I’m making my way through the Google IT Support Professional Certificate. I appreciate the refresher of many of my courses from pursuing my ATA in Web Application and Cloud Development. It may seem counterintuitive that I took two classes in CISCO Networking and one (of two) classes for the A+ certificate. But I saw value in them and did my best to fit them in.
And I’m getting to learn some new stuff, too. For instance, even though I’ve been managing Active Directory, I’ve not had the chance to dive deeply into things like Group Policies. And having an overview of data backups and disaster recovery was very insightful.
So, I have two more courses to go to finish this Certificate. I have a few different directions I can go once I finish this. The most obvious is to leverage my existing work in IT Administration and start exploring network administration. Another option, which builds more on my ATA is data systems (data analytics, database administration, that sort of thing). I do a fair amount of that right now, too. Less so in my work at the Edmonds Waterfront Center, but there’s quite a bit of alignment with what I’m doing at Trinity. I’ve been feeding a lot of ideas, my backgound, etc, into ChatGPT, and it’s recommending the data path. That seems good as I’m seeing things like “The outlook for network administrator jobs is mixed, with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projecting a decline in employment by 3% from 2023 to 2033”. And then this “The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has projected substantial growth for occupations related to data analysis, with some categories seeing increases as high as 23% or more between 2023 and 2033.”
I’m trying to keep moving forward, to keep learning relevant skills. The world is changing so fast, one must work to keep up.
