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Comment by kevin2r | Hacker News Reader

How this certification program compares to CompTIA A+ ?

Both are likely to be equally worthless in getting an IT job, IT jobs require experience in the field and not just knowledge.

That old Catch-22: how do you gain experience in the field if nobody will hire you?

Work for exposure shrugs

We based this on our internal training for our IT hires based on the gaps we found when we onboarded people over the last 7 years. We invested a lot in making the material practical and lab driven vs just rote memorization.

Disclosure: I worked on this program.

Thanks for being on this thread and commenting in a few places.

I just wanted to say thank you, as a senior sysadmin this looks like a really good course to uptrain t1/2's with, and it does seem to be more concise and relevant than other similar courses.

I rip on google a lot, but I can appreciate good work when I see it.

I am currently taking the course and I can tell you that for 50.00 it is well worth it. I have been in IT Support for 20+ years and can tell you that it is constantly changing and although I have a degree I did not learn the majority of the knowledge I have from college. We have had interns and hires that have certifications out the wazoo and 4-year degrees but do not know how to change a toner cartridge or could not describe how DNS and the internet works. I was super excited when the course went over DNS. Before I started this course about 3 weeks ago I was showing an employee how DNS works for an issue he ran into. I also like how the course went over Linux and windows, mac, etc. The course was not one sided like a lot, of courses, focusing specifically on the vendor. I also like how they have labs that have interaction. Any good training should have actual labs with hands-on experience. I personally think we have too many people that memorize brain dumps to pass but could not do the hands-on work. I did not run into a formatting issue with the things not matching up on the labs so I cannot attest to that. I do remember that they specifically say please take this on a desktop or laptop. It said something about not taking them on mobile devices or tablets. I also saw that sometimes when you put in an answer that if you left a hyphenated word out or only put the first part of the word it would now except the answer. That being said you can review the material as many times as you want and you can also retake the quizzes and assignments so there should be no reason for you to not pass unless you're just lazy. That being said, the course does not go over everything and nor should it. It is an entry-level course for 50.00 that you can do on your on time to further your education and career. Back in the day, CompTIA used to cost 50.00 but now it is 410.00. Most of the vendors have gouged on pricing in the last 20-30 years. Hats off to Google for trying to make a difference and not trying to charge people a gazillion dollars for it.

A+ covers IT support and touches a tiny bit on networking, Windows admin, and basic hardware.

This course seems to be pretty comparable, but it also covers writing Ruby code, managing Chef, and using Git.

Of course another big difference is this course teaches you exactly what you need to know, while CompTIA leaves it to third-parties to write the training materials independently from the courses, so you're reading a 500 page book for a 100 question exam.

Happy that it covers writing code for automation. I have automated some tedious tasks at my current job, it saves hours of frustration and boredom.

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