ISC2: Don't Be Held in Check by Cert Exam Anxiety
It's natural to be afraid when staring down the barrel of an IT certification exam, especially if you haven't taken very many (or any) IT certification exams before. As with any formal exam, you can't be certain of passing no matter how much time you may have spent studying and preparing. A new post to official blog of cybersecurity professional association ISC2 says that exam candidates shouldn't let fear hold them back. On the contrary, the ISC2 blog squad suggests that exam candidates can benefit from embracing their fears. The blog post argues that fear can be a catalyst, and offers three suggestions for ways that exam candidates can battle back. For example, sharing fears with mentors and/or professional peers can help by establishing solidarity with others who have faced their fears. Lean into those anxieties, test takers!
Does CompTIA Security+ Still Have IT (So to Speak)?
When sports commentators talk about veteran athletes and whether they will continue to excel in coming seasons, the discussion is often framed in terms of whether this basketball player or that soccer star still has "it." Is the sum of their gifts, in other words, equal to the task of leading teammates to victory one more time? IT certifications don't get old and physically lose their edge, but a lot of certifications can quickly age beyond relevance if the organization that maintains a given credential never updates the content of the exams for that credential. Hence, there are often discussions in IT circles of whether this or that certification is still relevant/worth it/valuable. A new post to the official blog of tech industry association and global IT certification leader CompTIA questions whether Security+ is "worth it in 2024." Security+ has been a leading cybersecurity certification for decades, and is overhauled every three years (the newest exam is due in November), so ... well, let's just say that a Magic 8 ball would almost certainly opine that "Signs point to yes."
Cisco Offers Free Training for White Hat Hackers
It's Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and we want to do our part to help you be aware of cybersecurity study and training opportunities. There's a good one available from Cisco Networking Academy, per a new post this week to the Cisco Learning blog. Cisco Networking Academy has launched a new in-depth course that covers ethical hacking. Ethical hacking often attracts interest from starry-eyed youth who are drawn to the boundary-crossing, taboo-busting "hacker" label, but the profession has plenty of room for anyone interested in the "breaking and entering" — on the up-and-up, of course — aspect of cyber wizardry. Cisco's new interactive, self-paced course has a 70-hour timeline that includes 34 labs and 86 practice activities. The best part? The Ethical Hacker course is available free of charge!
IBM Offers Free AI Training
Elsewhere on the Price is Right IT Professional Training Tour, you can stop in at IBM Training to feed your brain on generative AI knowledge. IBM is offering a dozen free bite-sized (or should that be "byte-sized"?) training courses covering various aspects of generative AI. You can click here for access to all 12 self-paced courses. Eight of the course are either 30 minutes to an hour in length, three of them are three or four hours in length, and one is "up to" 12 hours in length.
What Are Little IT Certifications Made Of?
In the Broadway sensation Hamilton, Aaron Burr is referring to backroom politicking when he declaims, "No one really knows how the game is played / The art of the trade / How the sausage gets made / We just assume that it happens." That's true of a lot of things in life. We don't really dig down deep into how things happen, so much as we just accept that they do. That's why it's often interesting to take a peek at process. A new article from the October issue of Certification Magazine does just that, peeking beneath the hood of a typical vendor-neutral IT certification. Tech writer Aaron Axline breaks the formula into three distinct phases and discusses what happens at each stage that contributes to the credential that Average Joe and Jane IT professionals encounter when they want to bolster their IT résumé. If you've never seen behind the IT certification curtain before, then it's worth a read.
That's all for this edition of Certification Watch. Please keep your certification news and tips coming to the GoCertify News Editor.
Copyright © 2023 TestOut Corp. Copyright © CompTIA, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Use of this web site constitutes acceptance of the GoCertify Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.