A service offered by some training providers is job placement assistance. This is designed to steer you into your first IT role. Having said that, occasionally too much is made of this feature, as it is actually not that hard for well qualified and focused men and women to find a job in the IT environment - because there's a great need for qualified personnel.

Bring your CV up to date as soon as possible however (advice can be sought on this via your provider). Don't delay till you've finished your exams. Various junior support jobs have been offered to people who are in the process of training and haven't even passed a single exam yet. This will at the very least get you into the 'maybe' pile of CV's - rather than the 'No' pile. The most reliable organisations to help you find a job are most often local IT focused employment agencies. Because they get paid commission to place you, they'll work that much harder to get a result.

To bottom line it, if you put the same amount of effort into securing your first job as into studying, you won't have any problems. A number of students inexplicably spend hundreds of hours on their training and studies and then call a halt once certified and would appear to think that businesses will just discover them.

The old fashioned style of teaching, using textbooks and whiteboards, is often a huge slog for most of us. If you're nodding as you read this, look for learning programmes which have a majority of interactive, multimedia parts. Where we can utilise all of our senses into our learning, then the results are usually dramatically better.

Find a course where you're provided with an array of CD or DVD ROM's - you'll begin by watching videos of instructors demonstrating the skills, followed by the chance to practice your skills in interactive lab's. It would be silly not to view examples of the courseware provided before you make your decision. The minimum you should expect would be instructor-led video demonstrations and interactive audio-visual sections with practice modules.

Avoiding training that is delivered purely online is generally a good idea. Always choose CD or DVD based study materials where possible, as you need to be able to use them whenever it's convenient for you - and not be totally reliant on your broadband being 'up' 100 percent of the time.

'Microsoft' own 'Visual Studio', - the foremost 'Windows' software development environment. They offer a number of languages, with 'C#.Net' and 'VB.Net' (Visual Basic) being the most commonly used. They're covered under the Programming pages on this website. The most commonly recognised accreditations are the Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist and the 'Microsoft Certified Professional Developer'.

Certainly one of Microsoft's great strengths throughout the last couple of decades has been their thrust towards more advanced certification, causing many other corporations to comply and increase their game. So much so that the whole I.T. world and especially senior managers view more advanced MS qualifications with huge respect.

Each programme of learning must provide a nationally (or globally) recognised exam as an end-goal - not some little 'in-house' piece of paper. You'll discover that only industry recognised accreditation from the top companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Adobe and CompTIA will have any meaning to employers.

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