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Old 27th Apr 2013, 12:33
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Saab Dastard
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A bit advanced for most troubleshooting, perhaps, Mixture.

It really depends what you aim / need to troubleshoot. Are you looking at personal use? SOHO? Corporates?

I am not aware of any certifications specifically aimed at troubleshooting. All the technology vendors certification programs incorporate an element of it into the syllabus for their exams.

At it's most fundamental, troubleshooting is taking a common-sense, structured, orderly, and methodical approach to problem solving, such that all possible faults are tested for and eliminated until the actual fault (or faults) is revealed. Hopefully, one starts with the simplest and most obvious and goes on from there!

A background in an engineering discipline (e.g. civil / mechanical engineering) is very helpful for developing an analytical approach, but common sense and patience are the basic requirements.

At the most basic level, the generic CompTIA certifications such as A+, Network+, Server+ etc. would be a reasonable starting point.

Then go on to MS MCITP / MCP / MCSE etc. in OSs; Cisco CCNA for Networking; VMWare VCP for virtualisation. As Mixture points out, there's a whole lot more technologies and product sets you can certify in - Citrix for terminal services, CISSP for security, then storage, Linux, hardware...

Certification is a bit of a treadmill - the technologies keep advancing, so you have to keep re-certifying to keep up (MS Server 2003 > 2008 > 2012). At the same time your knowledge is increasing in depth (hopefully), so you can get higher levels of certifications in the same sphere - e.g. CCNA > CCNP > CCIE.

SD
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