Professor Messer's 220-1001 A+ Study Group - June 2021

all right welcome to the pre-show everybody thanks for being here if you have tuned in or you're watching this on the replay we are about 10 minutes away from getting started with our 220 1001 core one a plus study group for june 2021 we are uh got we have all new questions just as we do every month so i've got those ready to go here they are you can't see them yet they're right there there are questions up on socrative at professormesser.comqa which you can only see if you are visiting us live hello everyone hello chatroom hi everybody it is uh it's a good day to do a study group it's a little uh a little overcast outside i think it might rain but we're going to be good in here we got plenty to do in this first hour i will ask you questions from the a plus exam objectives and in the second hour we just open up the phone lines i take questions from the chat room so we'll do that as well hello everybody thanks for being here joshua has your 1001 on june the 5th what's today today's june the 8th oh you passed on june the 5th you already got through the 1001 congratulations that's fantastic so you must be preparing for your 1002 and if that's the case we're doing one of these tomorrow on the 1002 a little bit of a change to the normal schedule so if you're somebody who is planning to take your 1002 come back this time tomorrow don't leave no stay here now but also come back tomorrow uh this is a little bit different you'll see me straight up in the in the in the view of the camera in just a moment once we get started this is not the actual show this is our pre-show so we are trying to get things started i'm checking all my cameras you can kind of see my camera set up you can even see me there i am hi so i'm checking as long as i have these four right here those are my four cameras and we're good shape uh my skype is up my call-in is ready i think we're in good shape i'm recording down here we're recording over here on the obs i think we're in pretty good shape i think we're in good shape everybody this is a pretty good setup uh this is one that has sort of evolved over time you can't see the lights the big lights are up here and on the side you can't see those i have one i have a shot of the studio from somewhere on the instagram or something uh but there is uh there is a lot going on here there's the mixer for the audio there's the video switcher in front of me which is a complete self-contained blackmagic setup i am able to watch this this is my stream console so i can see what's going on with the stream this is the video switching console so i can kind of see what's what you see and then i've got ready to go on the on the preview side you can see that's the preview button and then the four cameras are here i've got my primary screen that i normally use for doing pretty much everything i've got my secondary screen for this same computer that i use to check the chat this is the ipad i use to be able to see the presentation that is being played here so that i know what's coming up next see how that works and then we'll uh this is actually showing the slides that you will ultimately see and we're recording video on two can't really see the set the first one on the top this one on the bottom we're recording on two separate video streaming devices there we can uh we can record in video recorders and we've got of course streaming up here on the obs i'm recording on that local device as well and we're recording on youtube so we have really four recordings going all at the same time just to make sure that we don't lose anything you may wonder why are you doing four of them certainly two is enough well if two was enough we would have stopped with two but two as it turns out not even close to being enough so somebody at my front door of course there is of course this time of the day as i sit down and get started let's make sure it's not the near due wells it's probably well i don't know i do know who that is but that's just gonna have to uh that's just how it's gonna have to happen i'll have to send my better half a note there we go okay there see there's always something going on but that's okay we're in good shape i wish it was pizza wouldn't that be great if just a random pizza delivery not even one a schedule just it showed up no it's it's a lot less interesting it's the gentleman who is here to spray for uh for fertilizer on my lawn that's how exciting my day is right now he just shows up whenever it's normal he doesn't call me or set it up which is fine he knows he can come in and do whatever but that's that's what that's what he's doing there it's not uh someone calling check on my car's extended warranty but they they call very often asking about an extended warranty on my car uh they never talk to me so they just keep calling i guess that's fine uh let's see um so that should work out no this is a professional fertilizer terminator sort of person he handles you know getting the bugs off the trees and making sure the grass doesn't die of whatever the grass dies of uh you can tell i am extremely well read in the world of horticulture uh i'm gonna stick with computers that's okay with everybody that's why i have him that's why i have joe joe is here to spray the lawn so that's why i have joe because joe knows all of the details so no problem there works works just fine i wish i had uh a little more ready really to do actually i'm glad i don't have more to do right now because that means something would not have worked right but we've got about three and a half minutes to go before we get started on the live stream so uh grab uh grab a beverage sit back we'll get through all of these we'll figure out the details joe and joe does not bring any pizza i should talk to joe about doing that do you want the guy who's uh spring chemicals on your lawn to bring pizza i don't know if that's a good idea either probably not that's that's at least something to to think about um uh in the chat room past eight plus last year using my videos finished six months probation and a new i.t role congratulations made it through the difficult part now it's all about making more of it happen just keep moving up moving up moving up moving up we can absolutely do that mike with the 10 donation we've not even started yet mike's already on the case thank you so much for the donation mike says thanks for helping me pass a plus recently could not have done it without your videos and practice exams you could have i think you could have but i'm more than happy to help uh you kind of did the hard part the qa side is professormesser.comqa see how that works so easy uh why is the lighting always looks so dark even though we know it's bright because it is it's completely black i cannot see the wall back there behind me it is completely black but the lights are on me you just can't see that they're on me but you can kind of see if i hold my hand up here you can kind of see that this side of my hand is very bright this side of my hand is very dark so there's no lights behind me but it is it's and actually it's not that bright for this um but that's that's why it just seems it seems a little weird doesn't it seems like i'm here in the dark because i am here in the dark it's like this one spot where my nose is happens to be bright there happens to be all of the light is pointed right here uh and it's there's some behind me to light up behind me but that's that's kind of it i was told that comptia was going to include include chrome os would that be next time actually it was last time they included a little bit of chrome os in the previous 900 series version um so that's that's then they took it out but maybe they'll put it back in who knows in the next update just depends on what you start building this thing and scoping it out very very wide and it tends to go crazy well the chat room has just been incredible first we had uh mike with the 10 donation now jack with a 15 donation thank you so much very kind for you to do i put that there people will often say i don't want to buy notes i don't want to buy these things you have but i would like to donate so i put that there to be able to make that happen and thank you for doing that because it really does go a long way and jack says thanks past both 1001 and 1002 in a two-week span so jack apparently has the secret whatever that secret is jack has it uh two weeks is an incredibly aggressive schedule i i suspect jack had some familiarity with the technology already uh but what what a great two-week uh push to get that done that's fantastic congratulations and thank you again for the donation so nice uh 12 noon look at that 12 noon let's pull up our presentation here green light all looks good i think we should get started you know i don't even know if i have the actual i do have this ready to go so let's go hello everyone welcome to the june 2021 professor messer a plus study group specifically our core one two twenty one thousand one a plus study group this is our june 2021 study group thanks for joining us in this study group we're going to go through everything dealing with the a-plus certification exam at least a number of questions dealing with the a-plus certification exam and we've got a lot to go through i've got all new questions every month we're going to step through so you're going to be able to learn a little bit about that a-plus and of course all of our archives are online to go through and have a look at that if you're here live and you're watching this as we're making it thank you for being here it's always fun to have you here because we do ask these questions interactively if you'd like to participate live this is not something you'd be able to do if you're watching the replay but if you are here live you can pop open a new browser window and go to professormesser.com qa as i'm told it stands for question answer that's what that is for professormesser.comqa you can also go to your favorite app store and download an app for this because of course there's an app for this it is called the socrative student app because the service we use is called socrative the socrative student app you can get from your favorite app store but it will ask you for a room name the room name is professor messer all one word make sure you spell it right p-r-o-f-e-s-s-o-r-m-e-s-s-e-r and that will get you there you'll be able to visit that site you'll be able to see the questions that are on there if you do all of that the way that hopefully it should work you've got either gone to the page or you're looking at this then you will see that there's a question waiting for you we call this our rewind question because it is a question that we have from last month to see if you're able to get an answer the questions this question asks a user's application makes changes to a router configuration while the application is active which of the following describes this functionality is it p2p nat upnp mac filtering or wpa2 a user's application makes changes to router configuration while the application is active which the following describes this functionality is it p2p nat upnp mac filtering or wpa2 as always please no answers in the chat room you want to go to professormesser.com qa lock in your answer and we will come back to this question in just a moment well as i mentioned we do one of these study groups every month thank you for being here for our a plus study group of course there's all kinds of things happening here during the week when you're not watching when i'm not streaming live there's always something happening you can always find out when the latest things are happening by joining our youtube channel and subscribing at professormesser.com slash youtube or click the youtube icon at the top of the professor messer website don't forget about our daily pop quiz questions for a plus they're available on twitter at professormesser.com twitter and on instagram at professormesser.com instagram it's a great way to get the same question but the instagram just comes with a pretty picture which i think is nice so have a look at those they're all available for you and if you're just wanting to find me on any social media you type in professormesser.com the name of that social media thing and you'll find me if there is me on there you will find me if i'm not there then you won't find me it's it's physics i guess well if you're watching this for continuing education unit credit and if you are watching this for ceu credit then you know what that means if you don't know what that means then this doesn't apply to you but you uh you will find that sometime during this first hour i will give you information about how you can earn a credit of ceu so have a look at that um listen in for it it's during that first hour you'll be able to to hear it when it happens but uh stay awake stay alert you'll be able to find that whenever it comes along during this first hour today we're going to talk about questions that come from the 220 1001 exam as many of you know to earn your a plus certification you have to take two exams the 220 1001 and the 220 1002. these two exams were released on january 15th of 2019 now normally these would rotate through about every three years or so three and a half years before they retire but you'll notice that i've put the estimated exam retire retirement probably around the july time frame of 2022 this may next actually even get pushed a little we'll have to see we're so far from any of that happening that it's not something we have to worry about here in june of 2021. this means that if you are studying for your a plus certification and you're planning that right now keep doing it you've got plenty of time before this certification even comes close to retiring you are in the right place you're studying the right thing you'll get through this well before any type of retirement happens to occur so great place to be these exams are almost identical in structure they're 90 minutes long each there are a maximum of 90 questions on the exam but there's a different scoring for each one both are scaled the same way between 100 and 900 for the 1001 you have to score 675 for the 1002 you have to score 700. i do put here that there's quite a few new topics on these compared to the older versions and i say that because if you have older materials that you're studying from that are for the 900 series or 800 series throw those out get study materials that are for specifically the 220 1001 and the 220 1002 and make sure you have the objectives which you can find at professormesser.com objectives today we're going to go through the topics associated with this exam this is the 221001 so all of our questions today will be on mobile devices networking hardware virtualization and cloud computing and hardware and network troubleshooting we'll go through each one of those today and we'll start with that first question we'll come back to that in just a moment also don't forget that there's a lot more than just the free videos that are available on my website of course every video i make is available for you to watch online for free for all of these courses you don't have to log in there's no registration there's nothing you have to do they're not behind a paywall but some of you would like to have a downloadable version you'd like to have audio mp3s you'd like my course notes you'd like my practice exams you'd like my exam hacks ebook well i've just bundled all of that together into one single set of resources you can find it in my success bundle at professormesser.com 1001 success you can also see links from that on the menus of my website it's a great way to find everything in one place and of course you can buy individual for the most part part you could buy individual pieces of this some things in here you cannot buy they are exclusive like my exam hacks ebook can't buy that by itself so that's one of those that's kind of a bonus you get whenever you purchase the success bundle or in the case of the exam hacks book you purchase uh another item i'll tell you about that just a moment there's also free questions on my site my take 10 challenge is an archive of these study groups you can find the details of that at professormesser.com take 10 and there are questions there for a plus network plus and security plus there's a video replay of this study group available immediately afterwards but there is also an audio only version of this available in podcast form so if you have a podcast listening program that automatically downloads these and puts them on your mobile device you can add us to the list by visiting professormesser.com podcast and that's a great place to go to add the a plus the network plus and the security plus study group podcast so we'll be ready to go when you are if you go out and look at the youtube channel about a day afterwards my marketing manager lori who is watching this everybody say hi to laurie hi lori she's watching this and going through it and putting time stamps into the youtube video description which is an incredibly fast way to find what you're looking for you just click on the timestamp inside of the youtube video description it takes you right to that section of the video you will see that the uh the details are there for questions for answers for people calling in you're trying to find that particular part of the the video you know someone called in about a certain topic it's listed in there lori has written down all of these things for you and it goes back years you can find that on youtube at professormesser.com youtube don't forget about my course notes as well some of you are wondering how do i keep track of 137 videos it's 18 and a half hours of content well it's my course notes these course notes are a summary of all the text all the graphics all of the charts that are important from my videos and they're summarized into a single set of notes that's the physical version that i was holding there's also a digital version of the course notes let's see if i have them here on the screen there they are so here's the digital version the pdf so you can go through and look at all of the details there it's all there you will miss nothing from those uh the details of those uh videos that you're watching all available on my website you've got plenty that you can pour through with those the course notes we've spent a lot a lot of time on to make sure that it gives you exactly what you need for your exam doesn't replace your book it doesn't replace the videos it's another study material that you can use to make sure that you've got everything ready to go should be kind of the last thing that you use before you walk into that room it's fantastic to have all of that available in one one single place and you know it's correct you know it's comprehensive and you know what follows the exam objectives to the t because i made them that way find it at professormesser.com one thousand one notes for those of you that have been watching the website you'll notice that there are also discounted vouchers that you can get from the professor messer website don't pay full price for your vouchers get a discount you don't have to have a discount code you don't have to play the coupon game i hate the coupon game but you should not have to have an add-on to your browser to play a game of coupons in instead why don't we just price it so that it's automatically discounted you'll find that at professormesser.com vouchers where you can not only get your discounted voucher but you also if you buy it from my site free you get along with this a copy of my exam hacks ebook which is a list of all of these life hacks all based around the testing process the study the testing and even some things you can do after the testing process very useful find that at professormesser.com vouchers so for those of you that have you haven't wanted to buy or invest in the success bundle and i can appreciate that you thought i just want a way to get my hands on these exam hacks and i think these exam hocks are very useful especially if you've never gone into a comptia exam before well if you're going to get your voucher that's a perfect time to get one i do not have eu vouchers these vouchers unfortunately are only available in the united states territories canada mexico that's it i'm afraid i don't have any for the eu i'm so sorry but if you are in inside of the united states territories or north america in general you can of course get them from there as well very useful to have let's go back to that question i asked earlier enough of me talking the question asked a user's application makes changes to a router configuration while the application is active which of the following describes this functionality is it p2p nat upnp mac filtering or wpa2 let's show these results and you can see that 56 percent of you have chosen upnp whatever that is we'll talk about that in a moment sixteen percent of you said that would be nat the network address translation eleven percent said p2p and then nine percent said back filtering eight percent said wpa2 effectively a three-way tie for third there well 56 57 percent of you said universal plug-and-play that's what upnp stands for universal plug and play so you can go here to have your system automatically reconfigure itself your router automatically reconfigure itself based on what applications you happen to be running that's kind of scary isn't it if it sounds scary that's because it is scary the application you're using can make changes to your firewall that effectively allows inbound traffic that's something you would never use in an enterprise network it was created especially for these home based networks where people don't know how to get into a router and reconfigure it so that you can have your own minecraft server that's really what this was designed for maybe not specifically minecraft but any type of service that's on the inside of your network the best practice for this generally speaking is to disable it why would you allow applications to change the the functionality of your firewall that but that is what universal plug-and-play is that's what it was designed to do it's not plug and play which is a windows feature this is called universal plug and play which has nothing to do with the plug-and-play that's in an operating system so of course we named it exactly the same thing with the word universal in front of it as if we would all figure that out so that's at least an idea of where we would go with that it is universal plug-and-play is the right answer 15 of you said network address translation which is an extremely useful capability on these routers that we use at home that changes our internal ip addresses to something external that we can use to communicate over the network but that in itself does not make changes to a router configuration while an application is active that just works all the time whether it's there or not so would not be that p2p which is peer to peer is a communications method that applications use to communicate with each other it does not describe changes being made to a router configuration mac filtering is kind of an administrative function for a network device that allows you to filter out devices based on their media access control address it's not based on a macintosh it's not based on an apple piece of hardware it's based on a network card a network adapter so that's what the mac filtering refers to and of course mac filtering doesn't make changes to router configuration one application is active and wpa2 is an encryption method for wireless networks a very common encryption method that encryption method does not make changes to the router configuration the only thing that makes those changes is universal plug and play in 59 percent of you got that one absolutely right well done well let's jump now into some new questions and i have some available for you and my first new question of the month is a performance-based question for those of you not familiar with performance-based questions they are questions at the very beginning of your exams a handful of questions somewhere five or so questions plus or minus that you will get at the beginning of your exam the performance-based questions mean that they are anything but multiple choice they might be a matching question they could be putting things in a particular order you could have a question that's a drag and drop question you have to figure out what that might happen to be i have a performance-based question to start off our study group today this one is a fill in the blank which you actually don't get on your exam is a fill in the blank so let's see how you do with this fill in the blank and it asks this question to name these interfaces and i have five interfaces on the screen a b c d and e for those of you listening on the audio podcast i'm so sorry on these video type questions there's nothing there i can help you with there's a there's one connector on a there's another one on b here's a third one on c the audio description of the connectors doesn't help very much but at least you're able to see them on the screen and i have both the connector on the computer or the device side and i have the cable side as well at least part of it so you can get a feel and these are these are effectively uh to scale so that might help as well i tried to keep them to scale when i put them on the screen so there's abcd you've got the interface names on the socrative side you can visit the link at the bottom of your screen professormesser.com and you can answer this question what it happens to be remember what you put in and i'm going to have it show it on my side so i can see what you're putting in a lot of you're doing very very well with this you're spot on i think some of you have been working with your connectors so a lot of people doing very very very well with this there are some that are popping up interestingly we'll go through some i wasn't expecting there's always something i'm not expecting when we go through these questions i built these questions out about a week before and i i put them online i prepare everything it takes about a half a day to put all these questions together and sometimes i think well this question they're going to answer a certain way but very often it goes very differently so i'm i'm never quite sure what i'm going to see it's a constant surprise which i think is awesome you can find this and answer it at professormesser.comqa and of course as always please no answers in the chat room please no hints in the chat room we're going to pretend we're sitting right in front of the exam right now and we're having to type these in i think on the exam you would probably get a list of 10 different interface types that you would maybe drag and drop or match to and there would be some left over but in my particular case i want to make it a little bit harder than that so you do have to go through and really understand what each one of these connectors might be number of you answering this one pretty straight on i'm not really fooling anybody with some of these and most of you i think are doing pretty well with what these happen to be some of you are running into these and thinking i'm not sure what that one happens to be i'm not sure what that one there is uh we'll find out in a moment though to be able to work through all of those this is one of the important parts of this is those types of interfaces are listed in the comptia exam objectives make sure you have the objectives go to professormesser.comqa and you'll find all of the objectives there to go through could be very useful to have all of that let's see how you did with naming all of these let's see what these interfaces happen to be let's step through each one of these we'll start with the one on the far left which we marked as a and i think almost everybody as i'm i'm looking through this is obviously not a multiple choice question so i have to kind of summarize everything viewing through some of most people here said hdmi some of you said interestingly enough full-size hdmi which i guess technically this is the the full-size hdmi connection as many of you know by looking at the videos and the content that i have on my videos around these interfaces there's a smaller hdmi type as well this is not that smaller type because i i kept it at least to scale i was one of the points i was making with having you step through this but there are other hdmi interface types that are common on my camera for example i have a mini hdmi connection it's not mini what is it type type c type d there's different types of hdmi uh the hd but all you need to know for this particular answer hdmi is fine i will accept that perfect perfect answer for what we're looking at and if you've plugged in any video device i don't know in the last 10 years you probably got that one right i think most of you did second on our list uh is a relatively new interface uh you probably have a device at this point that has this functionality if you don't you certainly will in the future it's our usb c connector usbc refers to the connector type refers to this specific interface format but you can put different types of signals over a usbc connection for example i put thunderbolt signals over the usbc connections on my computer so it's usbc describes the physical interface that you see on the screen here it does not describe the data going over that interface so this usbc very specific and of course it could be usb data going over usbc uh what's nice about this of course is there's no up or down anymore you just plug it in it works finally the poor usb developers finally got to a point where we can make a connector that you can plug in and not have to do it three times before you get it right third on our list is an interface you might not have run into before a video based interface that is displayport displayport is an increasingly popular interface type especially if you are using high-end video if you're a gamer you want higher resolutions and faster response times you need a video format that's able to keep up with those speeds we didn't think about 120 uh changes on the screen every second 120 hertz 160 240 we have these video systems now we're getting faster and faster frame rates and we need a video that can keep up with it we never planned hdmi to be able to do that we need something that can support higher bandwidths that can send more data at the same time over those interface connections displayport is one of those connection types fourth on our list is one that is relatively familiar i think most of you are familiar with a usb specifically usb type a connector this is a usb connection this is does send usb not only a usb connector but the data over that connector is usb very rarely would you see another type of data being sent over that but the usb type a increasingly common this is the connector that only works if you plug it in three times you plug it in one way it doesn't fit you turn it around you plug it in the other way it doesn't fit you turn it back around and plug it in and finally it will fit so you have to do it three times that's the important part of that usb type-a connector which is why we we finally got the usb type-c connector who wants to go through that process every single time so lastly we have and that is although it's not colored and the colors are important uh we don't know what version of usb that happens to be but it seems to be one of the 2.0 maybe the 1.0 versions 1.1 versions of it so there you go that's the usb type a connector and the last one the list which probably most of you were looking at saying what is that connector type technically speaking the connector type is a mini displayport connector mini displayport connect that is the main displayport connector now those of you familiar with how this particular connector is used is that other things have used this connector type as well to send different signals so although we call this the mini display port connector you might also see people refer to this as a thunderbolt connector because we did use that connector for thunderbolt which i would accept i'll take that as a some of you even put in the answers mini displayport thunderbolt perfectly reasonable and i would accept that for both i would accept mini displayport i would accept thunderbolt or a combination of those not mini thunderbolt although it sort of is a mini thunderbolt but that's not what it is it's thunderbolt or mini displayport and that's what you would find those are increasingly uncommon we're kind of moving away from that mini displayport connector and moving now that usbc is available is very useful i think uh fire we did run firewire over those ports as well so that's another one i guess i could take firewire but firewire is not in the comptia a plus exam objectives for good reason we just don't use it anymore it's just not seen anymore so fire a wire is not one of those things that you will run into on the exam i would not have given you something on the screen that you would not have on the exam but i would accept that as a as an accurate representation of that interface so those five interfaces again hdmi usbc displayport usb type a and mini displayport that is our performance-based question of the month now as usual for those of you that have have done this and been on these before there you could have gotten more than one wrong here you could have gotten some right and some wrong the comptia has said on their website and they're frequently asked questions that it they could at times on their exams give you partial credit but they do not tell you if they are going to give you partial credit so you never know if you're going to get partial credit all you know is that it's possible so you might get partial credit or you might not only thing i can recommend to you is to do the best you can and just whatever the answers are going to be and whatever the grading is going to be is something that you don't have control of any way so do the best you can you're gonna do fine that's that's the goal if you know everything in the exam objectives you will do just fine with this let's shift gears and do a more traditional question with this uh let's start with a question that is a multiple choice based question we're going back to the multiple choice and the multiple choice based question here asks a network outage has taken the dhcp server offline which of the following could be assigned to local devices and i have for you five ip addresses they are 169.254.77.250. the next one is 192.168. the third is 10.54.177.68 the last is 172.16.120.121 and finally on our list 127.0. so quite a list of ip addresses i'm so glad i went through the process of having to figure out what all of those might be that is where the answers are if you'd like to answer this go to professormesser.comqa again no answers in the chat room no hints in the chat room we don't want to go through any of those so hopefully that's one that you're familiar with whenever you start looking at these questions though it may help you to be able to go through and find maybe some of the questions that might help you uh that you know already so you can get rid of those it could be the the calculators the limitations kind of thing so that's that i think would also help whenever you're stepping through this is figuring out the details of course as i mentioned please no uh no mention of this in the chat room no hints in the chat room either we can figure out yeah comptia does not do a all of the above none of the above some of the above which indeed aren't really useful they are not questions that that really help especially when you have 90 possible questions in an exam that you have to finish in 90 minutes so that's that's a challenge if you are ever in that situation that's a lot to go through so they don't give you some of these questions where you have to really go through and figuring out the details so that's that's whenever i go through this what i what i mean when i say uh that they don't really do all of the above none of the above send them some of the above because it's it's not useful now 90 is the maximum number of questions as some of the people in the chat room said that fewer questions you might get fewer than 90 which always helps it's always a mixture and each question appears as as far as we know to be worth a different number of questions so you never know exactly how many points a certain question may be worth to be able to have that can you skip questions and come back to them in the exam you absolutely can you can move around to any question at any time so you could start at the very end of the exam and work your way backwards if you wanted to i don't know why you do that but but you could it's at least the capability is there let's see how you did with this question the question asked a network outage has taken the dhcp server offline which of the following could be assigned to local devices is it 169.254 is it 192.168.101.88 is it 10.54.177.68 is it 172.16.120.121 or is it 127.0.0.120. it's got to be one of those right so that is let's see how you did let's show the results 56 of you have said it's 169.254.77 24 of you say it's 192.168.101.88 and then you have single digits for all three of the others 127.00120.9 120 121 got five percent and then 10.54.177.68 got seven percent well if we go with the majority here 169.254. that's 77.250 they say that's what you would see if the dhcp server was suddenly unavailable for those of you that haven't seen these ip addresses before these are called automatic private ip addressing addresses ap ipa is what those are for they are what we also refer to as a link local address that means that if you have been assigned this address you can communicate to anyone else on your local ipsubnet that also has been assigned one of these ap ipa addresses but you can't communicate outside of this local subnet routers will not route this outside of the local subnet you can't obviously communicate to the internet if you've been assigned an apipa address this is one where you really do have to look for these and understand why you would have been assigned these the way that you know if you have been assigned an apipa address is the range of addresses there is a reserve range from 169 to 254.0.0 through 169.254.255.255. this effectively means that 169.254 anything starting with 169.254 is an apipa address now in reality the first 255 addresses and the last 255 addresses are reserved so what you will really be assigned is an address in the range of 169.254.1.0 through 169.254.254.255. so if your address is somewhere in there and you don't have to memorize the whole thing just memorize those first two numbers 169.254. if you see that you have been assigned a link local address an ap ipa address so there is why whenever you start stepping through this that you will have this automatically assigned to you it will see that it has one that has been us usually it's because you are not communicating or can't communicate to a dhcp server and you don't have anything that has been locally assigned on your computer so automatically the operating system says well i need to give you something and at least maybe i can give you an ip address that would allow you to communicate to other devices on your local subnet so i'm going to sign you 169.254. a set of random numbers and it'll use arp and make sure that nobody else happens to be using those numbers and then assign it to your machine and so now you can at least communicate a little bit you can't communicate to the internet can't do much at all but the real key is 169.254. you could have a network that's a 169.253 or 169.255. those are legitimate ip addresses so don't confuse it with that make sure you know both of those octets 169.254 to be able to do that those are the important things if your machine is assigned that here's what it will look like in your ipconfig you can see that there's the number 169.254.228.109 and notice the subnet mask it has a very large range that it assigns on the subnet of 255.255.0.0 so that's what you will see and you'll see that and wonder wait for some reason i was not able to get an ip address from the dhcp server now let's do some additional troubleshooting to find out why so that is the answer to this question is the apipa address of 169.254.77.250. 56 of you got that one absolutely right now we have three other addresses here that our rfc 1918 addresses they are addresses that we consider to be private addresses there would be addresses that are behind our router that are not routable on the internet those ranges are things you also need to know especially for your network plus but the 192.168. the 10 anything starting with 10 and anything starting with 172.16 through 172.20 uh we'll have those there those are their private ip address ranges that you can work through the last one on the list 127.0 is a loopback address uh there are on your operating system a loopback built into your computer a private virtual ip address that's inside every single operating system that allows you to at least test to make sure that the system is working right from an ip perspective well anything starting with 127 is an a loopback address in ip version 4. so i say 2031 16 through 31. you've got an octet there of 16 that you're able to step through so it's useful to have the 192 the 10 the 172 networks because those can be used to put on different subnets inside of your network and not use any public ip addresses out on the internet very useful to have that there so hopefully that helped you too now why did i put the 120 there because i can well the entire loopback range is 127.0.0.0.8. that's in it's a huge range some operating systems will only respond to 127.0.0.1 if you were to ping it but you'll notice if you try to ping anything that's 127 dot anything technically speaking those are loopback addresses it should respond in an operating system they do not always some operating systems work differently but that is the standard that is the reserved range at the very least so you folks did really well with this one that was the right answer 57 percent got it absolutely right of 169.254.77 at 250. let's do another multiple choice based question shall we i've got another one for you this one asks a system administrator has upgraded a system by replacing a single memory module with two separate modules which of the following would describe this upgrade and for some reason no question mark there so bad grammar on my side the possible answers are multi-channel raid 1 multi-core ecc or hyper threading possible answers multi-channel raid 1 multi-core ecc or hyper threading a system administrators upgraded the system by replacing a single memory module with two separate modules which of the following would describe this upgrade question mark that's that's one you have to step through if you think you know the answer go to professormesser.com and lock in your answers is the loopback good for troubleshooting internal hardware the loopback is good for troubleshooting the software inside of your system that's the real key is knowing is your ip stack we call the the software that runs tcpip in your system the ip stack is your ip stack working it's a great place to start is the basic system software that runs the network able to communicate because if that doesn't nothing is going to work across the network so very useful to have that there so i i think that's that's where you would you would find those i know it's kind of hard to see this on the screen there my head's in the way maybe that will help if i move these down does not really test the neck doesn't really test hardware doesn't test anything associated with the hardware of the system it tests to make sure that the operating system software that runs tcp is working up is operating correctly that is the key for your loopback address so that's why you would check the loopback you don't really usually start with checking the loopback if you suspect that maybe something has gone awry in the operating system itself maybe then you check the loop back usually we start by pinging our local address our local physical address and that's a good way to check your your network interface card so that that would be one only one answer is correct i know it lets you pick more than one but it's only one answer only do one answer on i think almost all of these only do one answer so have a have a look at those see if you figure those out yeah uh you don't see the loopback fail very often there is a process in windows that allows you to rebuild the networking subsystem software and it's for that very reason that sometimes there will be system software that gets corrupted with malware gets corrupted through something else that got installed in the os and you can tell windows you know what rebuild your ip stack please and we'll try pinging your loop back again it's a good troubleshooting step to go through so hopefully that will that will help you with these let's see how you did with this question the question again was a system administrator has upgraded a system by replacing a single memory module with two separate modules which of the following would describe this upgrade is it multi-channel raid 1 multi-core ecc or hyper threading our results say 66 percent of you say it's multi-channel we have 11 percent that said multi-core and then effectively a three-way type for third single digits for raid 1 ecc and hyper threading so you've got a few choices to run through now the key here was we were taking a single memory module and we were effectively replacing it with two separate modules you should probably look at your motherboard and look at the memory you're using in your motherboard if you're running on a system to see if you're running a motherboard that supports multi-channel memory that's what this is and it could be dual channel triple channel quad channel usually that's what you'll usually you'll see dual channel it's not often you'll see triple or quad but they do exist but if you look at your motherboard you will see some options there sometimes even the memory modules of the motherboard will be colored like this so it'll almost telling you fill in the reds and make sure so if you had for instance 16 gig of memory in your system don't buy a single 16 gig a memory module and put it into one of these slots you want to buy two 8 gig modules and spread them across two separate slots because that is going to increase the throughput of the memory communication very very useful and and very fast to have that there so that's why you have to also make sure the motherboard supports that so of course check the the documentation of your motherboard manual it will tell you very clearly in the manual this is multi-channel here's the slot you would put it in to enable that multi-channel capability so check your documentation always check the documentation of your motherboard manual because there will be certain pci slots that you will want to use over others there will be memory modules that are preferable over others very useful to have that there so hopefully that would that would be useful to know as well uh the colors may help you so if you see different colors that is almost immediately something that tells you oh well there's there's different things i could be doing with this memory let me check my documentation and make sure that i'm plugged into the right connections there that's going to help you as well multi-channel memory was the right answer if you answered a multi-channel 66 percent of you got that one absolutely right 12 said multi-core that refers to the number of cpu engines that are inside of a physical cpu package so that would not be related to up changing the amount of memory modules in a system that if you were changing the cpu which of course rarely happens the cpu is one that that is not really something you would run into and that would be multi-core but here we're talking about memory nine percent of you said raid one raid is the redundant array of inexpensive or independent disks that raid one is a drive technology it's not used with memory so that would not apply in this particular case we've got ecc which is the you can be use ecc in a number of ways for the a plus ecc is the memory type that is able to identify errors as it's going through the checking of errors in memory is a pretty important part because errors can occur inside of memory usually we see ecc memory is a parity type that is able to identify errors and then be able of course after that to be able to correct the error which is great for servers you don't usually see ecc memory and a desktop computer that you use at home and lastly we've got hyper threading hyper threading is a technology and a cpu that would allow it to perform a little bit more efficiently by effectively speeding up the number of threads that are going through one single particular core of a cpu hyper threading of course is still used in another set of cpus in fact the cpu you're using probably does some type of hyper threading but that has nothing to do with the memory that you would have in your system multi-channel is the only technology here that has anything to do with replacing memory and that would be the right answer 67 percent of you chose a multi-channel that is absolutely correct well done those of you that have been through these study groups before you know that i tell you all the time to always get a good book watch the videos get plenty of hands-on and they get lots of q a we're doing a lot of q a today but there's a lot that you need to know for the exam the exam objectives are massive for the a plus certification exams and one of the things i found is that a lot of the questions that you find online not so good some of them are very very bad in fact i know this because i get emails from you all the time saying i found this on another site this seems to be wrong is it and of course i i can never answer all of these that you send me i just say ask the person on the website why they wrote a bad question and maybe they'll help you so what i thought is we need better questions we need something that will really help prepare us for the a plus certification exam so i wrote my own i wrote a set of practice exams specifically for the a plus certification and whenever you start looking at practice exams they need to be exams that cover the same percentage of topics they need to be very focused on the topics of the exam and they need to be questions that are not these crazy questions out of left field that you weren't expecting or that are badly written they need to be very well written and so i thought i'll write these we'll put them into a book i created my practice exams as three separate 90 question practice exams that include multiple choice and performance-based questions in fact we have one on my screen let's see if i can pull it up here's here's my book i've got it right in front of me right now a network connection in a conference room was installed years ago and there's no documentation for the cable run connecting a device to the cable results in a successful ethernet connection so the other end of the cable should terminate somewhere in the wiring closet which of the default which of these tools would be the best choice to find the other end of the network connection would that be a cable tester a tone generator a multimeter or a crimper now if you're using a some type of pdf reader that would allow you to go through and modify the pdf you could certainly do that by clicking on any one of these but if you want to see the quick answer you can click right here on the screen because it's a pdf i've got it so that you can very quickly do that and but i can click the details here that will immediately take me to page the correct page for this and it says in fact the answer is b tone generator and i give you an answer here a description of the answer that really does describe why this does not happen to be the correct or why this is the correct answer here now one of the problems whenever i start reading through these is that i need to be able to understand if i got it wrong why i got it wrong so every incorrect answer in my book has a full explanation of why i thought that question is incorrect so you will know immediately why you got it wrong and in fact you'll probably learn something that you'll be able to use for the exam i also put at the bottom a qr code that will take you right to the video associated with this particular question so if you need additional training on this you click that it opens up the video or if you've got the physical book you point your camera at it you can even do that right now for those of you listening you can point your camera at this screen and open up the qr code and go right to the network tools video so this is where really helps give you that feedback loop of understanding did i get it right or get it wrong and even if you get it right it might help you to read through the incorrect answers to understand why cable tester multimeter or crimper would not have been the right answer for this one these are my practice exams you can find out more about the core one practice exams by going to professormesser.com core1pe i think that would help you as well if you're someone who's working to figure out the details of this have a look through and see if that would help you with some of the things you're doing and you can also bundle this together with my course notes and get a little bit of a discount too so they're made there's a little bit of a cost benefit already built into the site again no coupon hunting for this the discounts are already built in if you want to buy all of those things together very useful to have let's do some more questions i've got another multiple choice question for you that asks which of the following best describes the software that manages virtual machines which are the following is which of the following best describes the software that manages virtual machines is it a bios sas vdi cache or hypervisor which of the following best describes the software that manages virtual machines is it a bios sas vdi cache or hypervisor it's got to be one of those if you happen to know the answer please no answering in the chat room instead go to professormesser.com and lock in your answer to figure out what those happen to be very useful yeah my practice exams it's a pdf i did i publish it as a pdf so that anybody can use those regardless of what operating system they're using regardless of what mobile device they're using but if you have a pdf editor you actually take notes in the book you can circle the answer you think it is it becomes a little more interactive so i always recommend people trying out the interactive functions of their pdf reader and being able to do that the other part of it i didn't even show in my pdf reader when you finish it i've got a back button in mind so if i hit the back button it goes right back to the original question i can just go to the next question on my list so that's another way to hop through one by one and go through each one of those to be able to figure out the details of that comes in handy so that's that's why whenever i say use the best tools for what you're doing a good pdf reader can really be a great tool to be able to work through this there's a number of great pdf readers and editors out there some of them do cost some money but you've at least got some options to be able to do that and folks in the chat room already mentioning what some of those options might be so i think that's great let's see how you did with this one this question asks which of the following best describes the software that manages virtual machines is it a bios is it sas is it vdi is it cash or is it hypervisor let's show the results 80 percent of you chose hypervisor that was a pretty big number you really felt like that was the right answer 12 percent of you though say vdi so we got double digits very small double digits on that one but vdi is what other people thought six percent said sas two percent said bios and zero percent said cash wouldn't that be interesting if it was the zero percent well it would be interesting and it would be wrong because the answer really was hypervisor most of you knew what this was if you've done anything with virtual machines of any kind whether it's virtual machines on your desktop or virtual machines in a corporate or enterprise environment then you're probably very familiar with a hypervisor this is the software that manages the communication between all of these different virtual machines extremely useful to have and of course requirement if you're doing anything from a vm perspective so if you're in an enterprise environment probably using something like vsphere from the vmware folks this happens to be the oracle virtualbox software on my screen here that i run on my local desktop but this is where the software is able to manage the cpu the hardware for the uh network interface cards any of the security between all of those very important to have and it's critical if you're doing anything from a virtualization perspective that you understand how to properly use the hypervisor for those of you interested in learning more this comes directly from my 221001 section 4.2 client-side virtualization the answer is always there at the bottom of the screen you always know exactly where that's coming from so very useful to have those capabilities the exam does not specifically differentiate between type 1 and type 2 so you'll not see any mention of that in my exam objectives but trust me there's a whole whole industry a whole career ahead of you doing nothing but working with hypervisors if that's what you'd like to do plenty of things that you will learn and continue to learn associated with hypervisors the answer there would indeed be e 81 percent of you got that one absolutely correct vdi the virtual desktop interface is one that is used to manage desktops over virtual environment vdi describes that type of environment but it does not describe software that manages virtual machines it's more of virtual machines running in a cloud that happened to be a desktop only 12 percent of you chose that one five percent said sas software as a service the software that manages virtual machines i guess could be software as a service but software as a service does not describe software that manages virtual machines as i showed the one that's on my desktop certainly is not software as a service that's running on my local desktop and bios basic input output system of your computer is not the software that manages virtual machines either and nobody thought it was cache there's lots of caches on your system i would not use a cache to be able to manage a virtual machine the only answer that makes any sense is the last one answer e hypervisor was the one that we would use if you're watching this video for continuing education unit credit and that's someone who already has a comptia or some other type of certification or you need ceus for some other reason go to the top or the bottom of the professor messer website there's a contact us link click that contact us link brings up a form put your name your email address in the subject line put the june 2021 core one study group and then on a line by itself in the body of the message put the super secret code word of the month hypervisor that's what you need to find the super secret code word of the month is hypervisor that is the one you would want to put in there and then you can put anything else you would like into the body of that message i read through every single one of those i unfortunately am not able to respond back to every single one of those because i get hundreds of these in in a single month but i at least will be able to see i do like reading through everything you send so i'm more than happy to do that and i do appreciate everything you do and put into those hopefully that will i usually send out those ceus by the way about a week sometimes faster sometimes slower but i get them out in about a week's time so please be patient you don't have to email me every hour wondering where your ceu is because it takes me a while i usually sit down and when i've got time to really pour through them i just do them all at the same time so we try to make that happen that's an easy way we have time for another question so let's get another one in while we have this time the question asks a network administrator is installing a raid 10 array what is the minimum number of drives required to build this array is it 2 3 four eight or ten got a few answers to choose from there a network administrator is installing a raid 10 array what is the minimum number of drives required to build this array is it two three four eight or ten lock in your answer professormesser.com qa please no answers in the chat room please no hints in the chat room we'll be able to figure out the details of what this happens to be whenever i start looking at the answers and trying to figure out answers from this there's some i can probably throw out immediately so make sure you go through and do your own calculators limitatus there and get rid of the ones that you think might not fit into what this happens to be that might be your way to summarize this on your exam you'll probably only get four answers some of the questions will will give you more than four but not a lot usually it's four possible answers i make mine a little bit more difficult by giving you an extra one so i make it make five hopefully it makes it harder i'm thinking it makes it harder we'll have to see if that that's the way it works out maybe it doesn't maybe it's not hard at all when i do it that way i think it does make it a little bit harder raid 10 array i don't know that a lot of us have installed a lot of raid 10 arrays probably not the most popular array type but i i see it out there from time to time so somebody's running it somebody has it there to be able to work through the chat room would i ever consider streaming on twitch well not not for this i guess this is not a twitchy kind of thing i guess it's sort of a game show but not really doesn't really fit the twitch model does it uh so currently no there's no plans to stream on twitch and certainly not plans for you to watch me play xbox on twitch that's nobody wants that i barely can stand watching myself play the xbox on twitch so i would not expect anyone else to want to do that either what raid setup do i recommend i think most people run raid 5. that's probably the most common raid setup or a raid 5 type a raid 5-ish many people that create arrays have a raid 5 that they sort of customize for their specific pieces so we'll have to say what happens for that i know there's a lot of other things on twitch but this we're on we're on youtube it works great so we'll just stick with what we got uh which scene seems to be working quite well for us um twitch just doesn't quite fit our model with what we're doing and having those there let's see how you did with this one a network administrator is installing a raid 10 array what is the minimum number of drives to be able minimum number drives required to build this array so we'll have to see uh i heard raid on the exams are not the ones used most in the real world no you have it the other way around there's a lot of different raid types the ones that are on the exam are probably the four most popular by far that you will run into so certainly what you will find let's see how you did with this one the results say 71 percent of you would have four drives in the array and then effectively a four-way tie for all the others so it would be two three eight and ten got nine nine five and six percent respectively so rate is an important thing to consider fortunately there's only four ray types you need to know for the exam there's raid 0 raid 1 raid 5 and raid 10. sometimes you'll see raid 10 referred to as raid 1 plus 0 which is differently than raid 0 1 which you'll sometimes see written as raid 0 plus 1 which is different than raid 1 plus 0. and if you go back and look at the details of this you will know what i mean by that you'll see that in the video which is section 5.3 troubleshooting hard drives you will need four drives minimum to be able to figure that out to be able to get raid one plus zero or raid 10 working for this so it becomes important that you have all four of those drives somebody says to you we're installing this we want raid 10 uh buy enough drive so we can get that started so hopefully that will help you drive three drives are required for raid five two for raid one you would need at least two for raid zero as well those are the minimums obviously but that's what you would want to work through this is one where with raid 10 is one of those few formats that you could lose more than one of the certain set you could possibly use lose more than one drive and still remain up and running if you lose two drives and they happen to be of the same set of striped of mirrored stripes well then that's a problem so there you go that's that's the real issue but you can possibly lose more than one drive with ray 10 and still be up and running you could lose two drives with ray 10 and be down as well that's why i don't tend to mention that very often it depends on which drives they are and if you look at the format for raid 10 which we just don't have time for today you would understand what i mean the answer here by far 71 percent of you said 4 is the number of drives that you would use i know we're at the top of the hour let's do one more we can fit one more in here we can do a little bit of overtime right and fit this last question in the question asked or asks a user would like to send and receive gmail messages from their mail client instead of a browser which of the following would provide this functionality would it be imap snmp https rdp or ldap a user would like to send and receive gmail messages from their mail client instead of a browser which of the following would provide this functionality would it be imap snmp https rdp or ldap which one would it be hopefully you know the answer if you think you do don't answer in the chat room go to professormesser.com and lock in your answer do you have that there it's got to be one of those right we need to know these different protocols to be able to run and work on the a plus exam and these are certainly protocols every single one of these is listed in the exam objectives you should know every single one if you're looking at this list and wondering i don't know what that one is make a note of it go look that one up it might help to be able to have that there the chat room raid zero raid 1 which would i choose in a personal computer i think raid 1 is the only one that provides any redundancy i would think on your personal computer redundancy is what you're shooting for not speed especially these days which you can set up everything as uh in some type or you should be running in some type of ssd that's your speed now you don't have to worry so much about the speed of drives on a personal computer so you probably run maybe raid one with multiple ssds that would be useful if you lose one ssd you'd still be up and running the ssds are just so so reliable though you almost don't necessarily need in a personal computer you'd be better off just having a good backup policy you know unless you're really changing data a lot if you're running your own business or you're doing something where you're producing a lot of content or a lot of data well then maybe raid does make sense for you you don't ever know for all of these let's see how you do with this one a number of you have locked in your answer so let's see how you did a user would like to send and receive gmail messages from their mail client instead of a browser which of the following would provide this functionality is it imap snmp https rdp or ldap 76 of you say imap 18 of you say snmp three percent said https one percent said rdp one percent said ldap well with 77 that is pretty strong you see this a lot though when people are using these commercial email providers like gmail very common to see this and you could bring up gmail in a browser use gmail as you would normally do it that's what i do with my gmail most of the time i'm in a browser but if you're on a mobile device maybe you don't want to use a browser maybe you would like to have those email messages downloaded to your machine and in that particular case you would need some type of protocol that would support that fortunately gmail microsoft exchange is online services their number of different online services their icloud and yahoo mail all support things like imap4 so imap in some cases even pop3 imap very useful for being able to send and receive messages for this the imap does does work so of this list the only thing there imaps what you would use to be able to receive those obviously we don't sim with imap we send with smtp which was not on the list so you would not choose that one the only option here that even comes close to providing at least half of this functionality is the very first one with imap so hopefully that will help the 77 percent of you got that one absolutely correct would not be snmp that's the simple network management protocol if you are querying a draw querying a server querying a switch a router a firewall snmp is what does that uh https is what you would be using in the browser so that doesn't make sense that's not what we would use from our our mail client rdp the remote desktop protocol also not what we would use to be able to see gmail messages in our mail client and then ldap this uh the lightweight directory access protocol you primarily use for name services and some type of communication and verification of authentication to that that name service but that would not be used for mail either the only option here that provides any type of this functionality is the first one imap where we can receive messages from gmail 77 of you got that one absolutely correct well done i think that's one where we really have to know these protocols and they sure throw a lot of protocols at you on this exam so you certainly need to know what those protocols happen to be it's going to help you as you go through it this exam is a big one and it covers a lot of different topics the first thing you should have on your machine is these objectives make sure you have this download the objectives you have a link to the comptia website go to professormesser.com objectives make sure you get those objectives incredibly useful to have that there they're a great checklist and they should be the last thing you look through before you decide to book your exam because it will tell you if you're ready to take the exam or not fantastic to have that capability we have another one of these study groups tomorrow we don't usually do them back to back there's usually at least a day in between but we'll see if my voice will hold up we'll go tomorrow we have our core two study group make sure you come back tomorrow for that we have another core one and core two study group in july on july the sixth and eighth we also have a network plus study group a week from today a week from tomorrow rather no it's a week from today isn't it because i changed the dates around so make sure you look at the calendar for this month to be able to know that and on the 14th of july is network plus and then uh of course we've got security plus this month and on the 21st of july they're all on my calendar go to professormesser.com calendar you'll be able to see all of those can you believe we've gone through an hour of q a just like that but we got more questions and answers i'll take questions from you in the after show stick around for that we'll be able to answer those we've also got of course my course notes and practice exams at professormesser.com 10016s don't forget about my discount vouchers no crazy codes or coupons required just go to professormesser.com vouchers if you liked this particular study group follow us and click the like button right now before you go anywhere it really does help with our folks at youtube i have a representative youtube that helps me with things on my channel they like to see when you like things so please click that like button if you were able to learn at least something in this last hour it sure helps me as you're going through this as well and if you want to know more you can always go to twitter youtube and instagram and find out more about these as well well thanks for being here in this first hour stick around for the after show we thank you for being here we'll see you next time on the a plus study group let's see if i can actually whoops make things happen here there we go it's time for the after show everybody hi everybody thanks for the the like brandon i appreciate it i really do it really does help uh and if you subscribe and you click bells and do all of those things helps as well but i don't try to push that too crazy let me get my system up and running here if you bear with me just a moment i am going to get the phone lines up and running i just have to remember how to do that it's always a mystery when i i come in after a couple weeks off because last week was my bye week i guess you could say and uh where we didn't have a live stream last week and then i have to remember now what button does what again that's always the hardest part so i if you'll bear with me a moment i have to bring up my skype i have to call into my own show because it's on the cloud as it should be right that's the way the cloud works there we go and it says thank you well you're welcome let's uh let me click the right things on my side and if i do that the nice lady will say enter your six digit pin i can if i remember my six digit pin i will type that in and what do you think of that nice lady welcome professor messi i thank you how nice of you to welcome me and if you are watching this i guess i need to change my graphic on the screen so that you're able to see what we're doing here as well you are able to call into the show it is a toll-free number in the united states eight five five seven eight five rj45 west of the rockies eight five five seven eight five seven five four five you call in for free because it's a toll-free number from anywhere although these days i guess most of our calling plans usually are are for free aren't they but if you're outside of the continental united states it's not for free but there's a free way you can call in by using skype you can use skype and skype does not require skype minutes if you call a toll-free number so you can call this number and call in as well but you have to put the plus one at the beginning so it's plus one eight five five seven eight five seven five four five and that will get you there so that's what that special code is that's why we have that right there at the beginning to have those capabilities wow in a reference to magic jack in the chat room there's something i haven't seen in a while is that even still a product up and running they still making money with magic jack i haven't seen advertising for that and i don't think forever uh just the capabilities of our mobile phones were able to do with skype and other calling services i would think that would have gone the way of uh video rental services in a lot a lot of ways so that's uh you can only receive with pop3 and imap you cannot send you'll get over it though i think you'll be okay you will make it yeah like who has the cue cat anybody have those cute cats will scan the code i had one serial connected over my nine pin serial link uh to have that there certainly was useful uh for two seconds it was useful for a moment and then it was no longer useful it just went away immediately those of you not understanding what that is that's one you can google later is q-cat c-u-e-c-a-t to have that there uh let's start off by heading to the phone lines uh we can start with the 757 area code hello caller what's your name where are you calling from hey professor messer this is william calling from hampton newport news area home of the greatest naval ship holders in the world absolutely is thank you for calling sir what can we do for you well um how's your family professor everything here is remarkably well um my kids are have not gone crazy everyone still likes each other uh after all of the things that have happened in the last year and a half so i can't complain yeah thank you should thank them for their support on my behalf i will thank you um you know you know something uh i had been listening to uh sound bites which comes on a uh public radio station wgmc out of uh uh greece rochester area new york and uh the panelists had so talked up the uh virtues of linux and so i determined that uh once i got my laptop repaired which i have already done got a ssd and all and all that and you know got better speed i decided i was going to download ubuntu which i did and life has been beautiful since then the one roadblock that i have been running into however is uh removing and adding printers and that has been a real bear um bless my my uh my neighbor bless his heart he gave me his lex mark which he replaced which with an hp the problem is is that the hp is part uh is is in a network a wireless network and i keep seeing it and i can't remove it and add the lexmark so i was wondering if you could talk me through that perhaps this this is probably one of the biggest challenges with linux is not that the operating system is not functional it's not that it doesn't have support it's not that it doesn't have the capabilities to do a lot of great things in the operating system itself in fact if you're on the professor messer website right now then you are on a number of linux machines that are keeping that whole system running incredibly useful operating system i often will kid whenever i talk to people uh and say well it would be a great operating system if it would only work and i really just say that to make the linux people crazy because it works great i use it all the time my entire business everything i do online relies on linux an incredibly important operating system the challenge though is getting linux to work properly at the desktop and the only way to do that is if you have someone who can write drivers and processes for end users to be able to install those drivers properly and the two biggest problems people generally have when they're installing linux on their local machine is wireless functionality although that's gotten much better lately and the other one as you're mentioning is is printers that is another big problem because there's there's very few printers are well supported in linux a lot of printers are ok supported in linux and a number of printers you just can't find support for in linux but very useful to have that capability every linux front end has a different way to go about installing these drivers and these these intricacies so it's nothing i can really talk you through over a environment like this but if there is a driver for it and it's something that is available then you should be able to to install that driver and get it up and running for the lexmark device that you have now while you're seeing his his uh hp seems unusual if his hp is on his local network i could certainly see as oh you know what it might be is that hp is probably one of those new ones that is set up for the direct print from your mobile devices which is more of an ad hoc printing functionality so you're you're so close to them in the neighborhood that you're seeing that printer advertise itself to mobile devices most likely is there a way to get rid of that there might be a way to filter it out in linux filter out that particular ssid but i don't know of a way to do that off the top of my head i bet there is a way there's always a way in some comp file in linux to make that happen and you have to uh you only have to google around for weeks until you find that one thread that gives you the answer that you need that actually makes the thing work um and unfortunately i have no idea what that happens to be i don't tend to run a lot of linux on my desktop uh just because i have other things to do with my i need it to work when i connect to a printer and i need it to work when i connect to the wireless network and there's just too many it's just not quite as as robust as i would prefer for a desktop computer but i run it all the time at a vm i run it all the time for my servers i just never have to run into printing or wireless problems when i do that okay are you there still yeah are you there yeah sure oh um yeah i was i was going to also ask uh you know uh sound uh use you as a sounding board for my career choice uh i have uh downloaded the practice exam and i'm doing okay with them i'm still missing like about 30 i think yeah it was like 30 out of the 90 questions on them um so i'm i'm having to you know go back to those but anyway to get to the point um yeah my objective is i'm i'm a navy veteran and uh at first i was just thinking about taking the a a plus and just you know continuing uh getting a degree in computer information systems but now i realize that if i'm going to work as a civilian for the department of the navy or department of defense that i need that server plus so my idea is to eventually get into the executive suite of uh like cio or cto something like that and i think server plus at plus a degree in uh computer information systems is going to get me to where i'm going and i just wanted to use you as a sounding board and see what you thought about that there there are there are indeed two those two things are pretty important uh the one you mentioned when you mention the area you were in i immediately thought security plus because if you're in that northeast dc virginia federal government area having a security plus is an incredibly useful credential to have on your resume everybody who's hiring is looking for security plus i often tell people depending on where you live in the country make sure you look to see what employers are looking for in your area because it does vary the requirements you'll see in that dc area will be very different than requirements that you might see in denver or chicago or anywhere or in florida where i am so you never know exactly what it will be until you look at the jobs that are being posted and you're not wrong i think security plus would be something you should be working towards now the other side of that and i have a video that i made which is how to get a job in it with no experience and i talk about the the importance of certifications because they are important but there's also an importance in a formal degree having some type of four two year or four year degree becomes increasingly important especially if you're planning to move up into management even today managers tend to see that uh especially a four-year degree is being valuable or in some cases a prerequisite before you get into management good then and it doesn't have to necessarily be a technical degree although if you're planning to move into a technical management role that certainly helps my degree was in business management had really no technical anything associated with it um and they made me a manager boy that was a i'm not sure that was a smart idea on their part they did it anyway it worked out okay for a little bit of time and then i decided it wasn't for me and went off to do something else but that that's one where my degree was not a technical degree and it doesn't have to be technical but it helps um how did you like being a systems engineer i that's that was the job for me i worked primarily in the last half of my career probably a little bit more than the last half of my career working for someone else was working as a a representative of a manufacturer as a systems engineer senior systems engineer so mine was going out as a primarily pre-sales but a little bit of post-sales primarily pre-sale systems engineer and work with customers who were having needs or problems and had a solution for it we could plug it in and we could make things work and it was always something new and different it was um it's not a job for everyone because it requires in many cases quite a bit of travel and certainly a lot of traveling during the day depending on where you happen to be sometimes i had i had jobs where my territory was the world and i would travel to europe i would travel to australia i would travel to asia i would travel all over i had other jobs that were just in the state where i lived now i live in florida which means i have to there's eight hours to drive if you wanted to drive from one side of the state to the other probably a little more um so having just one state as your territory doesn't necessarily mean it's a small territory but there's some territories for systems engineers that are a block of new york city so you never you never know what that what that means your territory can be very different depending on the company but i loved the job i love something new every day i love that i was always presented with challenges that most of the time when i would have a meeting with a customer um most of the time they would have a question i wouldn't know the answer because they had something very unique they were trying to do something that was not common and i would have to go you know i don't know but i know the people that do and i'll go get the answer and bring it back to you so often it was it was really constant growth constant knowledge gathering something new every day you met a lot of great people and as much as we like to say that the sales process is just awful and there's there's of course bad sales people and bad engineers wherever you go but i would say the vast majority of people i worked with in my company and the vast majority of the customers i worked with were just great people and it was just nice going and visiting and spending time and learning about their networks and walking around their data centers and learning the technology and something new every day i really really enjoyed it was one of the best parts of my career up to this point i think that this has been the culmination but it's sort of the gathering of all of the knowledge i made during that time allows me to now do this so uh uh but something i really really like to do it was just a lot of fun well i tell you what professor i am really stoked about the study group uh the uh the video courses and i i'm definitely intent on on getting the um the course notes yeah uh-huh thank you for all that you do sir i appreciate william thanks for the call best of luck all right bye-bye it's one of those things that if you've never been in i.t before there is a job for you that will allow you to do whatever you like wherever you would like to do it i i would literally have a job where i would walk in and my boss would say oh we need somebody in australia i know it's thursday but we have something we have a presentation that needs to be done on monday can you be in australia can you get on a plane tonight like sure let's go uh or uh we're doing a big roll out of a product um we need it installed by a professional in scotland for two weeks like okay let's go to scotland for two weeks and i would do that uh just remarkable that was a lot of travel there's obviously advantages and disadvantages for every job but what a lot of fun to have that there so that's one where i think if you're you're someone who would like to try something different would like to really push your capabilities and learn not just technically but learn communication skills it's a great job to have back to the phones let's go back to 757. hi caller which name were you calling from oh i just lost them where'd they go they they went away they decided they've had enough of my nonsense uh let's go to four zero then thanks for holding hi caller which name are you calling from hey president my name is oliver and i'm calling from maryland hey oliver what can we do for you uh yes so um i'm like trying to think which certification i should go for after they plus and i've decided to go for my network plus um also because i do want to work in like a knock and i also get class credit for it i was just wondering what skill or skills i should learn as i'm going for the network plus whether it would be like complementary or a completely different skill a couple options i do have is like power show python maybe like cisco ios commands and bash maybe even uh sql i was just wondering which scale i should go for um i do want to just go for like one skill at a time and stick to it it was just one thing your opinion on which is the most important skill especially for a novice in the field well this is good uh you you were able to hone in on exactly where i would have probably prompted you to go next because a lot of people ask me questions about i've got my a plus what should i do next and the answer i have is i don't know what are you trying to do but you already know what you would like to do you can see that there's some interest in the networking side of things network operations centers are great place to hone your skills on the networking side you meet a lot of very smart networking people you learn a lot about networks in general and it's a good jumping off point to learn more about how to manage networks especially switching and routing and if you are at that point this is what i did i started on the operating system side once i got into networking i knew that networks was what i wanted to do i wanted to do something very detailed on the networking side and it sounds like you've already got in your mind that's some interesting stuff and i would like to learn more about that and network plus is a great certification to get as an entry-level networking professional that positions you very well for a network operations center position it's certainly an entry-level knock position the the place you go from there and sort of complementary skills there's a lot of options in there many and varied i often tell people in these study groups if you have some skills in automation you will use those skills throughout your career and i often tell people become familiar with using scripting with understanding python of course is what everybody is looking at and if you're getting into networking python is used extensively on the networking side especially for managing devices and communicating via apis or programmatically modifying the configurations of these devices and it also leverages you very well for moving into the cloud-based infrastructure and for networking there's a lot of cloud-based infrastructure to pull from so python is it's just such a a swiss army knife of technology that i think everybody should have some knowledge of python of course you should also consider getting some knowledge in other scripting technologies once you know python it's very easy to apply this knowledge towards of shell scripting on linux or bash batch files or powershell more specifically on the windows side those are incredibly useful skills to have you had mentioned sql and although sql has a place in technology it doesn't quite have the same uh set of skills or same doesn't bring the same uh techno technical skills to the table as something like python or shell scripting might do for your or powershell you don't often run into a lot of sql challenges on the networking side you push that off to the database people so if you're planning to get into database administration sql is going to help you a lot otherwise i'd probably not focus on that quite specifically if i had to choose from any of those python is a great one it's great not only for your personal skill sets but when you walk into a job especially an interview and you say well i have my network plus and let me tell you about the things i've done with python scripting and then you have some practical examples of what you've done with python in your home lab that's incredibly interesting to me as someone who was a hiring manager at one time because i can see you've got the skills to be able to do things like that so that's that's a perfect place to go if i had to make any strong recommendation pick powershell or python go with one of those and you you will never go wrong in it right and my second question is um so i spoke with a recruiter recently for a network operations center position right and i was caught off guard in a way because uh they did ask me like 25 networking questions and i haven't done networking in a very long time the last exam i took was like the c-set and even that's expired so do you think he said to specifically come back with a ccma just so i do good on that particular on the phone interview um like exam do you think doing the network plus is enough to become a knock analyst or some sort of like that type of job well when you this is probably the question that people often try to weigh when they're looking at networking is they say do i get a network plus or do i go to the cisco ccna the answer is that those are two very very very different certifications they have a different in they're different in their scope they're different in their complexity and their difficulty level and they're different in the jobs that they are positioning you for if you're trying to get an entry level position in a knock knowing ccna will probably make them feel very comfortable that you are you know some of the technologies that you speak of but you're almost over qualifying yourself for that particular role uh ccna is is not an entry level cert it is your sort of an intermediate or next level cert after entry level but a number of people know that they are really pushing towards network administration they really eventually want to get to a point where they have access to manage the switches and configure the routers and if you know that's the direction you're going some people choose to skip over network plus i think the answer to this question is really back on what the employers are looking for so i would go back to that company and look at the job postings they put out already for network admin for knock help desk or entry level knock analyst whatever they call it also look at open positions they have for network administrator network engineer systems administrator whatever they're calling it at that organization see what certifications they're asking for and maybe having those those really written down on a piece of paper they may say we want everybody to have a network plus when they start okay let me go get the network plus or it might even not even mention network plus and everything is heavily focused on cisco well then you might want to reconsider and say i know ccna is not entry level but they seem to really push that in this job because it's so networking focused let me go and do that i'm gonna i'm gonna refer you back to the employer to see what they're asking about because every employer is a little bit different in how they they have a focus on that oliver right okay well i appreciate you taking my time taking your time to answer my question and um i'm actually taking my 1002 next tuesday so um just prepared for that i think i'm ready so excellent best of luck with your 1002 and let us know how the job hunt goes with the network operations center yeah well do thank you thanks oliver it's always interesting to me the differences that employers have it's it's part of i think their corporate culture uh which we tend to kind of discard at times and think that it's something that's not important but in many cases becomes incredibly important we've also seen this most recently where people have we've been working outside of the office and now for many of us it's back into the office uh and so we're now going back at least a certain amount of time so having those skills are going to help with that that corporate culture and they may have a certain minimum they'd like you to have let's go back to the phones the 774 area code hi caller which name are you calling from hi is that me it is you oh hi sorry i'm tom from west london hey tom uh thanks thanks for all the thanks for the videos first of all uh i've got my exam tomorrow for 1001 and uh your practice exams has been a massive help identifying gaps and yeah um so my question is hopefully this all goes well and i'll move on to the second part and we talked you thought already about things like labs and scripting um would you recommend between doing it client-side on my gaming pc the six cores and 16 gig of ram going with something like azure or um aws or google and doing it in the cloud or buying an old xeon server and building a full bare-bones metal with a switch plugged into it the sort of learning in particular in my case activate active directory uh because that seems to be what's in demand around where i am you know it it's one of those situations where uh you do whatever you happen to have access to at the time whenever i'm setting up i did a a number of years ago i did a windows 7 course where i set up a domain running windows server and then i had windows 7 devices that were all connecting to that i would show them all on the screen at the same time it's still on my youtube channel um but i did the entire course virtually on my on virtual machines that were local on my system um it gave me a lot more control over the operating system i was able to set up everything and tweak it and manage it locally i knew that i wouldn't have to rely on network connections to be able to make all of these things work properly so for my needs doing it all on my local machine as virtual machines was a perfect solution and it works great to do it that way but now that now that microsoft has such an extensive azure offering and you can do so much of this in the cloud i have been finding a lot of what i have done is cloud-based these days i just did a section for the new network plus that i'm working on um and it has a whole section on virtualization well i just loaded up a bunch of cloud services and grabbed the information i needed from there and put it right into the course it was so simple to do i didn't have to load up anything locally i didn't have to do anything it was it was fantastic when you start combining that though you start putting things in the cloud you're wanting the cloud to talk to devices that are local it becomes a little more complicated from a communications perspective but if you've got the whole thing happening in the cloud that makes it really really easy to have happen and azure is a great way to do that because it's so microsoft centric um i don't i think any one of those works you can't go wrong but because there is such a huge emphasis in azure and aws anything cloud-based these days has such a huge emphasis that uh i would really recommend trying that out first in the cloud because if you're sitting in the room with an employer in an interview you can talk about well let me tell you what i did in the azure cloud when i rolled up my own active directory infrastructure only took a couple of minutes it was crazy and then i loaded up windows 10 and we connected them and had everything running and here's what we ran that's a great story and you're using technologies they want people to be familiar with even if you it took maybe it did take you five minutes to load up azure ad in the cloud and get it running you did it it was running it was there in fact you had time to then play around with it and do things with it that brings to the table a different set of skills than just loading that up on your local machine now if you really want to try both you certainly could but we're talking about learning enough skills that you could bring to an employer to make them understand that you knew what was going on and not everybody does this so that's that's why i think that uh doing something in the cloud has a little bit more personal gain to you than perhaps loading it up locally on a local vm awesome that's really helpful so i'll i'll definitely go and use my six month free trial with with i think it's six months here with my mom and don't ever play with it where do you get a six month free trial with this is that uh something anybody else could do i'm not sure so so i know i definitely had one with google because i was running a valheim server for six months on their free trial which gets you several hundred dollars worth i think i think several hundred dollars worth of processor time so and that's available to anyone with a google account you just register as a developer and you can spin up virtual machines for six months wow that's fantastic so that take advantage of that if you possibly can and be able to do that that's uh that was great to hear and take advantage of that that's uh any employer would love it if you walked in and talked cloud with them awesome thanks a lot it's been really helpful thanks tom i appreciate the call whenever you start getting into cloud i i i'm pretty well invested on the cloud side um not just from what you if you're on professormesser.com you're on cloud servers if you're purchasing any of my products and you're downloading it you're downloading it from aws if you are connecting to my uh website you're really not connecting to my website you're really connecting to cloudflare which is virtualized systems that are all over the cloud uh physically located in different places around the world so i get local caching in india and the uk and uh and idaho so i've got a lot of access to the cloud just in the things that i'm running uh and in fact if i my son is finishing up his cloud degree right now i think he'll finish next month and uh i think he'll be able to walk out the door with skills that all of the employers that they are interested in people having which is how do we take what we have now and be able to run and support and secure it in these cloud-based environments um and unless you have some skills there and been in working with it it's deer in the headlights time and interestingly enough the cloud i won't say it's hard the cloud is of course complex and it has things you have to learn and there's a there's quite an interesting learning curve there but if you're a technologist these are just skills that you're adding on with your existing blocks of knowledge it's not like this is insurmountable it's not brain surgery it's what i'm trying to say you can learn this it is doable and it's a set of skills that everyone wants right now so at all if you have a chance to do some aws some azure some rackspace cloud whatever it is get that cloud-based knowledge and start using it uh it can only help you when you walk in the door with an employer let's go to the phones the 704 area code wow hello caller what's your name where you coming from my name is mohammed and i'm currently from charlotte north carolina it's a little difficult to hear you mohammed but give us a an idea of your question uh well um oh that's better i am a biology major and i am transitioning back into the i.t field and uh currently i'm i'm trying to get some admissions like into college so i can start my finances program in cyber security right and like i know so a lot of people that is a big lead for a big transition so um i've been asking around what are the steps like in order for me to get my certifications but i've been getting a lot of recommendations that i need to go directly for my security plus so but currently i'm studying for my a plus which i've already scheduled for at the end of this month so my question is what are your thoughts of recommendations when it comes to cyber security like uh because i think i'm going to try it in a step-by-step way but what can put me in a better position to at least get me a good entry level because even though i don't have that much extensive experience in the idea world but i'm very much um interested in it and it has got me hooked for quite a while now great i think your your perspective of your your step-by-step moving into the world of cyber security is probably the best or the the most uh positive way to go about doing it if you go out and try to find in your area and you're in a very good geography in the united states for these types of jobs there's tons of i.t in your area if you go out and look at the jobs available in the different companies just in your local area look at and see if there are entry level positions and in your area there might be a number of security operations centers or socks in your area and if possible that means there's probably more entry level options into security traditionally there's not a lot of entry-level jobs in security relative to the rest of it if you're just trying to get a job working in the i.t department it's generally as a more generic help desk position that's how you start in a lot of organizations and by doing that they're able to see your work ethic they're trying to understand how much you understand of the technologies and then they will move you out of the help desk and put you somewhere that's a little more specific into things that you would like to do but because there's not a lot of entry-level positions in security relative to the rest of it it's hard to find entry-level jobs that are specific to security so although i appreciate the idea of going out and getting a cyber security degree to get a security plus certification both of those valuable skills important certifications and uh and degrees to have you may find that there's no entry-level jobs out of college to support the things that you've been working on but that's okay get that entry level job wherever it happens to be get the help desk job get the sock job get the knock job whatever it is wherever they'll put you get in the door this is what i'm telling everybody doesn't matter it doesn't matter if you have a degree in uh in databases in computer science if you want to be an i.t get that it entry level position and get in that chair for at least nine months to a year and learn everything you possibly can about the company about their technologies and about the people that work on their technologies so that you can then move into the networking team the security team the uh data center team the operations team whatever happens to be in your environment the windows desktop the windows server the cloud-based systems that whatever that company is running find those teams and begin having a relationship with them and work with them is one of the best things you can do um so don't don't worry so much about needing to focus your uh your knowledge and your formal degree so that the first job you get is going to be security because it could possibly not be security but there is plenty of upward mobility there are tons of security jobs waiting for trained professionals to move into you just need to get yourself in the door so that you can then move up to the next level and then the next level and then the next level it's like a video game you're just going to try to level up as quickly as you can the fortunate part about it is that it is relatively easy to level up and that there's really no max level in it you just keep moving up as far as you can up and up and up and up until you you find the niche that works best for you and the level that works best for you i was able to go through my entire career uh almost all of it as a systems engineer we talked earlier about a little bit of time where i was a manager and i don't think i was great manager i think it was an okay manager it wasn't for me and i thought i'm happier being an engineer i moved back to being a systems engineer and just took off from there uh and had more upward mobility as an se than i had as a manager interestingly enough so my recommendation for you is learn everything you can about the things that interest you take the jobs whatever happens to be available in the it field and you will start seeing the opportunities arrive so that you can of course move into a different area of the organization or move into a different organization in your area that will allow you to do things that are more of an interest to you what's interesting is that whatever you do now is going to change as the years go by there will be new technologies that come out 10 years from now that none of us have thought of yet that we will need good technologies for well guess what nobody knows what they are yet nobody's trained on that yet you will suddenly find yourself looking at a technology that nobody knows that you're getting trained on and suddenly you become an expert in and it just happens to sort of fall into your lap because that's the way i it works it's a remarkable place to be that's one of the reasons i'm so excited about the industry in general not only because i see what's coming but i lived it i was able to make all of those things happen if i can do it anybody can do that so uh you're doing the right things you're getting the right kind of formal degree you're learning the right kind of certifications and skills uh both a plus and security plus both of those are good you might even want to look to more specifically of what employers in your area might be putting in their job postings that might help you decide a little bit better what direction you might want to go in the future but i think you're doing all the right things your key now is to get that degree get those certifications find those jobs get in the door and start earning a way up and out to the next levels of i.t and you're going to be just fine i appreciate that and also um i definitely appreciate your videos because um they're the ones that have helped me to study because of you know like trying to read from the book it is one thing but having those explanations the way you you break it down after the functions of some elements in terms of the the uh k plus um zero zero one like that was really helpful it helped me understand not just the topics as well as functionality as well so um that's all that i have for you today i appreciate the call thank you for those kind words and uh keep doing what you're doing you're heading right the right direction mohammed best of luck i appreciate it it's one of those things that i think it's hard to go wrong in i.t once you get in the door often in your career if you ever look at any other type of industry there's usually a pretty solid rail that you move along to move from here and then you move up to a junior role and then you move to the senior role and then you move into management and it's like a very specific rail you have to follow and if you don't follow that rail there's nowhere else to go but in it it's a broad set of decisions you get to make in fact in your career there will be times when you're ready to make a move and you're like i could go here or i could go here both of those things are very different responsibilities very different jobs with different skill sets that i have to be able to use and you get to make that decision what a great position to be in we often think at the time this is a horrible thing i have to do and have to decide between these two things in reality what a great position to be in how what a great uh industry that allows you that particular set of options it's hard to find that in other industries it really really is um this is really really key uh in making it making it work out that way well david in the chat room asks what are my thoughts on network plus versus ccna well when this is over rewind back about 10 minutes and you'll be able to know my opinions on that when i went through the whole thing you must have missed that part of it uh but we did go through a little bit of that it's a common commonly asked question too with understanding the differences between those there's a place for both uh and working through all of those uh that's true if you work in hardware uh i don't know ace hardware is exactly but maybe you could just not say that part uh you worked in hardware it had a lot to do with uh hedging and uh and digging uh you'd be surprised though how much hardware you will be working with when you work in i.t um you should always have that good drill if you're putting things in a rack uh it's always going to help you back to the phone calls 5590 a record hi caller which name we're calling from hi my name is ramon de la i'm calling you from las cruces new mexico well thanks for calling are you doing today thanks for appreciate that what can we do for you hi so i'm currently preparing myself to take my it test or the first 1001 next week on wednesday and i was just calling to get a little bit more of kind of verification that i did it right of what i did to prepare myself so i kind of found out a little bit later about your videos um i started using this paid course called test out which basically it's a course but then it also gives you a virtualization of windows so it kind of walks you through what you're supposed to be doing but i use that as a resource so i don't know if you were familiar with it if i did the right thing i kind of i kind of go through your videos and i seem to understand the content more through your videos and i kind of did through tests out but i appreciate that test out the virtualization and kind of the walk through so i don't know if you were familiar with it a little bit i don't spend a lot of time i just don't have a lot of time to look at all of the other options out there but i have heard of them before so i at least have some familiarity awesome and just just kind of um it's gonna be i want to go into network engineering great um and you just kind of talked about it go back 10 minutes as a i was about to ask you if the way to attack the network engineering because a lot of the job postings that i look at are going to be requiring your ccna or your network plus it's not really required that you have both okay but in terms of in terms of um i guess quality in the content would you go with a ccna or a networking plus it's almost like you if you know you're going to get into networking you know networking is what you want to do you want to manage the switches you want to understand the routing you want to kind of build the foundation for what even may eventually be a security role then you need to become an expert in networking and a lot of people start there so that they can use those skills to do something relating to security i mentioned leveling up that's a good example a lot of people who are in i.t security right now were originally experts in networking because you do so much networking on the i.t security side and if you're already looking at job postings and they even say you can have network plus or you could have ccna that should be your cue to think okay i could go either way with this and getting a ccna doesn't look bad to this employer they're not looking at this as me being overqualified they're looking at this as me being properly qualified for this job now as i mentioned earlier ccna is not an entry level position so if you're just starting out in this industry and you have no idea what the difference is between a switch and a router maybe network plus is a better place to start as a primer maybe that gets you the understanding of the technologies you're becoming more familiar with what a frame is and what a packet is and what routers do and uh and the terms we often use to be able to encapsulate and de-encapsulate them wide area network technologies and these all of these terms and acronyms that we use you would become familiar with that with network plus moving into ccna from there is a step up it's certainly a more difficult certification but now you've already understood the underlying foundation of of words the terms the nomenclature of the ccna and now you can start focusing on what do i do with the command line of this switch how do i configure this router to be able to properly dynamically route or act as a router on a stick or configure the ntp or recover it from a password that we don't remember those are things that you have to be able to do for the ccna but they're all command line you're sitting there typing the whole time ccna is a typing test not the test itself but you learning the ccna topics is a lot of typing at the command line and understanding those commands so that's why i often tell people if you're just starting off maybe network plus is a good place to start it's certainly a relatively easy it's designed to be entry level it's designed to ease you into the technologies but i also have a lot of people that skip over network plus they go straight to ccna just recognize that if you don't have that foundational knowledge you're going to need to spend a little bit more time on the ccna than other people might because you're really starting from ground zero and you're gonna have to learn that foundational piece as you go along it's not insurmountable it's just some extra time that you're gonna have to allocate to that and you may find and get frustrated that this is going very slow i'm having to spend a lot of the so i thought i'd be working on switches and routers i'm sitting here learning about what how a switch works and how a router works instead of actually doing the configurations well because you have to learn that first you have to at least begin somewhere with those pieces so i think if you wanted to jump right into ccna knowing that in the future you wanted to do something in networking that's perfectly reasonable just understand you're gonna have to spend a little bit more time on the fundamentals as you go through that process awesome awesome um and then in regards to like let's say security is it a good base to go a plus network and then lead into security is having that networking um how would you say i guess base of knowledge good to lead into security certainly comptia recommends that particular path for that particular reason what you often don't often find though is a lot of the entry-level positions that are outside the scope of the us federal government don't really talk a lot about security plus they're really focused on a plus and in some cases network plus if you get into the world of i.t and you want to become a security professional i worked as a systems engineer for a next generation firewall company for about seven years and i moved into the security role from before that i worked in a security role with a security company network associates so we were already doing switching and routing and firewalls and ips and antivirus and a lot of the security technologies but you had to have a basic foundational understanding of networking just to be able to understand how to install the firewall how to configure it as a layer 3 device how to set up the dynamic routing what if you needed to route with one routing protocol on the outside and a different routing protocol on the inside well we need to do some type of change and configuration of the device to be able to make that change to the different routing protocols uh what about the the routing redistribution so what if you uh wanted to set up a vpn an ipsec vpn between two sites does your firewall work with policies to determine what data goes across the vpn or does is it a route based vpn and you have to know what the differences are and if it is is there natting going on across that link so all of these security technologies i just mentioned most of those challenges are networking challenges they're understanding how to nat properly what the difference between policy based versus route based understanding how to configure the dynamic routing protocols how to do the route redistributions how to set up the ip addresses and the subnet masks we haven't even done the security part yet we're just trying to get the box plugged in that's why i always tell people get a knowledge of networking get a very an expertise knowledge of networking that's going to allow you to roll right into security so the networking part of security will be easy for you you can focus then on understanding the security overlay to all of those pieces so that's why i tell people all the time learn the network learn the network learn the network it's the foundation of almost everything in it but especially the foundation if you ever want to do anything on the i.t security side awesome thank you so much well i just want to thank you for uh for all the content that you put out it's been very helpful throughout this you know whole journey of trying to trying to study and prepare myself for that for that it certification test next week so um i i've been using your exam hack book and your practice test and i just wanted to know that it's all been very helpful to kind of just see where i'm at and see where i need to focus more time on so thank you so much for your time it's great to hear best of luck thank you thank you bye-bye that's that's something i think that we we often think in it that and i see this a lot where people say i just want to start net in security i just want to start on the security side but i just listed four or five things that are a very small part of id security and you have to have a very solid knowledge of this how do you plug in two firewalls in an active active they're both active at the same time how do you configure those firewalls so that they're able to stop flows properly or allow flows properly how do you configure that in an environment with redundant switches on the inside and maybe on the other side the firewalls are redundant routers you know there's all these different uh challenges ccna is really the first step you know after that you have to learn enough about the technologies to be able to start designing the networks to be able to answer the advantages and disadvantages of doing it one way or another ultimately you will get there ultimately you'll learn all of these that seems insurmountable right now but ultimately you will get there where someone will say i want to install something like this how can i do that well we can do it like this or we can do it like this here's the advantages of doing it this way here's the advantages of doing it the other way and you get to have people have a conversation because it's never it's often never one way there's often nuances and things you can modify in the design to fit best with what somebody's trying to do but you need to understand everything about the foundation if you ever want to be able to do that on the top of this before we go back to the phones uh thank you in the chat room for the five euro uh donation thanks your videos pass my a plus and network plus keep up the great work greetings from germany marco thank you marco for the five euro donation as well and and congratulations on your a plus in network plus exams uh it's been a good year to i think work on our certifications so uh what a what a great opportunity to have that there and i'm more than happy uh that you were able to take advantage of some of the things we provide as well congratulations on that back to the phones let's go back to the 757 area code hi caller what's your name where you calling from good afternoon my name is uh can you hear me well we can hear you great excellent okay yeah i was the person that called a little bit earlier and the moment that the phone beeped my mind just went to a complete blank and i forgot what i was going to do we got you here now um first of all i'm gonna be uh part of the the praise group and basically thank you for all the effort and uh time that you put in towards providing the material that we basically used to prepare better for thank you the it field you've done an immense job i've actually i've tried a different source to to help prepare for taking the exams and for some reason the material just you know it didn't i didn't grasp it and there was a lot of material in there that you had mentioned may not be part of the examination but was already mentioned and i kind of gave up on that and then your your content was repeatedly mentioned through forums and social media groups so i figured i'd give it a shot that's why there's options out there find the one that works for you and you got something you can go with that's great to hear yep definitely uh the question that i have is uh basically it's study related hopefully this question helps a lot of other people that may be curious and you know might be facing the same type of situation as far as studying what is the best the best advice that you can give to to retain the material as good as possible it's not just it really isn't retaining it's just the best way to learn it this is a question that's a little bit different depending on who you talk to because everybody learns a little bit differently everybody has a little bit different style some people prefer writing down everything they see some people don't some people prefer not writing and seeing before they ever start picking up a pen or a pencil and writing anything down or typing their their notes in uh it's it's very different but for me i'll give you the way i learn and you can take that for whatever it's worth i guess but i'll give you my perspective anyway is i do well with a combination of a lot of different things um although i make a lot of videos there's thousands of videos out on our youtube channel i focus on creating my youtube videos as a complete course when i start building these things out and i watch a lot of videos on how to do things so i appreciate having that accessible to me but i also really rely on books i pull a lot out of books because a book is going to be able to provide you with content in a different way it's able to give you a much more detailed view of content because reading or pulling something out of a book you're able to put a lot more detail in a book in a much smaller place than you ever could do with a video a video is one to provide more demonstration more stories more explanation of the things that you're doing and i think a book and a video work very well together but the one thing that always seems to work best for me is just the hands-on it's taking the concept that's being talked about and being able to perform that on my system so for example in the a plus when they talk about what's in a bios i like to bring up a bios and look at it myself and go through changing the screens and look to see what the options are when it talks about running the networking commands and understanding how ping works and understanding how trace route works and using the net commands in windows i like to run those myself let me do my own pings wow look at all this stuff that came up what is what does all this output mean it often leads me into doing additional studies and additional google searches to really pull out every little thing on the screen so i really understand it same thing with traceroute same thing with the windows net commands and trying to get it to do something that would help me remember that later i think there's something about typing it on a keyboard seeing it on the screen that fires different synapses in my brain that helps me remember it better later so that when i get a question about trace route i remember when i ran my trace route what i did with it and i i'm able to apply that back to the particular situation i'm on there i think that and finally of course the the practice exams and having some type of validation that you really did remember it is the ultimate check so that i've gone through the books and the videos and the hands-on but did i really remember it and and do i really understand the style of question that's going to be presented to me on the exam let's go see if i can really do this the right way so you find some good q a and you go through the q a and i think that's i think those things together it's not any one thing it's sort of a combination of different things thrown together and i think it's kind of a philosophy as well a lot of people go into uh certifications with the idea that they just want to run through it learn the bare minimums try to figure it out as quickly as possible take the exam and just hopefully they squeak through it but i think if you go into it certifications with the perspective that there is some valuable information in this certification uh information that probably even goes outside the scope of what i'm planning to do on my day-to-day job but it's knowledge that i'll be able to take with me the rest of my career if i can just learn it now that's some valuable stuff there's been plenty of certifications i've taken that when i took my cert i wasn't able to use that but i found that a year or two later i was put into a new role where suddenly all of these things that i learned two years ago now became incredibly important i was able to pull back some of that knowledge so if you go into it with the philosophy of let's really learn everything there is to learn about this i'm going to be able to use it if not now be able to use this in the future i think that's in some cases a more healthy way to go about your certifications than perhaps just rushing through it learning the bare minimums and hoping you do well on the exam absolutely true i can't agree 100 about that i don't want that to be a case where it's about you know rushing to memorize the material in order to take the to get a hypothesis on the exam it's basically it's starting to keep in mind that it's going to come in use because that's really what what it's about there i think there have been times in the past with especially with a plus where some of the things on the a-plus certification perhaps weren't as well scoped out as they could have been that perhaps there were technologies on it that people did not really see a lot of these days but i think the most recent iterations of a plus have been pretty spot on i can walk into any data center of any decent size and find all of the technologies that are listed in the a plus exam objectives almost 100 percent so with that knowing that you're going to run into these eventually why wouldn't you spend time learning them it just makes sense definitely you actually answer two other questions in the process of mentioning all that information i i must have known yeah you must have had uh the ability to see that later on highly valuable information uh i really do appreciate it so yeah eventually very very soon uh probably even more than likely even today you'll probably see my name pop up uh placing a note on some of that material uh that's on uh on your page i appreciate it i do not know that yeah i'm gonna need that material i've been going through the uh the videos i'm almost done with the one the one zero zero one heading into one zero zero two but i i just have a feeling that i'm gonna need more than just that to read the call that's fantastic best uh luck with your studies it sounds like you've got the right idea of what to do with the certifications and where to go from here i wish you the best of luck appreciate it thank you very much it's always a challenge i get sometimes frustrated when i read things online and you've probably seen it too where you read online that what good is this certification uh this is this is a waste of time you should really be getting i always say you should really be getting your ccna and i find it remarkable why why the ccna why aren't you starting with the ccie why aren't you why why are you starting in the help desk you should be starting as the ceo uh it's it's almost like they forget that there's a foundational knowledge you need to be able to start an i.t and then move up with these skills through the years and i sometimes i just don't know what people are thinking along those lines is if they never ever had to learn anything entry-level whenever they're doing something of course you need to know the entry level and the better you are at that the better foundation you create the better it is to to certainly start at that point and build on it makes sense to me let's go back to the phones the 347 area code hi caller what your name are you calling from oh hi so i do have a question and i do love your videos actually thank you um yeah so i have a few questions about like a career so i have um the a plus and that plus um and i go to college full time i i got the certification before going to college nice and uh yeah and i so i got once i got the certification i automatically landed a help desk job um a part-time goal in a in new york city actually right i live in new york city and um i'm wondering because i've been i've been in the health desk shop for like three years because like i guess because of convenience really sure you know it's part time and the pay is pretty good for a part-time right and and since it's uh it's next to my college too that's why it makes me it was easier you know travel and all that but now i'm kind of thinking i'm like i'm not sure what to really do in a sense like with my career right now like i got my associates already and i'm working towards my bachelor's and i kind of like spiraled down like i sort of lost like from my i.t knowledge because i think i've been stuck in the shop for a while and i haven't really been using my networking skills as much versus my computer so i'm not sure what to really do like like like where to like go like study more like what to focus on i'm kind of like confusing my career choices right now they're they're many people listening to your particular situation right now and screaming into their their monitors that you're doing exactly the right things you are in a very uh good position right now with the things that you're working on the fact that you already had certifications prior to starting up your formal education the fact that you've got a part-time job working on a help desk that is practical experience that any employer will look at and say okay we don't have to start you at the bottom we can start you at the next level up and at the same time you're working on getting that formal education which is not only going to help you for your initial jobs but will help you in the future if you ever decide to move up or even into management that's pretty strong places to come from i wouldn't don't for a second worry that perhaps you're not doing enough networking you're not doing enough security i think by the way i think that's perfectly healthy i think you should be thinking that way you should always be thinking about i would love to be doing more networking i in fact that you even have the idea that that's something that interests you is fantastic that's what you should be doing and in i.t we often think about that three-year plan we often joke amongst ourselves that we have a three-year plan we get into a job we learn everything about that job and by the time three years comes along we should be moving to the next job in some places especially very busy environments sometimes it's a it's a lot shorter amount of time i would think in a help desk you should probably be in a help desk nine months to a year at which point you should probably be thinking about what's my next place going to be it doesn't take long to get out of the help desk and make that happen but you're in a great wow what a great place to be with already having practical industry experience the job as you mentioned part-time job you're in college your goal is to get your degree the part-time job is there to maybe give you some spending money maybe support some of the things you're doing pay the rent a little bit but you're also what a great great job you got you're not working at a fast food you're not working as somebody i worked in a video rental store although in college i was able to work in in operations in my computer center with mainframes that i think that's that is one of the best things you can have on your resume is some practical industry experience along those lines i get that it's helpdesk you've been in three years of course it's going to seem a bit uh wrote you're going to have yet another password reset yet another one where somebody doesn't know how to do a mail merge i get it you know how much remote desktop can one person stand in a lifetime i get it i totally get it but we all have to kind of start at that level and the fact that you've got that now that you can rely on and keep doing that in your uh while you're taking your other uh job while you're i say another job but you're getting that degree it is another job while you're working on that degree i think you've got a nice setup here don't discount it i sound it sounded to me like you were discounting it a little bit don't discount it you're in a good position use that while you can to be able to hone the skills you have if you have the opportunity to on the weekends i'm sure the people the company you work with has a networking team they have a server team they have a security team i work for like a non-profit and they i'm kind of like the only one kind of running most of the things okay and i do have like i t boss he does set up the network but it's like he's more of a hired person and it's just like i'm trying to run the most other things well this is this is really a good position to be in um although you don't have the ability to go to separate teams within your company and maybe spend time with them on the weekend or bigger projects they may be working on you might be able to work with your boss a little bit and say i know we're putting in a new switch over in this new building can i watch you do that can i just stand over your shoulder and see what it really takes to put this switch in what configurations you would set up how do you plan it out maybe you can whiteboard it for me there's places where you can start learning a little more about those different parts of it without actually being in those jobs at the moment and if anybody else is in a help desk trust me the networking team loves to have some extra hands and people on board to help work with these things your there will be a time when they have to roll out a whole new uh conference center or they have to build out a new training room or they need to bring in a bunch of servers or move them across town you should be volunteering for those things it's a good chance to meet the people that are doing that and it's a good chance to learn some of the things that they're doing got you okay that's pretty good idea so so now my next question would be like about like going to a next job or like because i can't really do full time right now like i feel like with my parents right i'm kind of young um like i was thinking looking for more part-time i.t jobs but it's like most of the part-time was sent to the intern level and i think i probably get paid less than the amount i get now and i'm not sure maybe like even lesser responsibility i don't know what the case is but uh i mean do you think i should like apply for maybe more like intern jobs or like some other places where it's more part-time i think if you're working on a formal degree right now that that should be your focus i think that's what you need to get through first that's the thing you need to get in your pocket um i think you've got everything else sort of set up on with your part-time job now they're paying you pretty well there may not be a huge amount of technical knowledge that you're going to have to keep working on you may have hit a a point where you're pretty familiar with everything you're doing you feel like you're not learning anything yet uh but don't worry about that now you've got a whole career ahead of you and plenty of time i know people always say that like you've got a whole whole your whole lifetime ahead of you to work on those things but as far as your career is concerned especially in i.t that's really true you can move up very quickly in i.t very fast just by applying yourself learning these technologies and becoming very knowledgeable in these niches so i wouldn't worry so much about are you doing it fast enough are you getting the job that you need right now should you really be looking at a bigger company should you be trying to get a different help desk or different part-time don't worry about that right now go get your four-year degree get everything you need get it all in your pocket and then it will be time to start moving up start leveling up and moving up those ranks you'll you'll have no problem doing it with the foundational knowledge that you've already created while you've been in school actually thanks appreciate it yeah because like i'm 22 and like i feel like i'm and the pandemic just sort of changed a whole bunch of things and it's like i'm going to fire like okay what should i be doing next or like or you know like the world should be my next step kind of getting worried like you know what if there's not enough time probably delayed my my career or whatever the case is that's the life a lot of my mind i i get it i was exactly the same way in college working on my management degree i was working part-time in a computing center i was learning about these networking technologies and the mainframes and how the the cryogenerators worked and all of the systems around it i was dying to just keep going to run with it i was i was on fire with this and i think that fire is important i think that drive is going to move you up in the ranks of i.t very quickly but you got to build the foundation first get that degree get everything there because you're going to have a life you're going to have a family gonna have a wife you're gonna have a a a significant other you're gonna have there's children involved there's the rest of the family now we can't move because we've got kids in school now they're in high school it happens very quickly and and it starts to begin limiting the decisions that you make you have to start making very narrowly focused decisions right now your decisions are very wide uh focus on getting the foundational stuff in your pocket that's gonna to move you throughout your career for the rest of your career and that four-year degree and the foundational knowledge that you get there is what's going to be something you'll be able to rest on but you need to get in your pocket first at that point you're going to have no problem moving up but you've got the drive you've got the want you've got the interest it's now just a matter of sort of building the nest and at that point you'll be able to fly anywhere you want gotcha thank you appreciate it and i guess my sort of my last finalist question um so my my professors they recommended me to actually learn coding and i'm really just not good at coding and so the major i'm in is computer information system and i went with the networking track instead because since i kind of already went with the whole certification process um but is there i guess like a like should i look like should i be learning more coding or something like if i want to get into that security field or like um i mean i don't know like because when it comes to routing and stuff i feel like command lines are a little more easier than actually learning how to code if that makes sense well i guess the question question i have is when they say you need to learn coding what do they mean that's a very broad term coding do they have something specific that they mentioned um yeah like python and automation things like that okay i can i can get on board with that the reason i mention that sometimes when especially uh people who are academic say coding they're talking about c plus plus uh java learning some type of formalized programming language learning uh swift understand building apps on a mobile device building apps on the web and generally speaking i don't consider that to be a purview of i.t because in i.t we don't really do programming which is why coding's sort of a generic term it really doesn't mean anything if i had to and i this is in my video on how to get a job in it with no experience if you had to put these things on a venn diagram the world of computer science is the world of designing applications and designing hardware and building the software and hardware systems to be able to support those information technology or i t make sure that all of those systems are working implements them puts them in the network uh maintains the security of those devices make sure that those devices are able to operate properly and it's a completely different field of work notice that those two diagrams those two uh circles of computer science and information technology barely connect with each other so when somebody comes comes to me and says uh they said i need to learn how to program like okay what do they mean by that because creating an app building an app is something you will never do in it you should never say never except you would never do that in it that's not i.t at all that's computer science but but when you get into automation uh scripting being able to orchestrate that is absolutely knowledge that you should have in the world of i.t it is being able to underst in fact i tell people pick one of these pick python or powershell go learn everything you can about one of those if you're window z go learn the power shell if you're more into the cloud in networking maybe python but you really can't go wrong both of those are really good learn those technologies once you learn one you will be able to use that and apply it to other types of scripting so it's really the foundational knowledge of how do i make this scripting orchestration automation world work for me and python right now is a fantastic way to do it whoever your instructor said to you to go learn python was spot on they were absolutely correct you want to learn something new you want to push yourself you want to be have something in your pocket that you can bring into an employer and say i'm knowledgeable in this i can really make your network work really well python's a great way to do it okay okay that makes sense that makes a lot of sense thank you appreciate it yeah because i was just a little like stuck on like how my life is and it just like kind of helped me clarify a little bit about that appreciate you man you're you're in a good spot keep doing what you're doing whatever that is you're doing keep doing that okay gotcha yeah because i i i've used your um you know videos and everything when i studied for the eighth and that plus like two years ago and and i just looked at the uh video today i'm like oh crap like you know you you won't allow so let me ask you some questions about like my current stuff but appreciate man i appreciate all your help that you've been doing and appreciate for helping me now best of luck yeah thanks have a good one that's that's fantastic i think whenever we start looking at what can we do to do more in this industry there are always things we can work on there are always skills that we can use and there's plenty to pull from uh the challenge we often have is which one do i go with uh how do i know which one to choose and that's that's often the harder part uh but just ask me i'll give you my opinion anyway um and what i see people doing with these technologies but that it's one where i often worry because i do see if you're not in the industry you've never worked in i.t before in this world that we live in people often equate coding building applications with a knowledge of computers um very often there is no connection between learning applique how to program applications and knowledge of computers there's often a huge gap there um as as many people have had to troubleshoot bad applications can attest um knowing how to focus your efforts and learn the skills that will help you the most becomes almost as important as learning the actual skills let's go back to the phones 518 erie code hi caller which name are you calling from hello hello oh hi hi thank you for having me professor thank you for calling my name is avi from connect city new york hi avi yes sir um so i have a bachelor's in i.t but i never put it to use because i moved from one area to the next i moved out from new york city out to the upstate new york wilderness and i found a job at the new york lottery and i'm doing customer service work but i'm pursuing this a plus certification and i'm actually interested in two things i'm interested in cyber security but i also hear a lot about aws and um well i'm just trying to get a big my big big my big break in i.t my foot in the door so i gotta go with the a-plus first um do you have any advice on what and how to run up the career pathways in the aws and cyber security there there's a number of different ways the one thing that's nice about information technology in general and we spoke about this earlier is there is no single path to get you from point a to point e or f yeah there's there's multiple ways to get there you could either take this road or that road or the other road and and often it's not neither one of those is better or worse than the other they're just different ways to get there and it often has a dependence on where we happen to live what we're doing in our lives the opportunities that happen to be available in our current organization you never know where these opportunities are going to come from your particular organization the new york lottery there are technology people in that organization you may be able to network with uh certainly there is a big cyber security aspect to the things that are happening within your organization that you may not even see because of where you happened the department you happen to work in but you could ask the people who work there that you may may see or you may have uh knowledge of or you could just send an email to and say i'm really interested in doing this maybe ask them the same thing you asked me what could i do within the certifications or things that i'm working on that would qualify me to move into the networking team the security team or do something in it within our company and maybe they can get back with you and talk with you about some of those things whether that would make you move up within your current company or whether you move to a different company and make that happen i think another place to gather some of these details we often don't think about it but it's it's really a wealth of information are the job postings that are out there now even if you're not looking for a job right now but it's a great place to go to see what are other companies looking for what first what job openings do they happen to have and secondly for those job openings what are they asking for are any of them asking for aws are any of them asking for uh for azure are they doing more with other networking technologies that i should probably be focusing on did they even mention python you know those are the things that should prompt you to what you would want to do you had mentioned wanting to maybe get more knowledge in cloud-based technologies aws specifically amazon has some fantastic certifications available that would be perfect to step through if you wanted to learn more about that uh perhaps even stronger is the microsoft side where their azure certifications are extensive they roll out tons of those that go across many different cloud-based technologies there's plenty of places to go and i think certifications is a good way to have a structured focus on understanding those technologies and then at the end of it you could earn a cert that you could put on your resume that you could show someone else when you're ready to get that next job so it's almost a twofer where you are learning it you're getting really familiar with the technology and then you have something now that you can use as a credential when you go to look for those jobs so those are those are the things you can work on at least the opportunities that you could go with and i think you can't go wrong in either one of those oh well well thank you so much because that was a great those are great ideas um about asking my co-workers about how to move up and um you know looking for those job openings but i'm wondering like well i'm like pushing 35 now and um and you know is that too late to break i.t one great thing about uh the computers is they have no idea how old you are someone like me i'm also pushing 35 and uh one of the challenges that you run into isn't really on the computer side of things it's really on the people side of things and and there's been conversations about this most recently on reddit about ageism and the challenges with getting an entry-level tech job for someone who is not just out of college you've sort of done some things in your life to be able to work through those and i mentioned this in my video on how to get a job at it with no experience there i have four elements that i really think are essential for the best possible job that you could or best possible opportunity that you could have in a job without having any experience in it and i talk about the certifications i talk about the formal education i talk about having some type of hands-on or at least some practical experience with these technologies but it's that fourth one that perhaps becomes more important for people like you and me which is do i know somebody who works there do i know somebody who works in in technology there and the people networking part of this becomes incredibly important throughout my career in it i've probably had i i would say about well 15 to 20 different jobs you know i'm talking about starting as a technology specialist one to technology specialist two to technology specialist three those are different jobs that i've gone through some of the jobs i moved up within the existing company that i was at some of the jobs i moved to a different company but i went through a lot of different jobs in it to be able to work through those things one of the things that i found to be important in my first job i knew nobody who worked there i'm really not even sure today why they hired me but but they saw something and said well we could hire that guy to do this grunt job of being a field person and being able to work through it the part that helped me in every other job in it that i got after that i knew someone who worked there and it's not like you you know them at a personal level you unders you know where their kids go to school you spend time with them on the weekend you know them professionally they're part of your linkedin you see them at trade shows you see them at the cisco user group meeting you've run into them in different places and you know who they are and you have these conversations uh that really helps because when you're in a room with an um someone who's hiring you or or going through the interview process you go oh yeah i know bob in it we talked about this job and we talked about the projects you have going on and here's why i think this would be a good fit for me and how i think i could be a good fit for you uh that that just knowing somebody who works there opens doors they often have that that saying that it's not what you know but who you know and that certainly is an important part of this it's not only what you know it's also who you know because that that is certainly open doors for me and we often don't think enough about that being valuable and as you get older in our industry knowing more and more people becomes incredibly important you should already be working on your linkedin you should already be connecting with people you should already be meeting people and getting them in that circle that you have there so that you can reach out to them if you have a question hey everybody i'm trying to do this do you know anybody hiring a good networking person or you can touch base with people directly or at least constantly stay in touch with what they're doing um i think that discounts a lot of the problems we see with hiring people of a certain age in our industry and i think if you wanted to just have a better grouping of people that you can converse with it's good to have that as part of whether it's your linkedin or some other method of keeping track and networking with them professionally um it's an important part of what you do i know we often see in it you know we're just a bunch of computer people we don't like to talk to other people that's actually not true at all it's it's like any other industry it's like any other grouping of people it's like any other set of humans we like to communicate with other humans and see what they're doing so this is where you can for you can kind of get rid of the worries of ageism or the worries that somebody wouldn't want to hire you because of your age and you already know people who work there they would love to hire you they already know you they've already worked with you in the past they already know you from the the cisco user group or whatever it happens to be but you have to build that foundation you have to build that network now you can't do it when you're ready to get a job it already needs to be in place and it needs to be something you nurture throughout your entire career we're all wanting to stay connected with each other and everybody who's on my linkedin some of you that are watching you've you've sent me a linkedin request and you'll notice that i haven't responded to that i only add people to my linkedin that i have worked with or that i have had professional relationships with so that if i need to ask questions of people i'm asking questions of people that know me and i know them and i think that becomes a much more valuable set of goals for my linkedin that's what i'm trying to do with linkedin is having a well-curated a well-established network team of people that i know it's not like facebook where i'm trying to get a bunch of likes this is very very different and you need to work with it in a different way that may be a good way to kind of get that next job not having to worry about the age part of it oh yeah definitely sir um and uh what is it are you going to do anything um in cloud in terms of like a cloud bundle or something like that in the future maybe you know the the cloud piece of it i would love i want to do a lot of different courses i have a huge list of courses i probably have 20 things that i've written down that i would love to be able to do my problem is just physics it's just i'm one person trying to get through all of these courses and being able to do them all of these courses we've been working on a plus network plus security plus those all have cloud-based technologies inside of them i recognize they are not cloud certs but even then i'm seeing more cloud-based things happening uh currently we're in the process of updating network plus after that a plus will need to be updated it's about time for that to cycle through but right after that will be an opportunity for something and and i haven't decided specifically on what that will be but it's down to kind of the top three or four um cloud is part of that which cloud it is i don't know yet uh there's some google stuff there's amazon stuff there is uh certainly the microsoft those are big players in that or do i go outside the scope of that maybe we'll do cisco maybe we'll do vmware maybe we go well outside the scope and do palo alto networks i don't know yet uh i would love to be able to do more cloud but it's not something that's going to happen next week it's probably more like next year but it's certainly in the back of my mind wow cool you know i ordered the um a plus bundle and um i gotta tell you the product is just superb i just said i really do appreciate all the videos that you made for us you know and all of the information the practice exams they're pretty uh pretty much spot on you know so i just appreciate what uh the time you spend educating us here at professormesser.com and um thank you thank you for all that you do for us i i appreciate that thank you thank you for even saying that we i spend a lot of time for those of you that don't know uh we don't outsource this stuff everything that you read all of the questions that you see in my books all the course notes that you see in all the videos are content that i have written uh we we have a specific goal to create the highest quality materials that are very focused on you just getting that certification and that's where we're going to continue to have that focus and it's great to get that kind of feedback because it lets me know okay we're doing the right thing so thank you so much oh no it's it's a wealth of information every product is really really to the t i appreciate that thank you so much and uh and thank you for your support of those and best of luck with everything that you're doing thank you so much you have a great day now you too that's that's always good to hear for for those of you that don't know about this this is not a there's not a lab full of people here for those of you that have kind of been watching you know it's just me and a computer for the most part uh in the in the room i've got lori my marketing manager and it's kind of it we're sort of putting the whole thing together based on those side of things so uh it's good to know that some of the things that we're creating really are having the right impact i want to build out training materials that i would want to use if i went through this process and there's not a lot of room to uh to really cut corner i don't want to cut corners i don't want to have something that's just good enough i want to have something that you can use to really pass that certification our goal is for you to get a job or get a better job and the only way you're going to do that is if you have the best quality materials possible let's go back to the phone calls you've been holding for so long thank you caller 931 area code what's your name where are you calling from i hear myself i'm on speaker hello hi oh yes i i turned it off thank you uh my name is alex uh i'm from tennessee it's really good to talk to you mr mister hey alex thanks for calling um so my question would be i'm currently studying for the linux plus exams um and i've been a user for linux for maybe four months now and i have a pretty good understanding of like the core concepts right and so i got the book and i've been reading through it and i realized that it's very esoteric like it's uh it's not a lot of things that the normal user would implement right and i've been looking for a lot of study material and it seems that all of it is aimed towards the lpic i believe um and it's even old right um so i was just wondering what what would you recommend would you recommend maybe just downloading the exam objectives and just trying to drill those with maybe made up practice exams in my head or i i think at a minimum for everyone listening regardless of what certification you're working on through comptia always get the exam objectives in your pocket should be the first thing you grab because i don't think a lot of people realize just how extensive the exam objectives are they are a bullet by bullet breakdown of everything you need to know to pass the exam they're not some broad generalized listing of objectives they are a very specific list of objectives and competitors probably is the only organization in i.t that gives you this level of detail lpi used to or i guess they still might on their side for their certification but comptia certainly does a much better job than microsoft or cisco or vmware or any of the folks on that side it is a wealth of information you should absolutely grab that but your point to the lpi thing for those of you not familiar this latest iteration of linux plus is a wholly owned uh creation of comptia prior to this version there has been a partnership between comptia and an organization called lpi uh lpi is one that has had for a very long time linux certifications and you can still go to lpi and get a linux certification if you would like back when a comptia was looking at getting into linux plus they partnered with lpi effectively kind of took their exam objectives and created what comptia calls linux plus by lpi that's really was the full certification name uh powered by i think they used uh linux plus powered by lpi or something along those lines the lpi piece of it though they they uh decided not to continue that partnership lpi's now still off doing their thing but now linux plus what used to be two exams and was very focused on the lpi content is now a single exam and the content is solely written by comptia so it has kind of a different approach different perspective than the lpi side of things but because of that you can't use the lpi content to be able to really specifically learn for the current version of the linux plus exam if you're planning to do anything with comptia always study from materials that match the version of the exam that you're planning to take and looking at some of the older lpi stuff is is kind of going to take you off scope quite a bit considering there are two lpi tests and only one comptia exam obviously there are things that are dramatically different between the two so my my recommendation with linux plus especially you are already thinking i need more hands-on you're absolutely right get as much hands-on as possible with linux especially and you can do so much in a vm with linux very little resources required you everything is pretty much command line based for these exams anyway that's a great place to go to be able to work out those those nuances of the operating system without worrying that you're going to break something somewhere else the uh the other part of it is is getting a book that is specific to the current version can actually help you quite a bit as you're going through that certification if you didn't want to get a book and you just wanted to go through this the exam objectives and use other materials just pull it in bit by bit that's that's not unreasonable in a way that's sort of how i build my certification courses now is i use the exam objectives as my list and i simply build into the videos everything that's listed in the exam objectives you could effectively do a similar thing just not making videos of it you're instead doing hands-on with it or you're learning more about that particular topic from what's available on wikipedia and other sources on the internet perfectly reasonable and a little more disjointed and perhaps in some cases difficult to find content but it's something you could do to make that happen definitely don't use some of the lpi though don't use some of that old content if you're planning to get the current version of linux plus you've already seen those problems there alex yes sir and yes uh i i currently do have the uh i believe it's the ted jordan linux plus book um and i've watched all of your linux videos but uh of course even then i mean uh of course it's great foundational knowledge but it seems like there really is just a lack of content for this uh this one specific certification but [Music] the few linux plus related videos i did are from i don't know 10 years ago they're really really old some of the content in those isn't exactly the most uh modern or accurate uh to go along with the exam and i only did a handful i did a few of those videos i thought this would be a great course to do and then because of a number of reasons i realized this is not a good course to do and i decided to not do that course anymore so you end up with 10 videos that certainly don't don't make up i think i i plan to do 110 videos i did 10. um and that was enough uh and and part of there's many reasons behind that i'm not going to go into but you're right there's a limited amount of content for linux plus partly because it's relatively new on the comptia side partly because the the number of people asking for it is a relatively low number and therefore there are fewer resources available certainly as it compares to a plus network plus or security plus but there are some out there you can go with um the fact that you have any books at all is great go with that use the objectives and i think you'll be fine great all right well uh well thanks for the reassurance it was great talking to you thanks alex i appreciate the call that's one where it's it's a balancing act for me i'm i'm a single person that is that is building out courses so i have a a very narrow focus on all the things i'm able to do i would love to do a linux course i would love to do a cloud course i would love to do a cisco course i would love to do a vmware course i'd love to do all these uh but it generally takes three to four months to put a course together well that's a pretty big investment of time that's all i do i'm here every day from eight in the morning until ten at night so if that's the case and it takes me four months that's a lot of work going into these things so i have to pick and choose very carefully as to exactly what i'm going to do so we'll figure it out we'll we'll make these things happen however they're going to happen but that's one of the reasons why you don't see a ton of different and varied courses from me because i like to pick and choose exactly what we're going to do back to the phones thanks for holding for so long 781 area code hi caller what's your name where are you calling from hi my name is rachel i'm calling from boston math hi rachel how are you thanks i'm doing great thanks for calling great great thank you so i'm new to it i uh this is going to be my second career so i've only been studying for the core one a plus test for about two months and in looking at the uh 101001 objective it is it's really it's darting i'm literally learning a new language and so i wanted to know first off how in depth do you need to get uh for each line item so for instance if i look at the wireless networking protocol do i need to know you know all the frequencies uh the max throughput the bandwidth do i need to be able to compare them you know i know 801 i know the numbers um and i know that a lot of the test requires memorization and so i'm wondering how do i tackle this because i'm supposed to be taking the test in two weeks and i don't feel that i'm i don't feel that i'm there yet i can memorize but i need to understand and then i need to be able to problem solve so how should i focus my time and how in-depth should i get on each line item in this um you know sort of you know the objectives you're absolutely right you could you could take just the wireless section of the exam objectives and create a year's worth of content from that it is a broad set of of technologies that has an extensive amount of things that you could could work through and it obviously for the a plus you don't have to know a year's worth of information to be able to make that happen there's a very narrow scope of things you have to know fortunately the exam objectives if you read them and take them at a very basic straightforward level they provide you with all of the context you need for the most part so in other words if they are asking on the exam objectives and they list very specifically a set of specifications then you need to know their specifications if they do not specifically list out those specifications you do not need to know them i'll take an example of this from the 1001 which is a lot of people get wrapped up on this and they send me notes saying i'm spending so much time trying to learn all of the pins of memory how many pins on a different kind of memory and it's just ridiculous it's taking me forever my response to them is why are you learning that why are you going through and learning how many pins are on memory where in the exam objectives does it ask you to memorize how many pins happen to be on a certain type of memory and they look at their exam objectives and they say it's not listed here like okay so why are you are you learning that stop that uh well this other thing that i'm reading lists out all of these things it tells me i need to know that like well you're not learning the book you're learning the certification and comptia says you don't need to know it and it probably because it's a relatively worthless thing to know so why are you going through the process of learning that so that's why i always tell people go back to the exam objectives and use them very literally as what you need to know for the exam now there are times when they go a little bit outside the scope of the exam objectives and they go a little bit outside or at least they're a little vague in the objectives on things you need to learn but fortunately i've created these videos since the 600 series so the 600 700 800 900 now the 11 the 1000 series um so i've got through the years a pretty good understanding of what comptia is looking for or in a way deciphering the hieroglyphics of the exam objectives into the practical things you need to know for the exam so if you're ever in a situation where you're wondering do i really need to know that pull up my video list out everything that i have in my video especially things that i write on the slide i put them on the slide specifically when they are you're expected to know it if it is not specifically written on a slide then you do not need to know that for the most part um so you'll notice in none of my videos do i point out how many pins are on the memory because they don't ask about that there was a time when they used to ask a lot of details like that they don't ask about that anymore so that's what i would do i would recommend using my videos as sort of a guideline if you're ever wondering do i really need to understand the nuances or do i need here's a good one do i need to understand the modulation types used for each wireless standard no is it is that listed anywhere in the exam objectives it is not so if it's not listed there you do not need to know that now there's other things they do want you to expect you to know they expect you to understand what standards use which frequency ranges they expect you to understand what the maximum throughputs might be for those different standards but i created a chart for that on my video on the wireless standards that shows the the standard the the frequency they use the and the different pieces that you the different throughputs for each one of those and that's it there's nothing else listed in that chart because you don't need to know anything else in that chart another example of that since we're talking wireless a lot of people will say well i need to understand the distances used for wireless well there there are no distances it's wireless uh what antenna are you using how much power are you using uh there's so many variables there are no ways to determine a maximum or minimum distance for wireless and you'll notice it's not listed in the exam objectives so always go back to the objectives always go back to the videos get an understanding if you still can't figure out those pieces there's a contact us link at the top of my website throw me an email and i'll at least point you in a direction at the very least perfect perfect and i and i i love your videos they are very helpful so i will continue watching them i had one other uh question and so i heard you say that you like to tinker around the computer to figure your way around it and i'm a hands-on person as well so a lot of these questions say you know given a scenario select and configure or install or my i i'm afraid that i'm going to break something if i open up my computer and look at the motherboard or the cpu should i should i be there are certainly things that you can break inside of your computer and i've done a very good job of breaking things inside of my own computer before so it's possible that you could break something inside there and it's not necessary necessary that you do that either most people will even tell you don't use it on your own computer go get a broken one off of ebay or somewhere locally where it's 20 bucks they'll send you a broken computer but it's complete you know except for a bad capacitor that's on the motherboard they will send it to you and you they say you use it for parts well that's perfect you can take it apart you don't have to worry about it breaking you can see back behind me there's a motherboard behind me you know i pulled it out that's what i used whenever i showed people what's on a motherboard that's an old uh i forget exactly which motherboard that is i have back there but that's a good example of one that i know the system will never be used again i don't have to worry about breaking something i can pull it out kind of show it to people i can touch the things on it without worrying that i'm going to use some type of static electricity and break what's there if you can find just some throwaway that's somewhere and there's plenty out there that you can find that's often a better way to go about learning what's on the inside than actually breaking apart someone else's system but what i tell people all the time is just go to google to go to the image search that's on google and type in pc motherboard and look at the detailed high-resolution images of a pc motherboard and kind of see what's there see if you can figure out what is on that motherboard even better find out the model of that motherboard go download the manual and then in the manual it tells you here's where the memory slots are here's where the video card is here's the usb chip here is the these where the cpu fits it tells you what all these things are and you can see them in living color in that without having to touch take apart or in my case break the motherboard that i'm using now great all right well i will definitely do that i do have a computer that our instructor gave us i just uh haven't haven't really uh focused on taking it apart but i will that's great advice and i appreciate everything that that you are doing as well and um i will check back and let you know how i did on part one and then after we'll come part two so thank you for all that you're doing for everyone thanks for the call rachel best of luck thank you okay bye-bye it's one of those challenges though if you don't have the materials available to you right now uh at least you'll be able to to see what other people are doing with it and and uh there's tons of youtube videos out there people pulling apart a computer and looking inside of it and and putting them putting uh different components together and in some cases repairing those components but uh to the first question that rachel mentioned which is scope and context it's sometimes not obvious from the exam objectives just the entirety of the scope they're looking for one of them is you know install and configure a router well gosh there's there's a lot to go into with installing and configuring a router what are they really talking about well there's there's only certain things they want you to be aware of and that they're not asking you to know exactly how to install it for this particular model of device they want you in a scenario to be able to understand when you would use this technology and what it takes to be able to make that happen uh and there's plenty of places you can go online to maybe even go through uh simulations of that i think link says has a great simulation page you can go to any linksys device drill down into it and suddenly you're using the device it's another great way to configure a system without actually needing a system in front of you back to the phones let's go to the 215 area code hi caller what's your name where you calling from oh hi hi this is gene hi gene i great i've got you thank you um my question is because i'm older and i have already performed help desk situations and specialized in pharmaceutical i.t uh jobs as far i i i'm an i.t auditor which i i can't really talk about my jobs but now when i go and look for a job the people are younger the hiring managers are younger and they do not know what it takes to be an i.t person so to speak right and i'm getting hr screeners and i'm doing my best to become recertified even in a plus even though i've performed all of this work in the past i need a new certificate because now all the job applications say must have this certification yep so i'm studying i have the books i have it on a tablet because you can't you can't beat the system you have to say okay i have a new certificate and i know all of this business and learning to shorten the resume to one or two pages as best i can because you can't know it all even when you go in i find every company that i have gone into i've had to start from the bottom up because i needed to learn their system and how everything was connected i needed to see the big picture and it's it's just really frustrating now with cobia 19 and all to the american companies do not pay for your i.t training anymore so you need to go out and spend your money that you don't have to get re-certified so that they'll at least look at your resume so i i am trying to network again there's a net technical networking professional group in the philadelphia area right and so i'll be joined they're meeting again in june 15th so because i want to stay in touch and i need them to know that i'm still here and i have friends in that group too so and i'm on linkedin as well but i'm wondering you know what else can i do i what else can i do i mean every time that people see my resume they want me to be a project manager and that's not where my heart belongs my heart is in i.t and i just am very good at it good good for you i kind of have the same perspective too because i've been in situations before people said you seem to be uh you seem to be able to organize things well let's get you in a project management position and that sort of happened when i moved into it management is they kind of wanted me to double up on that and uh gantt charts it was just not for me it's not my gig uh following up on people you're effectively a grown-up babysitter in in many regards when you're an i.t manager even more so when you're an i.t project manager it seems and to that my my heart was not in it there are some project managers i've worked through through the years which were phenomenal people that really knew their stuff they were perfectly situated for that i am not so i was i went back to being systems engineer it worked out much better for me to your point though i would think especially in some of the larger organizations right now that it's going to be ramping up pretty quick uh you know compliance and i'm trying to lean back towards the skills you already have with auditing uh the compliance parts that people are dealing with these days is is extensive from a privacy perspective certainly in financial organizations uh we're seeing a lot more of it um on the privacy side those are places where you might be able to move into an i.t group especially a larger company that needs those types of skills i think you you kind of hit on it and you were already kind of going down this road with the local it group is is really getting a network of people in it who understand your skills who'd be able to understand more about what you're trying to do to fit you better you don't need to work on a help desk that's not where you're you're coming from you already have some of the skills in i.t that you'd be able to apply to some of these other pieces it's now about finding the right role you would learn their structure though a lot of times i find being an i.t auditor people won't tell you what's really going on and you have to be walk carefully to get the information that you need so you make friends with people in the company that you need that information so i'll go and visit them during lunch or something like that yeah and i'll say hey i recognize you you work on that blah blah project but what happens when you're a contractor oftentimes is that once you do find the mistakes they blame it on you and they get rid of you because the full-time employed management does not want to lose their job i can only imagine uh when the word auditor is associated with your your particular job role uh the type of we don't want to talk to you certainly comes into play um and that that is a challenge i've asked them not to say that i'm an i.t auditor i said please label me as an i.t lead for the project and and leave the word auditor out of it because no one will talk to me right right i probably would be in that same position you don't want to uh say the wrong thing or do something that's going to uh be detrimental towards you or or the company or your job along those lines so i i get it and i understand i think you were on the right track though in getting some some uh listing of all of the different people you've worked with in the past though um this is kind of the challenge when working in any it role is it's often a very difficult job hunt right up until the point you actually get offered that new position then suddenly everything's fine uh it's sort of the nature of the job hunts in general it sounds like you've built a large grouping of people that you'd be able to add to the linkedin and at least ping a little bit to find out what they're doing and you've got some work going on along with that uh the technical user group that's a fantastic place to start working on these it sounds like you're doing all the right things there are amazing people in this group they're all from the old i.t school and you know they went through all the difficulties of learning what they know and they know it inside and out you you can't fault them they're so good and i i when i listen to you on this podcast i i think wow it's right on he's right on everything he's saying is absolutely correct i hope people are listening to them because that really is what it is what you're telling them yeah i can back you up on everything i've heard and i certainly will be looking at your videos for a plus because i'm not a fool i know what sells and if i have to get enough certificate then i will do that yes i have multiple networking engineering certified master you know certificate yes microsoft banyan which a lot of people don't know ip tcip email all kinds of email systems all of that ip networking i would go into a police station and teach their person that was interested and i said you can sit here and observe me but in the contract i am not a trainer so they're i'm restricted into what things i can say to you and i said i sympathize with you but you need to go to the classes you need but now i i've trained myself so much that i buy the books i i look at the videos i look at the cds i look at all the exercises that are given to me i take all the tests that i can find before i go into the test center because i'm very hyper with tests i'm horrible with tests and i really have to know my information like the back of my hand before i go in and take the test this is one of the things i i think a lot of people do especially on these exams is learning all of that content and i think you're right though uh having that foundational knowledge sort of that um that that institutional knowledge going back to banyan vines and nobel netware and knowing all of the the things associated with that it's the same thing except newer there's nothing nothing has changed on the network side the ethernet frame is exactly the same ethernet frame it was 30 years ago the problem though is that all these new certifications are out and i think you're right getting some of those certs having that cert just on your resume getting it through that hr so that you can get to the next step is going to be an important piece and i think the other important piece is just getting that uh you're getting your network of people working and making sure that it's firing in all cylinders i just talked some with someone today who's a a former u.s marine and she was my boss back with uh soft switch and lotus notes to lotus domino to then ibm bought them and then i was the qa lead in the test lab for uh adding in java into lotus domino so i was always doing a security check first thing in the morning everything every system and then i you know i have a qa background i've i've been massively trained from the pharmaceutical business on every fda nuance and every sucks nuance in the it world and i can't get a job i mean that's crazy so i finally figured out i need that certificate i i think that's going to help you the things you're talking about that were spot-on with what managers and cios want to have in their organizations now you've got if if you've done anything with lotus notes then you've been through the ringer of i.t at this point uh so now i think the point is is you're absolutely right get the pieces around that get all of the other certifications you need around that and i think it's going to get the eyes of other people and don't stop the other pieces that you're doing with your person-to-person networking as well you'll do fine so important people are so important it's it's it's about 60 of your job or more so this is the time to take advantage of that beef up the linkedin make sure you keep in touch with those people ping them uh constantly you know check in every month or so find out the things going on in their organization have they seen anything have they heard anything keep them top of mind so that when they see something they'll also think of you and and maybe even be more proactive about getting in touch with you as well hopefully that will help for you with eugene yeah yeah i i appreciate the encouragement because i really need that with this isolation routine for the past year and a half now we're coming out of it now it's uh the numbers are looking good it's now a lot of companies are ramping up the i.t side of things this is where you make it happen i appreciate the call yeah thank you so much and i keep looking for you for you in any a plus and and i have to go on you know i have to keep uh i have to i just have to keep practicing and pass those tests i think we all do sounds crazy because i'm so knowledgeable but guess what you know it has a a a lifetime of about 10 years and it comes and goes you have to be ready for the next two things it is a constant path a constant process of learning certifying there's a there you will never stop there's never an end to it and i think uh for a lot of the people that are just getting their a plus this is the beginning but very often we have to go back and get those certs that other employers are asking about even if it's something that we think we know that's just sort of the normal way of doing things in this business so i appreciate it thank you for calling okay thank you that's it's one of the challenges i think when dealing with i.t in general and maybe people don't realize this is you don't just learn it and then you're good you're done it's constant in its process you will always be learning there will never be a time when you're not learning about some type of technology because not only are we trying to keep up with what we have now there's new technologies coming out all the time some people consider this to be a negative some people think that this is something that that they don't want to get involved with i see that as being incredibly useful it's something's always fresh there's always something new to learn i feel like i'm always getting better as a technologist i'm always learning new technologies i'm always doing things especially now with the cloud there's tons of things to be able to work through i think the next step for pretty much everybody is to get the certification they're working on and then it's just a plan for the next one i think when i when i was with palo alto networks it was my last job working for another company i think even then i accumulated two or three new certifications in that seven year period even though i felt i was at sort of the pinnacle of my sc positions uh i had a knowledge in uh technology that the world had never seen before as a brand new technology that we were rolling out i became certified in that technology because i worked there and i needed to be certified in it but i already knew everything as i was the systems engineer i was already in designing and installing these things yes you have to go back and get the certification that's just part of the process of what we do it's a good it's a good level check for anybody else in the organization to know oh you got the cert great we know that you know a minimum now of what we can expect for this particular set of technologies that's what certification brings the table it's a great decision maker or helps make the decision where people are trying to decide who to hire and perhaps who not to hire it's better to have that in your pocket than not so that's that's the goal i think all of us need to work towards i want to thank everybody for joining us today we we did sort of an after show big after show today what's interesting about our scheduling this week normally we have time between our study groups we're doing one tomorrow so because of my crazy schedule uh we'll do the core 2 221 0002 tomorrow i have a whole brand new set of questions for you from the core 2 exam we'll of course open up the phone lines and take questions from the chat room tomorrow as well we'd love to have you come back for that and uh and sit through that and learn something else about what you need to know with the certification thanks for joining us this time we will see you next time on the a plus study group thanks everyone you

Channel: Professor Messer

Views: 66,616

Keywords: professor messer, study group, A+, certification, information technology, comptia

Id: vFT-usP1Yps

Length: 205min 49sec (12349 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2021