CompTIA Certification Can Be Transformative

In 1995, I was in my second year of teaching High School English to a group of “alternative” kids at an “alternative” high school. “Alternative” was a nice way of saying “troubled” as these were the kids who had been previously tossed out of their original high schools and were now on a perilous path, which in many cases, led to the street and in some cases to jail.
I loved my job—and more importantly, I loved helping the kids whose only semblance of family was found at our school, but at the end of my second year, I found out that the school district budget had been cut and all non-tenured teachers would be RIF’d. “RIF” was not an acronym I was familiar with, and someone had to tell me what it meant “Reduction in Force.” And so, I would have to start looking at other school districts for work.

At that point, I had to make a really tough decision: either continue in education or jump ship and start fresh in the booming Information Technology industry. After doing some research—and some soul-searching—it was obvious that IT is where I wanted to be. Windows 95 had just been introduced, and the PC-boom was about to explode. I had a natural love of technology, and I was fascinated to find out where a career in IT might take me.

It turned out my first stop was to get trained. Today at New Horizons, we train thousands of students every year that find themselves in a situation very similar to the one I was in over 18 years ago. That’s not surprising—people change careers or start new ones all of the time. What is surprising though is that the first step that many of our students take is the same one that I took in 1996—earning a CompTIA certification.

First established in 1982 as the Association of Better Computer Dealers, CompTIA has provided career-changers and career-enhancers an avenue to learn the fundamental skills necessary to be successful in the IT industry.

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