Learning through experience is certainly invaluable and you definitely can gain much expertise in those areas you are exposed to. But experience alone can only provide a limited scope of expertise. Education via degree and certification training programs exposes you to much greater depth within an expertise and breadth across the countless areas of expertise within the industries within IT. Again, IT is industries within industries. Nobody can ever know it all. This fact is often glazed over. Becoming very proficient at JavaScript, Visual Basic, assembling computers and installing Windows, as examples, may make one an expert in those two "specialties". But that does not make them experts in electronics, motherboards, chipsets, RAM, graphics cards, networking, C++, security, or operating systems, as just a few examples. I will quickly add that lacking degrees or certifications does NOT make one less an expert! In fact, I fully believe the common expression "2 years experience equals 1 year of college". And it is also true that book smarts with no experience does not make anyone an expert.
Complicating the issue is the constant advances in the state-of-the-art within the many technologies within IT. While these technologies are typically designed to work together to achieve a common goal, the advances are commonly done independently of each other. For example, 64-bit hardware has been around for decades but it was only when 64-bit Windows 7 took over the market share that 64-bit operating systems became commonplace. And even then, it took several more years before 64-bit applications became commonplace. Other examples of independent advances include wireless networking protocols, I/O interfaces, and SSD technologies. Solid state storage devices have been around for many years but only recently have operating systems embraced them natively.
It is these constant advances in the state-of-the-art that makes the challenge of being and remaining an expert in a specific area even more challenging. What was true in the past is often no longer true. So to be an expert, you have to keep up with the expertise and associated technologies. A real challenge in an ever evolving environment.
This is what makes venues like this forum so great. Folks with advanced expertise in many different "specialties" or "niches" come together in one place and are able to pick each others brains. You might have similar access to such wealth of knowledge in a large IT company or classrooms for advanced studies, but never in a small business or via home hobby experiences.
I come to Sysnative to help users fix and maintain their computers, and have a great, safe and secure computing experience. Being able to do so gives me wonderful "warm fuzzies". But the true bonus for me is being able to learn something new from my friends and colleagues who also come to (provide and run) this forum who I get to rub shoulders with. :smile9:
It is the "synergy", cooperation, and respect we share among each other that makes tech support forums in general, and Sysnative specifically, a great place to hang-out, share, and learn.
) and have dedicated the past 5 years to it and many more to come! Recently I have mainly dealt with repair and management of machines along with other forms of devices.
