Subtitles of the Movie

Let's talk about the A Plus Certification just in general and kind of get you up to speed in case you don't know this about where it came from, exactly what it is and how it works. First of all this is an industry-wide certification that was put together by a consortium of companies, and I'll talk about those in just a minute. But you need to understand this is vendor neutral. You're not going to see a lot of Unix, Linux type questions here. Ah, it is based on the Microsoft Windows products simply because that's the predominant operating system for most users. Now keep in mind the, the general attitude with A Plus are, is the user side, if you will, the ah the client PC. You will see some other information in there, but for the most part it tends to stay toward the client side. Now, the A Plus certification is administered and put together and so forth by the Comp TIA organization. Now, this is actually a non-profit, industry ah trade association and it's made up of quite a few people out there, for example, Adobe Systems, Novell, CISCO systems, Microsoft, IBM, Toshiba, a lot of different people have a lot of input into what exactly this exam covers and, and how it's tested and so forth, and how it's ah, administered. And I can't remember the exact number of companies, but this is just a very small slice of some of the biggest ones. There's hundreds and hundreds of companies ah who help and ah participate in this. Now, the bottom line with the A Plus certification is it demonstrates a general level of knowledge of the PC. Now if, if you go back to when the PC first hit the workplace back in the late 80s, early 90s, they were buggy, ah, everybody that had one did their own support on it because nobody knew anything about it, and a few nerds ah, kind of picked up on the PCs, started to run with them, and so you always had those one or two people in the office who kind of knew everything. You may find yourself in that position right now. The problem is, is these people didn't have any formal education, it was hard for them to continue their education, and the big thing is, is they didn't get paid for what they were doing. This kind of got lumped onto them along with whatever else they were paid to do. So the bottom line is, is the A Plus certification, when it first came out, was kind of slow to take off but people caught on pretty quickly and realized, Wait a minute. This thing is a great way to know if somebody knows what they're talking about. And notice here on the screen now the test covers the information that a technician with nine months experience should be familiar with. So what the A Plus certification gives you when you go to a potential employer, or you go to your current employer that says, Look, if, if you hire me you're getting somebody with at least nine months workable, usable, factual experience level of, of knowledge. And so this makes it very easy to get into the IT industry. This will open doors because employers can see that A Plus certification and know, Well, at least this, this man or woman passed the exam so they have a certain level of PC knowledge and they're not going to come in here and destroy my company, or destroy my machines. This is by ah, as a matter of information, the most popular IC, IT certification out there, it's the most widely held. Most people start their ah IT career by getting A Plus. So that's just a little bit about certification itself, where it came from, how it's administered, and ah we'll start to get into some more details ah as we go through the course.