Information Day.

Another lazy weekend went past and basically apart from watching TV dramas, playing on the Wii, sitting around and doing nothing, I didn’t really spend the weekend meaningfully. I was supposed to have been doing some revisions for my Security+ exam, but in the end lazy bugs got the better of me. Oh well, I can always do the revisions in school anyway.

I’m sitting inside the function room in college now for the course information day. To be absolutely honest, I’m not due for duty until later in the afternoon, but because my main office is closed for refurnishing for these 2 days, I’ve decided to temporarily make the function room my working place for this period. It’s quite interesting to be sitting here actually, because I see that most people are not exactly interested in a course in Computing! The counters at BizAd and Tourism Studies are filled with people (well at least the chairs there are all occupied) while my department’s counter has not seen a single soul since the day started. Maybe most people are still not keen on a course in IT, even though the dot-com bubble burst had actually happened almost half a decade ago.

That actually sets me to think about myself too. Is a course (or in my case a degree) in IT that entirely useful? Take myself for example – I graduated with an Computing degree, so that means that I’m supposed to be IT-trained. But when I actually am looking at technical things such as network infrastructure building, application development, my education suddenly doesn’t seem to be entirely useful. It’s like, my degree alone doesn’t seem to be able to convince employers that I can do the things that they ask me to do. It’s things like your MCTS, SCJP, CISSP, CCNA that tell the world that you know how to program in C#, you know how to program in Java, you know how to set up a Cisco network, etc etc. It does look weird – it’s like, if you want a career in IT, you do not just need your degree, but also a lot of all these commercial certifications. And given that technology advances ever so quickly, whatever certifications you have now may become obsolete in 3 years’ time (I mean, people are talking about the next version of Windows when Vista is barely out). And when that happens, it’s time to get another certificate. This looks like an endless loop.

Whatever it is, I am still focused on my Security+ – I hope to get it cleared by next week, if not this.

And yes, sitting inside this function room isn’t that bad after all because I do get to see some of the prettier colleagues at the other departments – always a nice thing on a Monday morning!