complaint dept: school blues post #1

[selector23]

whew...just SLAMMED with school work...mostly reading. I will be SO glad when this Networking Fundamentals class is finished. Never in my life have I had to absorb so much useless information. I continue to read the ALL the material, but it is so MUCH information, that I am retaining almost none of it. It seems ridiculous to me that you have to

Comments

[hollowsphere]

Much of the information that you are absorbing for the certification exams is actually at some point likely (should that be your path) to be only a fraction of the information you know on a day to day basis. The supposed point of the exams is to judge your skill level for a particular job. As you said though, if you get it through books then a lot of it is not going to be retained. For example, I went to training on Pix firewalls, training which was designed to allow you to get a certification afterwards. Once I left the class, I didn't do any work on our Pix firewalls for some time and I forgot most everything. Now Nokia and Checkpoint firewalls I work on pretty much every day. At this point I could probably conduct the class or write the exam. But I can still do my job and get by when it comes to Pix firewalls by looking things up. The only time I have had trouble is in an interview situation. Tech interviews in NYC are insanely hard because all that stuff you are forgetting? Yeah they want you to know that off the top of your head

[obiefernandez]

I agree with John -- most of what they're teaching you now is a fraction of what you'll need to know. Over the years (for me at least) it's been more important to be aware that certain bits of knowledge are out there and can be referenced in detail if necessary. That usually entails reading through blogs and technical books constantly, and getting a feel for what I'll be able to use in the future if I need it.

As for website design stuff, the real pros don't depend on any WYSIWYG tools. Handcoding is the way to go. I suppose starting out with something like Dreamweaver is not such a bad idea, but eventually you shouldn't need those tools to do your job.