The CompTIA A+ course covers four specialised areas - the requirement is exam passes in 2 specialities to be competent in A+. You'll find that most colleges only offer two of the four areas. Our opinion is this is selling you short - yes you'll have qualified, but experience of all four will give you a distinct advantage in your working life, where you'll need to know about all of them. So that's why you should train in all four areas.

A+ certification without additional courses will mean that you're able to mend and maintain stand alone Macs, computers and laptops; ones that are most often not part of a network - which is for the most part the home market. Should you want to work towards looking after computer networks, add the excellent Network+ to the CompTIA A+ training you're doing. This will prepare you to apply for more interesting jobs. Alternatively, you may prefer the route to networking via Microsoft, in the form of MCP's, MCSA or the full MCSE.

A useful feature that many training companies provide is a programme of Job Placement assistance. The service is put in place to assist your search for your first position. With the great shortage of skills in the United Kingdom today, it's not necessary to become overly impressed with this service however. It really won't be that difficult to secure employment once you're well trained and qualified.

Having said that, it's important to have advice and support about your CV and interviews though; and we'd encourage everyone to get their CV updated as soon as they start a course - don't wait till you've finished your exams. You may not have got to the stage where you've taken your exams when you will get your initial junior support job; however this is not possible unless you've posted your CV on job sites. Normally you'll get better performance from a specialist independent regional employment service than you'll experience from any training course provider's employment division, because they'll know local industry and the area better.

Just be sure that you don't conscientiously work through your course materials, and then do nothing more and leave it in the hands of the gods to secure your first position. Stand up for yourself and get out there. Invest as much resource into getting the right position as it took to pass the exams.

If you're like many of the students we talk to then you're quite practically minded - the 'hands-on' type. Typically, the painful task of reading endless manuals can be just about bared when essential, but it doesn't suit your way of doing things. So look for on-screen interactive learning packages if you'd really rather not use books. Where we can get all of our senses involved in our learning, then we often see hugely increased memory retention as a result.

Fully interactive motion videos featuring instructor demo's and practice lab's will beat books every time. And they're far more fun. Any company that you're considering must be pushed to demo a few examples of the materials provided for study. You should hope for instructor-led videos and a wide selection of interactive elements.

Go for physical media such as CD or DVD ROM's in all circumstances. This then avoids all the potential pitfalls with the variability of broadband quality and service.

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