No.
Ask HN: Do people hire for A+ certification
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Re: Ask HN: Do people hire for A+ certification
#12I got my A+ in ~2000 as part of a job I worked for (doing technical support). At the time, A+ never expired and was considered good for life. It never helped me get a job and no one ever asked me about having it. I did end up going the software route instead of hardware, so that probably played a big part.
As someone already said, it's baseline "I am knowledgeable about IT." If you're just starting out, I would consider getting it. Otherwise, not worth it IMO.
Re: Ask HN: Do people hire for A+ certification
#13I got my first tech support role while studying for my A+. Nice to see someone asking about it on HN, brings back fun memories of cable management and actually building servers.
Re: Ask HN: Do people hire for A+ certification
#14I got my A+ through a vocational program in high school. When my friends were getting jobs at McDonalds, I worked help desk at the community college and crawled under desks fixing PCs.
The only thing the A+ cert did was get my foot in the door as a kid with no experience. That alone made the cert worthwhile for me. Later in my career, I took it off my resume because I didn't want to do desktop support work anymore and recruiters were stereotyping me based on that cert.
Re: Ask HN: Do people hire for A+ certification
#15Nobody gets employment because of it, but if you dont know what it has to teach you, do it.
Re: Ask HN: Do people hire for A+ certification
#16It’s certainly an advantage for someone looking to get their foot in the door at an entry level help desk or IT tech job. I’d recommend it to students looking for their first tech job, or someone interested in tech who isn’t going to college. You won’t demand high wages with it — probably slightly more than minimum wage - but it’ll help you differentiate yourself from other candidates with zero tech related things on their resume.
Re: Ask HN: Do people hire for A+ certification
#17I got my A, Net, and Security + right after high school and i REALLY helped me to earn a living. Lots of technicians work, cabling, labor setting up servers etc It was a spring board that helped me get into a financial position to go to university where I studied IT. If I hadn’t gone the college route I wanted to do CCNA, and CISP. Certs are absolutely worth it and a pathway forward into a career
This path makes a lot of sense to me - I'm curious though - why do you think more people don't pursue these certs early on in life?
I think it’s hard for people to be self motivating, to commit to studying a book for a test essentially in isolation. At University, you have professors and other people looking over your shoulder and seeing your performance. Harder to slack off I guess.
Re: Ask HN: Do people hire for A+ certification
#18It's geared toward "technician"-type work (read: not "engineering" or any kind of development). If you're looking to work helpdesk, as a sysadmin, or maybe in a datacenter it might be worthwhile if starting out. Personally the only certs that ever seemed worthwhile to me were the redhat ones.
Re: Ask HN: Do people hire for A+ certification
#19Are there an certifications that are valuable from an employment perspective for software engineers?
Re: Ask HN: Do people hire for A+ certification
#20I have no exposure to the A+ program, so apologies if this is obvious.
A friend's kid right out of high school is going through the Google IT certification program (https://grow.google/programs/it-support/).
Do the programs overlap at all? Is the Google program as useful as the A+? Being newer, is the Google program more relevant to the industry now?