Must Have IT Communications Certifications

There’s more than “ordinary networking” involved in all of these IT communications credentials, and the technologies they cover.

When it comes to bringing people and systems together, separately and together, more than networking is often required to make all of the right connections and technologies work together. This “Top 5” article is something of a grab-bag, because it ties classic telecommunications, telecommunications networking, and various kinds of streaming voice and video platforms and technologies together.

This is also a market and technology niche where a single company – namely, Cisco Systems – puts down an enormous footprint on the landscape. You’ll notice that three of our top five credentials (one of which is an entire credential family for the Voice track for CCNA, CCNP, and CCIE) come from this one single company. These credentials are joined by an engineering oriented communications distribution credential from BICSI, which was originally a building trades association, and also a classic voice and data convergence credential developed under the auspices of the Telecommunications Industry Association, aka TIA.

There’s more than “ordinary networking” involved in all of these credentials, and the technologies they cover, because voice and streaming media traffic come with certain unavoidable and important requirements for limited latency and quick delivery. These are necessary to enable real-time voice and video communications to occur, and for streaming media delivery to provide an acceptable user experience without hiccups, interruptions, and so forth.

Thus, there’s a vital service level establishment, monitoring, and troubleshooting component for all of these credentials, and a larger-than-usual collection of protocols and services that certified professionals must know how to install, configure, manage, and troubleshoot, above and beyond the usual collection of TCP/IP basics commonly found in Internet-connected networking environments.

Ed Tittel is a 30-year-plus veteran of the computing industry, who’s worked as a programmer, a technical manager, a classroom instructor, a network consultant and a technical evangelist for companies that include Burroughs, Schlumberger, Novell, IBM/Tivoli and NetQoS. He has written and blogged for numerous publications, including Tom's Hardware, and is the author of over 140 computing books with a special emphasis on information security, Web markup languages and development tools, and Windows operating systems.

Check out Ed's Tom's IT Pro  Making It in IT - Certification & Training blog here.

See here for all of Ed's Tom's IT Pro articles.

Mary Kyle is a full-time freelance writer, editor, and project manager based in Austin, TX. A former IBMer, Mary has over 10 years of project management experience in IT, software development and IT-related legal issues.

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