Apple Certifications for 17 year old?

[Nitromaster]

Wirelessly posted (Nokia N70-3 Ireland-Opera: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341 Safari/528.16)

Hi
I'm currently 17, and realising I probaly should start to figure out what I'm doing with my life eventually.
Was thinking of learning as much different skills as possible while I have pretty much free time.
I've realized I'll likely need certfications in whatever field I decide to try and work in, so I've decided to start looking at the various apple courses/certs to start with.
Couple of questions:
Looking at the different options, the iLife or iWork associate courses seem like they'd be the best to start with. (I have both suites on my mac, totally underused though)
any advice re: this choice or the whole idea of me trying to get certfications in the first place? (re:age...I understand I might have to do them again sometime to stay current?)
there's no apple stores here in Ireland, and I presume none or hardly no traing centers or whatever...so the best option would be to self-learn via one of those books listed on the apple site..then fly to the uk or somewhere when it comes to taking the actual test!

Any more advice or help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks

 

[belvdr]

Better bet is to go to college and get a degree. That opens more doors than anything.

All certs I know of, not sure about Apple, require recertification.

 

[AppleMatt]

I wouldn't say that certificates in iWork are very employable.

I'd go for retail, either an Apple shop or those Apple areas in PC World etc. That way you'll get good experience, and rather than paying to get certified you can get them to send you on whatever training you need to bolster your CV.

Failing that, go for a more general certificate such as OS X or whatever.

AppleMatt

 

[Nitromaster]

Wirelessly posted (Nokia N70-3 Ireland-Opera: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341 Safari/528.16)

Better bet is to go to college and get a degree. That opens more doors than anything.



All certs I know of, not sure about Apple, require recertification.

Thanks for your reply

College will definately happen as well, but once this school year finishes (end of may) I have still another year before college.

Was just thinking about the fact I'll probaly want/should learn all the stuff that'll appear on the iLife/iWork papers anyway, and I probaly should "learn" mac osx sometime as well.

@AppleMatt
Thanks for the advice
Was thinking more of the iLife/iWork ones plainly because I should learn how to use those apps anyway at some stage.
Mac OS X/pro app certs would be much more worthwhile obviously though

 

[lannister80]

Meh, forget certifications. Start studying:

• Operating Systems (contention, locks, scheduling, semaphores, etc)
• Networking (packets, frames, sliding windows, throughput, CIDR, etc)
• Some kind of OO programming (Java?)
• Some kind of low-level programming (play with registers, OPcodes, etc)
• Linux tools/command line fun (fstab, ps, grep, |, etc)
• File Systems (FAT is a good place to get started)

This assumes you want to go the general Computer Science route. If you want to be a repair tech, that's waaaaay different.

 

[CylonGlitch]

This assumes you want to go the general Computer Science route. If you want to be a repair tech, that's waaaaay different.

I agree with lannister80, if you want CompSci go with what he said above, those will benefit you a lot more. If you are going something else, say engineering, then study your math, and electronics. If you are going computer services (IT), then study networking and the different pieces of equipment.

Learning iLife suite is like preparing to be a secretary or something along those lines. And if that is your intention, learn Word, it's more widely used.

If you want to learn for your own use, just start using it and learning from online docs, no need to take the course, it won't help you much.

 

[miles01110]

Avoid all non-technical Apple Certifications. If you want to be a hardware technician that's somewhat transferable. iWork/iLife are totally useless.

 

[NextTuesday]

Apple Retail?

If you've a year to wait before college, the best experience you could get is a retail position or trying to start a company of sorts.

CompuB (Apple Reseller here in Cork and Limerick) are opening in Dublin, it might be worth your while to try and get your CV in to them now. I'm 18 and work part-time in the Cork store, with no previous experience and my Leaving Cert this June too.