CompTIA A+ certification Designations Comparison with other industries
CompTIA A+ certification designations for IT professionals working in Cisco or Microsoft or IBM or other technology environments are relatively new when compared to other industries. For every IT professional in 2004 just gaining her CompTIA A+ certification for the first time or the guy who upgrades his CompTIA A+ certification credentials in order to deal with a newly installed corporate email service, there will be nearly 90 years of industry credentialing occurring in the financial services fields.
What Is The History Of IT Industry's CompTIA A+ certification Designations?
CompTIA A+ certification boot camp training and CompTIA A+ certification online course offerings mark the IT industry as a relative "newcomer" to the professional services industries, beginning effectively a mere 20 years ago during the 1980s in terms of the breakaway from single resource mainframe/dummy terminal environments to the current multi-level interconnected virtual environments of modern exchange listed corporations through to sole proprietorships seeking operational controls and efficiencies.
CompTIA A+ certification test sponsorship by Novell in the 1980's tipped the IT market towards a process of re-education and a commitment towards related CompTIA A+ certification training and testing that would define the market in terms of corporate expectations. Novell became the IT industry's initial stab at establishing CompTIA A+ certification training and performance designations by way of the Novell Certified Netware Engineer program or CNE. Arguably, Novell's CompTIA A+ certification course was a quite normal effort to build and protect a new market by educating re-sellers as well as end users in the technical and operating requirements to best exploit Novell's product capabilities, accordingly requiring a particular level of Novell a +certification as evidence of qualification to work as a CNE.
Similarly, CompTIA A+ certification course offerings were made by the colleges and universities, which immediately responded to the market trend triggered by Novell with its first CNE CompTIA A+ certification training course. Although Novell's marketing and training personnel may not have realized that they were creating a breakthrough step in an IT credentialing, the resulting emergence of over 1000 CompTIA A+ certification designations offered by over 120 IT sponsor vendors has created a revolution in the market. Universities and technical institutions as well as their commercial counterparts can now direct incoming IT candidates as well as market-experienced IT professionals to a wide selection of IT designations, CompTIA A+ certification training and information resources, and career paths reflecting sequential accumulation of technical skills supported by associated test performances.
In the IT field, the range and breadth of CompTIA A+ certification exam and training options reflected quite different market needs, namely the delivery of solutions to business problems rather than the creation of "standards". Within the IT field, companies and their management didn't have time to create job definitions and standards, since the technologies were changing so rapidly that "yesterday's need" had little connection to "tomorrow's problem". CompTIA A+ certification course instruction was management's technique to "bridge" that technology gap. IT hardware and software applications vendors were moving the market forward so quickly, companies were radically transforming from paper based management models to "virtual" organizations in terms of the underlying business processes, that their respective IT personnel simply had no choice but to rapidly and constructively upgrade their CompTIA A+ certification credentials simply to address the changing technology environment.
Notwithstanding "market forces", organizations such as CompTIA (with over 12,000 member organizations) developed the CompTIA A+ certification standards along with the National Skill Standards Board and related organizations which together establish more clear and formal job role definitions. The industry objective is to promote vendor-neutral CompTIA A+ certification standards. To the extent that specific and competing vendor "brand" certifications are considered redundant, then CompTIA A+ certification designations may soon move away from sponsor firm "brand" references towards a more standardized job role classification, which will over time gain greater support from government, the market place, and academia, e.g. in other words, a Novell system engineer certifications will be viewed not different but the same as a Microsoft system engineer certification.
In non-IT service markets such as tax and accounting, government and the marketplace sought to establish clear standards for the treatment of financial records related to tax, estate, valuation of market investments, and so on. CPA designations were conferred only to candidates who had generally received undergraduate college education in finance and accounting, and then had successfully completed the state licensing exam, thus evidencing the increased centralization of the industry around agreed to codes and standards. Due to the maturity of the CPCompTIA A+ certification market - nationally and at the state level - CPA certified and licensed persons need also commit to annual seminar and reeducation programs in order to maintain knowledge of changes in the state or federal tax code. In a similar manner, the automotive industry has gradually taken the credentialing of auto mechanics from a backyard "tinkerer" to the 1970s initiated Automotive Service Excellence credential or ASE designation which consumers can rely upon as evidence of necessary training.
One critical distinguishing feature between automotive and financial service practitioners versus IT professionals is that the car and tax guys created credentials in response to a market need for "standards".
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