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Hi,
I've been doing IT Help Desk for about a year and a half now. I got laid off in March and have been doing temp assignments lately (well, one that keeps getting continued.) I'm taking the A+ right now because it seems to be absolutely necessary to get hired anywhere.
As for the test, it's much harder than I thought it would be. I figured if I've been in the field for a while, read through an Exam Cram book, then I'd probably be okay. Wrong. Went in to take it the first time and failed miserably. So then I bought a new CompTIA approved book, started studying much harder and passed the first exam. The hardest part is that you have to memorize all the IRQ and I/O addresses for standard devices. I'm just getting started on the Windows OS segment.
As for what other certs you may want, that depends entirely on what you want to do. A+ leads into Help Desk/Desktop Support/PC Technician work. Cisco and Oracle is more Sys Admin stuff. CCNA is for a LAN/WAN engineer. Another one to go for is the MCSE. That's the cert for a Network Administrator. Warning though, that's a long series of hard tests and there's a lot of unemployed Network Administrators right now.
I don't want to be too negative but I have to add this. You know the tech sector is a disaster right now right? Thousands unemployed, many working below their skill level just to have a job, incredibly competitive job market even and especially for entry level. If this is truly the field you want to be in (and I gather from some of your other posts that it is) then it's still doable. It'll just be MUCH harder than it was 2 and 1/2 years ago. Good luck to you. With a lot of perserverance, initiative and determination I'm sure you'll do great.
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