CompTIA Blog

The CompTIA IT Services and Support Community set out to explore the future of IT Service Delivery over the next three to five years as one of its 2014 initiatives. The first step in this expedition is a recently completed survey of IT service professionals. IT services of the future will seek to continue to delight customers by addressing their needs in a complex and changing IT landscape (91 percent of respondents classified addressing customer needs and challenges as a “must have”).

It is becoming apparent that the new trends in IT are leading to a completely new approach for businesses. In the case of mobility, having a wide range of options for front-end devices is changing the mindset around device management and workflow structure. Smartphones and tablets are transforming the device landscape and driving much of the initial discussion around enterprise mobility. Meanwhile, PCs remain viable options along with smartphones and tablets, and companies must decide how to handle all three.

CertMaster, a comprehensive new neuroscience-based learning tool from CompTIA, has already garnered fans in the IT community, like 43-year-old Sean Byrne, a warehouse and office manager from Ireland. “Once I start the tutorials, I find it hard to stop,” he said. The adaptive training program, designed to help people start or advance their IT careers, was built on research from neurobiology, cognitive psychology and game studies.

As Gen-Y infiltrates the IT channel more and more, CompTIA examines its characteristics and potential.

The world of business revolves around financial numbers and terms, and learning to understand and interpret them will keep you ahead of the game. Success, for example, is measured on a balance sheet, a profit and loss statement, year-over-year growth, ROI and a host of other terms. It’s imperative you build a functional knowledge of finance and, more importantly, learn to tell the story of your contributions, build business models, and track and report results through numbers.

Marketing yourself can be a challenge, but you do have tools available at your fingertips. Through your online presence, your resume and interview, present yourself as competent and capable. You’re convincing a company that they need you, so tailor everything for the job that you’re applying for. Find ways to connect your credentials to the job at hand and weave in your core competencies and past achievements to suit the new job.

Looking for your next career opportunity can be a full-time job. What if you had multiple people making referrals to you, or referring you to companies that are hiring and helping to get your resume in front of the right contacts? Networking is your best strategy for accelerating your search. Networking is like sales: It’s a numbers game. The more people you talk to, the sooner you get to the people who can help you.

IT recruiting is very specific, and recruiters are looking for candidates with skill sets that are specific to their hiring manager’s needs. A well-formatted, easy-to-read resume is critical to attract and grab the reader’s attention and make the reader want to get into the details of your experience. In this article, Patricia Martin, Business Development Manager, walks through her recommendations to get your resume not just scanned, but noticed.

Contracting is a great place to gain and build your resume. Many businesses will pass you over for other technicians if your experience is light, so consider getting some extra work on your resume by working the contracting game. You have two options: independent contracting and becoming an employee of a contracting company. They are in some ways similar, but have big differences when it comes to tax filing, employment insurance and work guarantees.

This guest blog entry was written by Lester Keizer, CEO of Business Continuity Technologies. Business Continuity Solutions has been in business for over 30 years. We’re one of the oldest technology companies in the Las Vegas area. Over the decades we’ve morphed from a regular technology product sales company to a company selling enterprise-level products to a firm that does strictly managed services in its purest form. The last six months has really been great for our company. We see ...

Remote monitoring and management tools have been available to channel companies for quite some time. Just last week, a friend of mine sent me a link to the first article I ever wrote on managed services — from almost a decade ago — to congratulate me on 10 years of covering this industry-changing topic. Though it was just a brief mention from the former Gartner System Builders’ Summit and VARVision show, the Business Solutions magazine piece reminded me just how much the channe ...

Accelerated learning is the hallmark of Firebrand Training, a UK-based global learning center that promises fast, quality results. There, IT instructor Gary Fildes has undertaken some experiments that move the curriculum along faster and take his UK apprentice students from IT zeroes to IT heroes.

Catch a ride this summer on Harper College’s new innovation: a charter bus turned computer classroom.

This addition to the CompTIA blog is part of a guest series celebrating Small Business Week. IT companies today operate in an environment that’s both exciting and challenging. The persistent evolution of technology — cloud computing, mobility, unified communications, cybersecurity and virtualization, for example — make technology solutions more accessible and affordable than ever before.  The willingness of businesses and consumers to embrace these innovations has created ...

The dilemma: Companies have job openings or want to hire in order to expand, but are fearful of a slowdown in new business orders. This scenario has been the default for companies across the IT channel during the past few years of economic uncertainty. New research from CompTIA suggests we may have finally reached a point of sustained stability. According to CompTIA’s recent Q2 IT Industry Business Confidence Index, executives feel more positive about the overall economy and growth prosp ...