Have a conversation with almost any practiced advisor and you'll be surprised by their many awful tales of students who've been conned by dodgy salespeople. Ensure you only ever work with an experienced industry professional that asks some in-depth questions to find out what's right for you - not for their retirement-fund! You must establish the very best place to start for you. Quite often, the training start-point for a student with experience is hugely dissimilar to the student with none. It's wise to consider some basic Microsoft package and Windows skills first. It can brush up on your current abilities and make the transition to higher-level learning a less steep.

Ensure all your exams are commercially valid and current - don't even consider courses that only give in-house certificates. Unless your qualification is issued by a company like Microsoft, Cisco, Adobe or CompTIA, then you may discover it will have been a waste of time - because it won't give an employer any directly-useable skills.

When did you last consider how safe your job is? For the majority of us, this only rears its head when something dramatic happens to shake us. However, The cold truth is that true job security doesn't really exist anymore, for nearly everyone now. Whereas a marketplace with high growth, with a constant demand for staff (because of a growing shortage of commercially certified staff), opens the possibility of proper job security.

Recently, a national e-Skills analysis brought to light that over 26 percent of all IT positions available are unfilled mainly due to a chronic shortage of trained staff. Essentially, we can only fill just 3 out of each four job positions in IT. Achieving full commercial Information Technology exams is thus a 'Fast Track' to a life-long as well as worthwhile profession. While the market is increasing at the speed it is, is there any other area of industry worth considering for retraining.

Commercial qualifications are now, very visibly, taking over from the traditional routes into IT - but why is this? With fees and living expenses for university students spiralling out of control, and the IT sector's general opinion that vendor-based training is closer to the mark commercially, there has been a big surge in Microsoft, CISCO, Adobe and CompTIA authorised training courses that provide key skills to an employee at a fraction of the cost and time involved. This is done through concentrating on the particular skills that are needed (together with an appropriate level of related knowledge,) rather than spending months and years on the background non-specific minutiae that degrees in computing can often find themselves doing (because the syllabus is so wide).

What if you were an employer - and you wanted someone who could provide a specific set of skills. Which is the most straightforward: Go through loads of academic qualifications from various applicants, struggling to grasp what they've learned and what vocational skills they have, or select a specialised number of commercial certifications that precisely match your needs, and make your short-list from that. You can then focus on how someone will fit into the team at interview - rather than establishing whether they can do a specific task.

How the program is actually delivered to you isn't always given the appropriate level of importance. In what way are your training elements sectioned? What is the order and what control do you have at what pace it arrives? Training companies will normally offer a 2 or 3 year study programme, and send out each piece as you finish each section. If you think this sound logical, then consider this: Many students find that the trainer's usual training route doesn't suit. They might find varying the order of study will be far more suitable. Perhaps you don't make it in the allotted time?

For the perfect solution, you want ALL the study materials up-front - giving you them all to come back to at any time in the future - at any time you choose. Variations can then be made to the order that you complete each objective if you find another route more intuitive.

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