I'm not convinced of the quality of this course material. I thought I could try it out, see if I could fill some gaps in my knowledge. I tried out some of the quizzes and they were just bad. Course 1, week 2, for example, asks you to match items to where they go on a motherboard. This quiz is flatly wrong. It asks you to match a PSU to the rear Ethernet port, and a SATA cable to an IDE port. Being so obviously wrong about something so basic gives me serious concerns about everything else. I quickly cancelled the free trial.
I went through the first several weeks of course 1, and you are spot on. The quiz in week 2 is absolutely wrong (did anyone audit this?). I skimmed through the first 6 weeks and even for a beginner course, this is way too dumbed down.
I checked out some of the material a bit further through the course as well, and I cannot recommend it for anyone serious about the profession. It looks good on the surface (reading the course summaries and the objectives), but the quality just isn't there.
I was also a bit surprised by the simplicity of course 1, but then remembered that the course as a whole is designed for folks with no experience. Looking through the descriptions for the other courses (the actual material isn't out yet) I'm hopeful they will have the level of depth I think we're all expecting.
Yeah you definitely want to keep in mind that this cert, and especially Course 1, has to be accessible to anyone. So it's building a foundation of common knowledge for the other courses which absolutely go into much more details.
I sent this on to the right people. We audited the course and had a private external beta, so it's surprising to see obvious errors like this. I imagine there might be something else going on with the labs.
That reminds me of the quality of the claimed "study helping" material for similar certifications that I occasionally stumble upon while looking for solutions to actual problems. It's hard to resist a physical facepalm or other expression when reading some of that stuff, since it'd otherwise make for great satire.
Personally, I don't have a high opinion of anyone whose only stated qualifications are these sorts of certifications --- all it really shows is rote memorisation, when good IT support relies on creative and insightful problem-solving skills --- including being good at... Googling.
Thank you for flagging this issue. We are extremely proud to have worked with Google on creating this certificate, which makes it possible for anyone without a technical background to gain the skills they need to start a career in IT. In our enthusiasm to launch a first-of-its-kind certificate, this error slipped through Coursera's review process. We have already removed the assessment with the error and will release a fix for it very soon. We sincerely apologize for this subpar learning experience in a certificate program that otherwise has been carefully designed and beta-tested over several months.
Hi
I wish to enroll into the google IT professional certificate program but will like to know if the program is only for US residents or for everyone out of the US like me
IT Support will replace factories in Middle America. These are jobs that are 1)Trained quickly 2) Geographically distributed 3) Cheap. IT Support needs to be onsite for hardware, but any Software can be distributed in smaller cities or work from home. Maybe Google will have a real help line one day?
It is also a great path into technology for those who did get CS degrees from a top school.
Side note: In the video, all the Google VPs and Leads were sitting in bright offices. The IT staff sat in dark rooms with little or no windows. @2min mark, the IT staff look to be in a dungeon at night.
Disclosure: I am one of the instructors for this course and went through Google's IT Residency Program.
Tonyour side note, the help desks (we call them Techstops) are anything but a dungeon :) you can image search for "Google Techstop" and get a very representative view of what they tend to look like.
We actually expect our support team (at least portions of them) to build internal apps that automate workflows for ops work or for users. It's not always as complex as a full soft eng role, but some of our IT staff do move on to those positions internally based on the work they do in IT. I think it really depends on the company you do IT for, and what they expect for the role. At Google, our IT staff are full time engineers.
Disclosure: I worked on this program and went through Google's IT Residency Program.
> At Google, our IT staff are full time engineers.
If this course is based on this view of the IT Support role (which I heartily approve of, but which is not the baseline norm in the industry) it really should be called the IT Support Engineering Professional Certificate or something similar, because otherwise it won't communicate it's real focus either to applicants or, perhaps more critically, hiring officers.
Depends on what level of IT you're working at. There are segments of the market where the various computer-related jobs that need to be done aren't neatly siloed.
A lot of people in my class dropped out of the CS program because they had confused the two.
I really think we should rename “computer science” to “computing science” or “computational science” - just please get the word “computer” out of there.
I disagree completely. IT is going the opposite way, much of the maintenance is becoming commodified so the more complex tasks almost always involved writing actual code.
It's become more of a SWE org everywhere.
It's funny because SWE peeps get really defensive about IT vs SWE roles; like they don't want to be associated with IT for some ego-related reason.
I vehemently disagree. The whole SWE/DevOps trend isn't super popular once you leave Silicon Valley. At the end of the day, most businesses still use Windows, and most IT staff are telling people how to print correctly and resetting the passwords people forgot for the umteenth time this week. This isn't going to change in the near future, and I assume Google's IT Support certificate is either teaching the skills necessary for these things... or not going to be a useful certificate for anyone trying to get a job.
If anything, that's the weirdest thing, Google's doing an IT cert? Are they teaching Microsoft platforms and being useful, or are they trying to teach Google's Chrome management platform that nobody uses? If Google's willing to hire graduates, it presumably teaches Google's IT stack... which isn't remotely similar to the IT stack people will find in other companies.
And Microsoft has been pushing businesses increasingly toward technologies like Powershell and products like SCCM in the past decade. The trend is slower in the Microsoft world, but it's definitely toward automation taking on the type of work you'd traditionally have support techs running around handling.
"I vehemently disagree. The whole SWE/DevOps trend isn't super popular once you leave Silicon Valley. At the end of the day, most businesses still use Windows, and most IT staff are telling people how to print correctly and resetting the passwords people forgot for the umteenth time this week. "
Both are true: even ten years ago, there was a noticeable split between helpdesk and maintenance skills, and things that we might now call "DevOps". If you have hundreds or thousands of computers, you can end up with people who specialize in stuff like building packages and disk images for deployments, writing scripts for user account management, and other automation, and don't fix printers so much any more, even if they don't have a separate job title.
> 80% of traditional IT hocus pocus can be automated or performed by an office manager or admin.
Then you clearly have never worked at a business where IT or technology isn't a core function of the business. Middle America wasn't and still isn't ready for understanding IT. I say this as someone who has worked with over 150 companies (mainly mid market, middle america) doing IT audits.
This! A small dev team with an AWS account and a git repo will run circles around the IT team in terms of speed, compliance requirements and scalability. Traditional network infrastructure, virtualization, security, DBMS, etc. are all on the verge of extinction.
The other way around. The cost to use Amazon never works out once hit more than a handful of high workload systems. I write out the proposal for our C levels every quarter and the increased cost of going to Amazon is enough to hire 2 full time level 1 sysadmins.
Edit: This obviously is super variable. If you have a low load worldwide need AWS will win. Or rapid bursts of traffic. Or hundreds of other scenarios where it makes sense. It is not a one size fits all solution though.
It depends on how you measure and account for cost. My last big on premises project landed about $10M of hardware, which wasn’t at capacity for about 18 months for various reasons. And that was a very successful project.
Yet it wasted about $2-2.5M in hardware value alone. That’s not free, especially when you wouldn’t be incurring cost on a pay by drink cloud model.
Now take, for example, a legal firm. One of the major LOB vendors in this space has a product that only runs on Oracle on Windows, with an extremely snowflake-like build. You can call them a dinosaur, but since they are a legal firm that wants to be competitive they will use this product.
Supporting this product involves a somewhat constant string of repairs, involving things like "logon to a user desktop and reregister DLLs". It takes a helpdesk team to run these things. The new "cloud" edition is literally a Microsoft RDS server that you run on premises, and on which you run the client software. Thereby facilitating remote access, making it a "cloud" product.
Do we argue that legal firms don't matter because soon every company will soon just be a development team? I don't think that's feasible.
Good software can move that IT job to a cheaper admin job. If printers are easy to install, or passwords are easy to reset, then the admin can just say “the printer nearest to you is Floor3-South. Go into Printers and select it” leaving IT to just maintain the printer and not have to coach users.
Here in Australia, most people just think "literally anything to do with computers = IT". So when I talked to course counselors they said if I wanted to be a programmer, I had to do an IT degree. Not even close.
Software engineering, or maybe CS, is what I wanted. I hadn't even heard the phrase "computer science" when I started university. The total incompetence of the course counselors at the core function of their job contributed to putting me on a path that eventually lead to the ruin of my life.
I did a degree that claimed to contain software development, but was in the IT category - I never learned of the concept of version control (at all), how to use makefiles, exception blocks, performance profiling, or a bunch of other practical stuff.
Now I'm wasting away in an IT support job. I can't blame everything on that, and most of the responsibility for where I am today is on me - especially for not turning it around better after I realised my mistakes, but I feel like the confusion between "IT", "CS", and "Software engineering" definitely kickstarted a path that wasted alot of my most valuable learning time.
Don't trust course counselors - or other people in general.
The school could have done you better, but don't externalize your problems. Most schools' CS degrees won't teach you version control, makefiles or any of that practical stuff. You learn it for fun, incidentally, or on the job.
I was once in your shoes. Same background, same regrettable life choices, same potential future.
If you want to develop, do it. Start by looking at the crap software your company likely pays hundreds of thousands of dollars for and think about how you could do it better. Start by actually trying to supplant it with something of your own creation.
I have a generic degree. All those "practical" things you lament missing out on, I learned by just doing it. But I never had cause to learn what big-o notation was or how to navigate a b-tree...you know, that non-practical knowledge a CS degree would have endowed me with. The lack of such has only stopped me from working at Google. Plenty of other shops are not in the business of recruiting only those who can write the freshest sorting algorithms.
Just don't spend the rest of your life in a job you hate, condemning yourself for being put upon. It takes little effort to invoke large changes.
My CS degree didn't even teach any specific languages. Pretty much every course used a different language. I'll date myself here but I used PL/1, Pascal, Modula 2, C, Scheme, assembly, and maybe a couple of others. None were the explicit focus of the class. The programming language was incidental, students were expected to learn it on their own. And my first job used none of those languages. My next job didn't either. In fact I've never used any of the languages I used in school on the job.
In the US, at least, outside of Silicon Valley, the type of degree isn't necessarily a barrier.
Some of the best developers, DBAs, system engineers, etc, I've hired had history degrees, math degrees, journalism, EE, etc. The degree itself, for me, is just proof that you finished something important. I care more about what you know, and how well you can learn something new.
I don't think I'm that unique in this respect. The tech shops I've worked in over my career were full of non-CS degreed people. Mostly my experience here, though, is with non tech companies. Things like the IT departments in Healthcare, Travel, Automotive, etc.
At my San Francisco employer, my org has several people without degrees, and one of the best managers in my team has a degree in one of the hard sciences, not CS.
>Don't trust course counselors - or other people in general.
I... think it's not so much a matter of 'trust' as you have to understand what people understand. My understanding is that their job is to help you navigate academia, and I'm sure they are competent at that. I can't imagine how they could be good at figuring out what you want to do. That's hard enough to do yourself.
The other thing about higher education is that it's usually not meant as vocational. Now, I'm in IT too, and for that matter, I didn't go to college, so maybe I don't know anything, but my impression is that a good school is about giving you a common intellectual and cultural background, not about actually teaching you how to do your job.
This is to say, after your undergrad, you should be prepared to learn how to do a job that requires a degree, and how to communicate with others who have gone through the same training.
(Personally, I am a little confused as to just what you learn in an "IT" degree; as far as I can tell, they don't give you much math, and on a personal level, the only people I've worked with who had 'IT' type degrees were management.)
Here in Australia, most people just think "literally anything to do with computers = IT".
Stateside too. I used to get asked to fix printers by friends and associates and in general get treated like a help desk by people all the time because all they know is "Dave works with computers" even when I started working directly with managing software development teams later in my career.
Heck, about 16 years ago when I was working the help desk in a call center I had someone ask me "Hey IT Guy why isn't the water fountain working?" as I was walking out the door. I asked her to wait a moment, poked my head into the office of the facilities maintenance manager and asked him if he could help out.
For some reason that last bit was especially insulting, both being called "IT Guy" instead of being greeted at bare minimum by name, and for the assumption that I somehow knew how water fountains work. I was a frustrated and angry young man then, heh.
Feels good nowadays when people ask what I do "Security and Compliance". I don't get asked to fix printers anymore.
Also, the borders between the higher levels of IT, what we call Systems Administration, and programming are somewhat porous. I've worked as a programmer before, and I've never worked anywhere (as a sysadmin) where they would hire a SysAdmin who didn't have basic programming skills.
Especially as I think many dev jobs will disappear.
More free, open source platforms that are powerful and free but just need some configuration, customization and support.
Developing getting simpler to becoming just config anyway. We're already seeing this, you dont need to know anything about pointers any more, just hooking up libraries.
At the risk of sounding utterly foolish in the future, I would say that there will always be jobs for the creative developer. The one thing that has made Software Engineering stand out from other professions is just how SE is essential/Integrated in fields outside of its immediate application. What I mean is: devs are required in Oil and Gas, Academia, Education, Manufacturing etc. apart from the regular jobs in the Computer world (i.e. Software-only companies like MS, Google).
IT support will ALWAYS be required though. Unless we build some kind of AI that can diagnose issues like humans do... after which they will all become obsolete. But I don't see that happening in the next 50 years.
I was amazed to find out last year that both my mom and dad both have a solid understanding of SQL queries - one is a nurse and the other is an insurance adjuster.
> Or do Hospital and Insurance enterprise systems allow them to run raw SQL on their DBs?
There's no good reason not to, since if your security and auditing systems are correctly implemented, limited-permission DB users doing direct SQL have the same security and accountability as someone using a specialized app.
The languages move on but so do the expectations. Until we have star trek style computers there will always be more to it than just hooking up some libraries
In a way we already have Star Trek-style computers today. Many of the commands heard in Next Generation era series can be represented as SQL SELECT commands. The voice recognition is an only slightly more sophisticated Siri / Ok Google / Alexa.
The fact that I can get a basic web app up in an hour rather than days does not mean that I only work an hour per week, it means that I can spend my time building much more complex applications.
That frees up the developer to work on projects that would have been infeasible a couple decades ago. To put it another way, has the growth of high level languages like Python led to more jobs or fewer? I strongly suspect the answer is more.
I got started at Google years ago in the IT support department. I was an atypical case because I have a CS degree from an prestigious university, but at the time, I was caught in the fallout of the dot-com bust, so I needed any job I could get.
I eventually interviewed successfully to become a SWE, but my experiences working with the broader swath of people (not just CS/CE grads from elite programs) in IT really opened my perspective on technology, products, and the diverse set of people and talents it takes to make an organization function.
I have no connection to this certificate effort (I moved into development eons ago), but I think that the opportunity for exposure to a technology profession that this program offers could be the foot in the door for a lot of people, regardless of their background.
It's hard to find anything about working at Google that isn't geared towards SWE. What job title(s) would someone working for Google in IT support hold? Is the interview process as grueling as the SWE positions, or is Google looking for generalists?
In IT, it depends on the level, but early on we look for generalists, and then expect people to specialize over time. The interview process is similar to SWE, but for new grads the technical bar is lower. The title is Corporate Operations Engineer, unless you're in our IT Residency Program, in which case it's IT Resident.
The job title is "Corporate Operations Engineer" [1]. I don't know what the current interview process is, but it's almost certainly quite different than the interview process for Software Engineering. There is probably an emphasis on troubleshooting and support-related skills and abilities.
We’re not located in the valley and our help desk positions are within 10% of that number.
I just shared this course with our support team. They’re great at product support and know it inside and out, but can be lacking on the IT side which is where I generally have to get involved.
No, but Boulder CO is still one of the few cities in the country growing economically(I assume that's where you are from your profile). There are many larger cities in the Midwest declining, and it's here that it's nearly impossible to get a low-paying "entry-level" position without a degree and several years of experience. And they certainly don't pay $50k.
It's not like that everywhere. Yeah if your city is imploding, you're going to struggle to find any job, which is of course one reason why the city is declining and wages are stagnating. But $50k in Boulder isn't $50k in Flint or Gary, so comparing salaries like that is kind of ridiculous.
More than half a decade ago I was hired out of an internship at a fairly average company doing fairly average work in a mid-sized Midwestern city making $51k/yr. I was 23 and the internship was the only IT experience I had.
So take an anecdote as an anecdote... it's not always true across the board.
I understand the sentiment you're going for, but Gary has a commuter train that goes to downtown Chicago in less than an hour. With free (working) wifi. I've known some guys that have worked in high paying IT jobs in Chicago while renting a house on the beach in the part of Gary that is surrounded by National Park Service land (Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore). Rent and a monthly train pass was around $500 per person. They rarely locked their doors and one of the guys got his car broken into once in the 3 years they did it, which would probably be considered decent in SF. Their typical weekend involved dragging a cooler full of beer and a volleyball net onto the sand.
You can still get a good software engineer salary in the midwest. In Indy we have at least 4-5 places that will pay you 140k+, the place I'm at will pay 180k for someone that has proven their worth. That is a lot of money in Indiana.
In Germany, this is called "Fachinformatiker für Systemintegration" and is an official professional apprenticeship for which you do not pay money, but GET PAID as you are spending 30% of your time in school and 70% applying your knowledge in a company. If you have 4.5 years of experience on-the-job in IT you can just apply for the final exams without going to school.
According to Google translate, that is a "Systems Integration Specialist". I really like it: it's more descriptive of your actual job than "Information Technologist".
But then you have a Google degree and not one certified by the government. Google is reputable now but I wouldn't be so sure if the Google degree is worth much in 20 years.
This is a certificate, not a degree, which is a fairly important distinction. The goal is to teach a set of technical skills that allow you to get a specific job. In 20 years, your experience will count much more than either a degree or certificate.
Your experience will count much more than a degree or certificate in far fewer than 20 years. It's probably more in the 2-5 year range, depending on your degree and experience.
Disclosure: I am one of the instructors for this course and went through Google's IT Residency Program.
It's unfortunate that the company's external support has such a bad reputation. But our internal support team is actually highly regarded and loved by employees. The training here is very much based on the training we provide to our internal hires.
Between very-very large scale integration, walled-garden consumer devices, and the everyday nature of distributed computing, IT is a dead man walking.
When each compute node becomes essentially a disposable quantity, what does that do to the value of the people who service them?
People will say "What about networking?", as though locality makes a difference here. I've seen so many local network deployments where a guy in India configures the switch and firewall, then mails them over here and pays a local guy who is practically illiterate $75 for half a day's work to mount and plug everything in. They may have to go back-and-forth for several attempts since local guy is a hot mess. Even so, at $75 a pop the economics still work out.
I've seen that at big brand name. The network was dead multiple times every week for entire hours. It's so terrible.
There would be a dozen contractors in the room. They discuss who works on what in the morning, then the network is down and noone can do anything for half the day.
The arrogance here is appalling. "Here is a new cert that nobody in the industry is familiar with, but it will qualify you for an entry-level role pretty much anywhere, because we're Google and we said so."
We'll have to see if they start hiring their helpdesk/techstop from this programme. If they hire from this programme, then i think it should be a good sign of trustworthiness.
For our IT Residency Program, we don't require it, but if you have a CS background, you might get asked about it. Maybe automate a simple task and maybe some discussion on optimization. The interviews tend to be customized to the candidate's background. We hire a decent number of people from non traditional degrees into our IT program, so we care more about you being teachable, knowing at least one technology well and having passion for tech and customer service in general.
Google hires a lot of techstop people and they're very good. It doesn't seem arrogant to think they know what this kind of job requires when it's based on actual experience.
Reputable in the field of doing IT in a Windows-dominated business world? Or just reputable as a company in general?
I think Coca-cola is a reputable company (probably, I'm sure someone knows some dark secret I haven't read about), but I wouldn't assume a Cisco networking certification from them is reputable.
Both. And if Coca-cola funded a networking cert, I'd consider it reputable too. It be a Cisco cert wouldn't make sense though, then it would be banking on Cisco's reputation.
For better or for worse, there's a limited subset of certification vendors that are considered reputable by most hiring managers. Most of their certifications consist entirely of alphabet soup and are recognized nationwide if not globally. (Unfortunately this does lead to some unfortunate mishaps, like OSCP being overlooked in favor of garbage like CEH).
When someone comes along with an official "I can MongoDB certified architect" certificate issued by Mongo themselves, it's a good talking point during an interview, but we don't consider it a credential in itself.
There's no way to vet every arbitrary corporate certificate that comes through the door; we don't know if it's the result of a rigorous apprenticeship, 1000-question exam, a practical and 10 years of industry experience or a couple YouTube videos and a questionnaire. We don't know if the standards changed with management; what used to be impossible to attain is now printed like money. We don't know if the way Coca-cola teaches students to do things complies with best practices or industry standards, or just with Coca-cola's vision for how things should be done (which is absolutely what I'd expect from an entity like Google, who has demonstrated this in other avenues of influence).
Equifax could have printed certifications. Until recently, they were a reputable name. Would you trust an information security certificate issued by them now?
There is no accountability with corporate certifications. You're advocating faith-based hiring by trading on name alone.
Ultimately, hiring managers in aggregate decide which certificates are good. I can honestly say most of the time if someone has very many certificates listed on their resume their odds of making it through our hiring process are pretty low (information security consulting). There are only a couple of certificates that come to mind that are interesting. OSCP is one. The upper level Cisco certificates are well regarded. If I see a new certificate on someone's resume I look it up.
Everyone familiar with Cisco's certificates knows the CCIE is really hard to get because you have to actually demonstrate competence at fixing broken networking in a complex environment. Which leads to an interesting point. It is effectively a work product assessment. If someone can get a CCIE they can probably wrangle your network architecture too. It is similar to how we hire folks. OSCP is similar in that there is a practical part to their certifications. You have to demonstrate actual competence to get one of their various certs.
Contrast to CEH/CISSP you just multiple choice a bunch of facts. Literally, almost anyone, could sit down and cram for 4-6 weeks and get a CISSP. Even people that don't know much about how technology and computing works. Tests like the Bar exam also go far beyond multiple choice, having essay components and very complex questions in most cases.
I think it boils down to a simple thing: do enough people who know about the certificate and how difficult it is to acquire say it is actually difficult and or practical in a meaningful way. Equifax could have crafted such a certificate and it certainly would have been a blow to certificate holders if it was a good certificate with a convincing practical setup like OSCP or CCIE. The rough heuristic I always hear is what you said "Certs are garbage" -- someone else will pipe up, well I guess OSCP is alright, etc.
Is this similar to other courses but just branded as Google or is there Google specific knowledge? Do you get a chance to work for Google after taking this course?
This certificate is geared towards CS, Mathematics, or Engineering students or enthusiasts or self taught programmers and engineers.
The job: Application Support Analyst, IT Analyst, Tech Support Analyst... You'll find the job descriptions on Indeed.com..... If you are currently an "IT major" you may learn some of this material as part of your major coursework. Otherwise, calling it "IT Support" would be very misleading for someone like me who has done Help Desk/Desktop/ Networking/System Administration/ Networking security for the past 13 years with MCSE, COMPTIA, and Cisco certifications and I'm giving someone advice as for as which path to follow.
Now with that said, a "job" consisting of these skillsets is more of a TIER III/IV in IT Support, but can serve as entry level experience for DevOps for CS or engineering functionaries (CS grads and self taught).Especially someone like me who already has technical IT experience and it is a requirement that I am versed in at least one scripting language and some automation scripts and tools.
My advice....this certificate was formulated as a gateway to DevOps, technical support, not "IT Support," in the traditional sense. You won't receive calls about not being able to retrieve emails, paystubs, lost files, identity management and access. However, if an internal company app or the companies software product is buggy, that's where you start. "Back-end IT Support" would be more accurate.
It would be nice if Google can have a real customer support of its own first where you can reach a human at the end. I have been trying to get help on Google Voice issues that I have been having for months now, and the only help I have available is community driven "Google Support" forums.
If you have a business account with them you get a rep that you can actually speak to, just fyi, google has been improving business support vastly over the last few years. Everyone else though is relegated to those ms-support-esque forums.
Glad this is a thing. Waiting to see feedback, might dabble a little. But I have family who would be open to just about any suggestion (midwest+sw US). Lots of tight knit support groups that prevent the younger ones from relocating unless they have a handful of siblings or similar. They're bored out of their minds and without hope in some cases. I tried to get my brother into A+ type material as a way out of warehouse-type jobs, being that computers are how I made it anywhere. I understand those don't sound like great employees, but on the contrary, if it's a legitimately good option it could do wonders for their morale and they'd be loyal. So kudos to Google for getting started with this.
We based this on our internal training for our IT hires based on the gaps we found when we onboarded people over the last 7 years. We invested a lot in making the material practical and lab driven vs just rote memorization.
I am currently taking the course and I can tell you that for 50.00 it is well worth it. I have been in IT Support for 20+ years and can tell you that it is constantly changing and although I have a degree I did not learn the majority of the knowledge I have from college. We have had interns and hires that have certifications out the wazoo and 4-year degrees but do not know how to change a toner cartridge or could not describe how DNS and the internet works. I was super excited when the course went over DNS. Before I started this course about 3 weeks ago I was showing an employee how DNS works for an issue he ran into. I also like how the course went over Linux and windows, mac, etc. The course was not one sided like a lot, of courses, focusing specifically on the vendor. I also like how they have labs that have interaction. Any good training should have actual labs with hands-on experience. I personally think we have too many people that memorize brain dumps to pass but could not do the hands-on work. I did not run into a formatting issue with the things not matching up on the labs so I cannot attest to that. I do remember that they specifically say please take this on a desktop or laptop. It said something about not taking them on mobile devices or tablets. I also saw that sometimes when you put in an answer that if you left a hyphenated word out or only put the first part of the word it would now except the answer. That being said you can review the material as many times as you want and you can also retake the quizzes and assignments so there should be no reason for you to not pass unless you're just lazy. That being said, the course does not go over everything and nor should it. It is an entry-level course for 50.00 that you can do on your on time to further your education and career. Back in the day, CompTIA used to cost 50.00 but now it is 410.00. Most of the vendors have gouged on pricing in the last 20-30 years. Hats off to Google for trying to make a difference and not trying to charge people a gazillion dollars for it.
I just wanted to say thank you, as a senior sysadmin this looks like a really good course to uptrain t1/2's with, and it does seem to be more concise and relevant than other similar courses.
I rip on google a lot, but I can appreciate good work when I see it.
A+ covers IT support and touches a tiny bit on networking, Windows admin, and basic hardware.
This course seems to be pretty comparable, but it also covers writing Ruby code, managing Chef, and using Git.
Of course another big difference is this course teaches you exactly what you need to know, while CompTIA leaves it to third-parties to write the training materials independently from the courses, so you're reading a 500 page book for a 100 question exam.
I signed up for this course even though after a brief look it looks like more of an entry-level course than a full-blown IT specialist course (which is understanding considering the course delivery being web-based).
I've been writing code for over 15 years and have seen more than enough opportunity to expand my business into the IT side of things, a lot more than contract coding anyway.
I've let these opportunities go by as I don't have any real qualifications although I reckon I could cobble enough together with my experience to get by.
That being said, if I get a cert' from this it might be the confidence to push my business further if nothing else.
Unless they've figured out a way to attach a DRM policy to the knowledge you learn from taking a course, I don't think it's possible for them to leave anyone high and dry.
"Hey Doug, Got a minute? So the university where you learned Computer Science, well we just found out they recently closed their doors. Since they are no longer an accredited institution, nor do they even exist, we're going to have to let you go."
Google just sponsored Web app developer and Android developer nanodegrees to thousands of people. https://www.udacity.com/google-scholarships
I guess they are giving big players like udacity and coursera even support.
Glad to see the partnership with Coursera for it. Althought MOOCs haven't changed the world in the way they were hyped, I still think they have incredible promise for stuff like this or for stuff like Udacity's training of new frameworks like React or working with Android.
I'm not truly sold on the merit of this program or that it will lead directly to a high paying job. I do know that there are very few employers who will consider this cert as a negative. At $50/month it could provide some with that first step to something more.
Does anyone remember the movie "The Internship", in which all of interns were IT Support? It's really funny that that they portrayed them as IT Support.
Will Google also partner, like Apple, with some of the community colleges in the US to deliver the training to populations that might need the additional help?
I'm not convinced that there is demand for a large number of IT Support Professionals, or if there is, there's not enough of a demand for employers to hire outside of the few tech hubs of the country. I've held A+, Network+, Project+, Security+, and CCNA certifications for a while now in the third largest city in Missouri, yet the only positions that have been available to me have been low-wage temporary contract jobs.
You can't really offshore swapping out a defective network cable or replacing a hard drive. I haven't looked at how they define an "IT Support Professional" but I'm assuming it's not just answering a phone and following a decision tree and saying "I'm very sorry to hear that you are still experiencing a problem" before each step. Anyone can do that with almost no training.
Of course you can, enterprises are already starting to push "bring your own device". Even if you don't do that, you can still move to the thin client model where hardware failure just means asking the office manager to swap your device with a new one from the cupboard.
BYOD doesn't do away with the problem because the users don't know how to fix them themselves, so they'll still need someone, even if it's a tech at the mall rather than in their office.
office workers still have computing devices on their desks, keyboards monitors, mice, printers, label printers, scanners, voip phones, switches, routers, access points, sip callboxes on the doors, projectors, access control systems, etc.
maybe the office will finally go paperless this decade, and a couple of those will go away. they'll just be some new IoT fuckery to contend with.
An office of freelancers with their own laptops using GMail, deploying an app to GKE, writing Google Docs, etc needs a barista before they need an IT Support person, and Google perfectly well knows this, because this is the world they are striving to create!
Or Azure or AWS I just mention Google stuff because this is their thing
I thought I just read about layoffs in all the big support centers in India? Are those similar jobs? Where is IBM, DXC et. al. sending the jobs or is that all just unrelated or my bad memory?
For some reason I thought the general trend lately was many Western countries were bringing support jobs back to their own countries.
IMO the reduction of workforce IT / Software related field is worldwide. Now place I work is hiring whole bunch of people but just on basis of that I wouldn't say in general is industry is creating whole lot of jobs.
I think going forward the hiring would be at best replacing people who joined in 80s in case those jobs are not totally automated away.
FTA: "In the United States alone, there are currently 150,000 open IT support jobs"
This program was literally started so Google could provide tech support to its employees. A highly technical group with access to a leading public cloud. None of that does away with the need to provide IT support.
That is a ludicrously high number. Are there entire companies, entire offices, staring out of the window waiting for someone to do some IT? Or are they managing and sure an IT guy/gal would be nice to have, but no big deal to do without?
I think number looks okay in terms of posting. One thing people wrongly assume that companies putting these openings do actually want to fill them all or even any significant number.
They're both pretty much exams. The 'MCSE' or any other certification from Microsoft would be worth more and probably be cheaper than udacity. If your goal to have something to show to a potential employer, MCSE will hold alot more weight.
Udacity degrees, certifications or whatever they're called are GEDs of certifications and should be treated as such.
If you want an actual job where you will be respected at, don't go to udacity.
MCSE certs prepare you for a vastly different job than IT Support. Think CompTIA A+. IT Support and systems administration are different jobs and different certifications help out in different ways.
When I got my CompTIA Security+ in college, I got asked by interviewers why I got that and not the CISSP. The answer is, while the CISSP is a far more respected certification, the requirements and entry price are also far different. The CISSP is not an entry-level certification, it actually mandates a certain number of years in the industry.
MTA is entry-level. MCSA is entry level. MCSE is for established professionals, it is an expert-level certification, so of course it's more respected. The people taking it are already well-respected experts themselves.
The MTA is the Microsoft certification that's most comparable to this. Not MCSE.
Half the folks don't have a knack for methodical troubleshooting. Doesn't matter whether they are certified, experienced, or not. Some folks don't have the common sense to simply tell someone, "I'll find out later" AND put forth the effort in finding the answer themselves.
I mentioned the CISSP which has a similar problem... the requirements are X number of years in the security industry but 90% of the people I know with a CISSP are project managers.
The problem is boot camps. When you can pay $5k and have the answers drilled into your head for a week, of course anyone can pass.
Problem is you can't gain the experience without a CISSP, for the most part. You have to get lucky that you're either promoted or transferred to a security position. That needs to change at the entry level, so these folks can get the relavent experience. Then apply to take the ISC2 or CISSP....One does not necessarily have to obtain an MSCA or MCSE just to get a foot in the door. You are not applying for a sysadmin gig when starting out. At this point, A+, Net+, and ITIL are seen as the gatekeepers.
