My Apprenticeship

My Apprenticeship
The Apprentices

Wednesday 18 February 2015

Qualifications

Since my post in August, where I had sent the last piece of evidence off for my NVQ portfolio, I have passed my NVQ. The last piece of evidence was enough to complete the criteria needed so I was pleased to complete it a month before the deadline.

Because I am on the Network and Infrastructure team until the end of my apprenticeship, the industry specific qualification I have chosen to study for is the Cisco Certified Network Associate qualification. This exam validates the ability to install, configure, operate and troubleshoot medium sized networks, including different sites as part of a Wide Area Network. This will help me get on the networking ladder. Getting hands on experience in the workplace has also helped me study for this exam as it allows me to understand the theory better. Also having a team around me who can help explain things in a different way has helped too, rather than reading from a book all the time.

I also attended an introduction to networking course on the 4th until the 7th February in London. This went through the basic concepts of networking and was very useful for me, again another alternative to reading from a book all the time and I am going back there on the 22nd February to attend a 6 day course which will go into more detail on networking to help me understand more and hands on troubleshooting a network, which will further help me pass the CCNA exam.

Its been a while!

It has been a while since I last posted on here, so I will update you in the next two blogs over what has happened since the end of August.

When I last posted, I was in my three month placement on the Investment Management Systems team, identifying issues that users of the applications are having, recreating the issue and logging the problem with the software supplier. Once it had been fixed by the supplier I would then test it to make sure the issue didn’t occur again.

I have since then finished the placement, and at the beginning of October I went back on to the Network and Infrastructure team. This is the team that I will be spending the remainder of my apprenticeship with. Since I have been on the team I have been getting more involved with what they do. For example in December I was able to go to the London office and get involved with upgrading the existing Wifi network that was in place as the old one wasn’t able to handle to amount of devices that were connecting to it so we upgraded to a new solution and since then we haven’t had any issues.

I am glad to be back on the team as it is an interesting area of IT to be involved in as there are many different routes you can go down in the network field of IT, for example security, voice over IP, wireless and data centre’s, just a number of things you can end up choosing to specialise in!