Preparing for CompTIA A+ 1200 series (Part 1)
If you like learning like I do, tech might be for you.
And, tech pays well!
During COVID, lives were shook up. I started as a Teaching Assistant at Per Scholas, doing CompTIA A+ and Network+ courses.
I have been remotely doing CompTIA and AWS training at Per Scholas for over five years, and now I am a manager at Per Scholas.
I love working remotely. I feel lucky every day I go to work and troubleshoot problems that the staff or learners are facing. Troubleshooting is a rewarding process, and it is something CompTIA really likes to talk about.
Troubleshooting Methodology
When you are in IT, people ask you for help because they need help getting into their email. Or, they cannot connect to the database.
Or, their computer is “broken” and they don’t know why, so you got the call.
Maybe some new equipment was purchased, and now your job is to unpack it, read the instructions, and set the device up. The new equipment could be a printer, a router, a new computer, and much more.
Troubleshooting is the process of problem solving, and all problems have three things in common.
causes
symptoms
consequences
From a business point of view, sometimes resolving the consequences of the problem is more important than solving for the cause.
For example, if a user’s workstation in the office has a bad hard drive or faulty screen, it might be easier and cheaper for the business to give that user a new workstation until there is time to troubleshoot that broken workstation, because first we need to get the company’s internal data center back online.
The data center issue is much more severe and affects multiple users. That problem should be fixed before fixing the workstation, which only affects a single user.
In short, troubleshooting processes should be in context of best practice, and trying to help as many staff members as possible.
In the next blog post, “I Eat Tacos Every Valentine’s Day,” we will talk about the CompTIA Troubleshooting method, which is no longer explicitly tied to the A+ exam objectives, but is still important to know for an IT Specialist.
