There are four specialised areas of training in the full CompTIA A+ syllabus, of which 2 passes are needed for your A+ qualification. However restricting yourself to two of the four specialities is likely to leave your knowledge base somewhat light. At least learn about all four - employers will notice the difference.

As well as learning how to build PC’s and fix them, students of A+ will learn how to operate in antistatic conditions, how to fault find, to diagnose and to remotely access problems.

If you would like to be the person who works in a multi-faceted environment - fixing and supporting networks, build on A+ with Network+, or consider the Microsoft networking route (MCSA - MCSE) as you’ll need a deeper understanding of how networks work.

Many trainers have a handy Job Placement Assistance program, designed to steer you into your first job. Often, too much is made of this feature, because it is actually not that hard for well qualified and focused men and women to find a job in the IT industry - as employers are keen to find appropriately trained staff.

Help with your CV and interview techniques is sometimes offered (if not, see one of our sites for help). Make sure you bring your CV right up to date right away - don’t leave it till you pass the exams!

A good number of junior support jobs have been offered to people who’re still on their course and haven’t got any qualifications yet. This will at least get you into the ‘maybe’ pile of CV’s - rather than the ‘No’ pile.

If you’d like to keep travelling time and costs to a minimum, then you may well find that a local (but specialised) recruitment consultancy may be more appropriate than a centralised service, for they’re far more likely to be familiar with local employment needs.

Just ensure you don’t put hundreds of hours of effort into your studies, and then just stop and leave it up to everyone else to secure your first position. Stop procrastinating and get on with the job. Channel the same focus into finding your first job as you did to gain the skills.

Beware of putting too much emphasis, as many people do, on the certification itself. Training for training’s sake is generally pointless; you’re training to become commercially employable. You need to remain focused on where you want to go.

You may train for one year and then end up doing the job for 20 years. Avoid the mistake of finding what seems like a very ‘interesting’ program only to spend 20 years doing a job you hate!

Stay focused on where you want to go, and then build your training requirements around that - not the other way round. Keep your eyes on your goals and ensure that you’re training for something you’ll still be enjoying many years from now.

Take advice from an experienced advisor, even if you have to pay a small fee - as it’s a lot cheaper and safer to find out at the start if you’ve chosen correctly, rather than find out after several years of study that the job you’ve chosen is not for you and have to return to the start of another program.

One area often overlooked by those weighing up a particular programme is the concept of ‘training segmentation’. Basically, this means how the program is broken down into parts for drop-shipping to you, which makes a huge difference to the point you end up at.

Usually, you’ll join a programme staged over 2 or 3 years and receive a module at a time. This sounds logical on one level, until you consider this:

Maybe the order of study insisted on by the company won’t suit you. It may be difficult to get through every element inside of their particular timetable?

For future safety and flexibility, many trainees now want to insist that all study materials are delivered immediately, and not in stages. That means it’s down to you in what order and how fast or slow you’d like to work.

People attracted to this sort of work can be very practical by nature, and won’t enjoy sitting at a desk in class, and endless reading of dry academic textbooks. If this is putting you off studying, opt for more involving, interactive learning materials, where learning is video-based.

Research has always verified that becoming involved with our studies, to utilise all our senses, is proven to produce longer-lasting and deeper memory retention.

Interactive full motion video involving demonstration and virtual lab’s will beat books every time. And you’ll find them fun and interesting.

It would be silly not to view a small selection of training examples before you purchase a course. You should expect video tutorials, instructor demo’s and audio-visual elements backed up by interactive lab’s.

Some companies only have access to training that is purely available online; sometimes you can get away with this - but, consider how you’ll deal with it if your access to the internet is broken or you get intermittent problems and speed issues. It is usually safer to have actual CD or DVD ROMs that removes the issue entirely.

(C) 2009 S. Edwards. Browse around CareerRetrainingCourses.co.uk/ucareco.html or Website Design Course.