Matthew Stern's Posts

It was in the midst of the recent recession when Adrian Genesir, product development manager for the College of IT at Western Governors University, began his involvement with the school. With fifteen years of experience as a software engineer and database developer, he stepped into a faculty mentor role at WGU and started directly helping students, some of whom were actively working in the IT field and found their jobs were now in jeopardy, differentiate themselves -- partially through CompTIA certifications.

Sana’a Qaiser had only been in Washington, D.C., for a week on her first visit to the U.S. and she had already begun to start to feel at home. A rising senior at Kuwait’s Gulf University for Science and Technology (GUST), where she studies information systems, she took advantage of the school’s summer semester abroad and attended classes at George Washington University, while availing herself of the myriad exciting new cultural experiences a major U.S. city has to offer.

On an average day, Dave Atherton, recruitment specialist at Peckham in Lansing, Michigan, has numerous people with years of experience in the IT field coming into his office looking for employment. But sometimes he ends up having to be the bearer of bad news, and not because the candidates are incapable of thriving in a prospective IT role. Even if a tech who comes into his office has worked for more than a decade as an IT professional, without a certification, Atherton can’t put the tech on the job.

A security breach in this constantly connected world can mean anything from being inconvenienced to being extorted — and for businesses that don’t properly secure their networks it can mean massive losses in profits and time. At a time when it’s harder than ever to find highly skilled IT security staff, CompTIA’s 11th Annual Information Security Trends study shows data breaches cropping up with growing frequency, and recovery taking longer than ever before.

Whether just starting out in the field or trying to get back into the game after a long absence, certification is a critical differentiator for IT professionals looking to move their careers forward. Having effective study tools is key for IT professionals looking to pass their certification exams. Four IT workers, all at very different points in their professional lives, found that CertMaster not only helped them study to pass an exam, but helped them retain practical knowledge that may come in handy in their careers to come.

When a teacher’s computer goes down in a Doss High School classroom, it isn’t the school’s tech support person who shows up to fix it. Rather, it’s one of the students in technology coordinator J.R. Drummond’s help desk class, putting into practice in the field everything they’re learning in the classroom.

Just as Terminator: Genisys hits theaters, we took a look at how much technology speculated about in the Terminator movies has become a reality in 2015.

These days, wireless Internet permeates major Jamaican cities and smartphones are a common sight. Jamaica’s tech sector is growing. But the IT industry is not immune to the economic realities of life in a country where the rate of exchange with the U.S. dollar is around 100 to 1, and a country that is just now beginning to recover from 2008’s worldwide economic downturn. That's where Vector comes in.

IT offers good salaries even in otherwise difficult economic times, and it’s a well-established fact that certification is a differentiator for employers in the crowded but booming IT job market. In the world of certification, CompTIA is a name that carries a lot of heft. Just how well CompTIA certifications play with employers is something that Certification Magazine’s “Annual Salary Survey” illustrates with hard data.

Ralph Lazaro accumulated more than a decade’s worth of hands-on computer experience in the U.S. Navy. But when he got out of the service and sent his resume around in search of civilian jobs, he was not getting calls back. His resume was missing one crucial element – certifications. CompTIA and its partner New Horizons were there to help.