Planning Your Brilliant IT Certification Career

By itself, planning cannot guarantee a brilliant or any other kind of certification career. But the logistics involved in managing a full-time job, family life, and leisure time in the busy lives people lead make planning for certification vital and important.

That’s because shoe-horning another set of activities, and the commitments of time, money, and energy involved to undertake them, demand careful consideration and planning to achieve even modest success.

Guess What? You’ve Already GOT a Life…

Over the past couple of decades I’ve worked with lots of people in IT at all levels, and provided input and advice to help them improve their technical skills and knowledge, and to advance in their careers. The most important observation I can make about what I’ve learned myself, and what I’ve seen others do and learn, is that certain sacrifices will be required to achieve success.

That’s because when you put more time, energy, and money into one set of activities, other activities and commitments must suffer at a least a little, if only to rebalance our limited resources of time, energy and money.

Planning is important because it lets you decide how much of those resources you can commit to certain activities, and what implications those commitments will have on the rest of your life and on your family. A good buddy of mine, Harold, for example, seized the impending birth of his daughter three years ago, to step up and commit to earning a CCIE by the time he turned 35. He asked his wife to permit him to spend two evenings per week (4 hours each), and a day and a half every other weekend (12 hours) to his studies and certification practice.

That gave Harold a time budget of around 20 hours a week to spend on certification–a HUGE commitment, given that each week is 168 hours long, and that sleep, work and commuting consumed 99 hours right of the top. Of the 69 hours he had left to handle the rest of life in its entirety, he decided to devote about 29 percent to certification study and preparation.

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.