On November 30, the CompTIA Volley podcast focused on the new version of CompTIA A+, scheduled for release in January 2019. Senior Director, Industry Analysis, Carolyn April and Senior Director, Technology Analysis, Seth Robinson interviewed Senior Director, Certification Products, Teresa Sears, who oversees CompTIA A+ jobs you can get with a certificate.
CompTIA A+ is designed to build problem solvers for today’s digital world, moving past traditional help desk activities to embrace a wide range of IT functions. The updated entry-level IT certification will launch in January 2019, and in the podcast, Sears describes some of the changes that IT pros can expect to see.
Click below to listen to the podcast, or keep scrolling to read the transcript.
CAROLYN: Hello, everybody. Welcome to the latest edition of Volley. I’m Carolyn April, and, as always, looking for my good friend, Seth Robinson. Seth? You out there
SETH: Hey! How are you?
CAROLYN: Doing pretty well. Cruising into the end of the week here. Had a nice Thanksgiving. Pretty uneventful. Peaceful. Kind of rested and rejuvenated. How about yourself?
SETH: I got through Thanksgiving. It wasn’t peaceful. It wasn’t horrible, but there were some family moments, so that got a little rocky. Yeah. Definitely getting toward the end of this week. I think this week is the hardest week of the year to work. For my money, nothing even comes close. You’ve come out of Thanksgiving. You wanna just get to the next break. And, it’s kind of tough to get things going.
CAROLYN: Yeah. I agree with you. I’m sort of like, “Let’s call it, day after Thanksgiving ’til the end of the year.” But, I guess life doesn’t work that way.
SETH: No, unfortunately not. We should put it in the suggestion box, though. Just shut down the whole rest of the year. Actually, someone was telling me this week that their college break used to start at Thanksgiving, and they thought Northwestern did that, but...
CAROLYN: Well, Northwestern, since I did go there so I know, is on trimesters. So, the year is divided, actually, in four quarters, if you go to school in the summer. So, it’s very different than a two-semester academic year.
You have fall trimester, winter trimester and then a spring trimester. That screws up the whole calendar a bit. You start school later, like the beginning of the year, around the third week of September, is when school starts at Northwestern. Then, it goes later than a typical school. And, the breaks are different. It’s just a funky system.
SETH: Yeah. That’s how Georgia Tech used to be. Then, my last year there, they switched to regular semesters. Even then, we would kind of break for Thanksgiving, come back for two weeks, and then do finals and then have a break. It didn’t just start at Thanksgiving, and you had the whole rest of the year off.
CAROLYN: Yeah. No. Olivia just went back to UVM after Thanksgiving, and it’s two weeks of classes, then a week of finals. So, she’s back for three weeks before she comes home for winter break.
SETH: Oh, well.
CAROLYN: Yeah.
SETH: Well, for this week on Volley, we wanted to talk a little bit about certifications. I’m sure a lot of people that listen to the podcast are aware that CompTIA makes the majority of its revenue through certifications for IT professionals. Certifications that measure skills and help an IT pro start a career or continue in their career and build themselves up.
SETH: Joining us today, we have Teresa Sears. She is the senior director of product development here at CompTIA. Teresa, thanks for joining us.
TERESA: Hi! Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
SETH: Our pleasure. We want to talk a little bit about the upcoming A+, but before we get there, Teresa, I thought you could talk a little bit about what product development does because, like I said, a lot of people probably are familiar with the certs. Maybe we have people who hold our certifications, but they may not be aware of how we actually go about building them.
TERESA: Yeah. Sure. I’d be happy to talk about that. I think sometimes folks have this idea of how a certification exam is built and that maybe there’s a room full of CompTIA employees, squirreled away somewhere, coming up with exam items designed to trick you. That’s somewhat far from the truth.
The reality of it is, there are no CompTIA employees who are writing exam items for our certifications because all of our items, as well as the standard or the set of objectives, are actually developed by people who are doing the jobs that we certify, day in and day out.
No comments:
Post a Comment