five different times on these tests. You just go back and ...