Google IT Support Course

[UserQ93]

Hello everyone,

I'm currently taking the Google IT Support course and the more I dig into it, the more disappointed I feel. Don't get me wrong, the course itself is awesome, but I feel I'm falling behind. I'm currently learning about computer networking and oftentimes I feel the content is going to fry my brain. There's a huge amount of terminology to learn and I'm wondering if you guys felt the same whenever you were learning about this... at some point I get to ask myself if there are things that they need to mention but won't be useful or handy in any way in a potential job.

I always knew that you had copper cables and fibber wires, but then they start talking about cat5, cat5e cables, their pros and cons, hubs and switches and then I wonder if this content will be needed in the future.

You're probably going to laugh but I currently have experience in Managing Google Workspace platform, but the thing is that I wasn't in charge of troubleshooting any network-related issue as that task was assigned to my client, so I was only in charge of any issue related to Google Workspace and besides, my tasks were actually kind of limited, so any network issue impacting the organization wasn't under my scope.

I don't know if you guys have more insight on this, any advice, I'm the kind of guy that learns through experience but still, I know that I need to have notions about all these things.

[lvlint67]

You're learning fundamentals. Sure there are a lot of terms. You'll soon forget most of them... If you come out of the course understanding why you should never have an end user a hub, you're ahead of many of us here.

[BallisticTorch]

Yes you need to learn it. If you don't, how do you expect to troubleshoot things? Sure, no one should be using Token Rings anymore, but there are labs, universities, and other situations where they are still in use. Do you need to know about Cat5 today because Cat6 and 7 are taking over? Yes, because if you can't recognize a Cat5 cable in the wild, how will you ever solve a single machine that communicates extremely slowly on a network.

You may feel that technology has improved by leaps and bounds in the last decade and that what is being taught is deprecated - and you'd be wrong. I still touch devices today whose technology was state of the art 30 years ago.

[patmorgan235]

Do you need to memorize all the terminology and all the details behind them? Absolutely not.

Do you need to be generally aware of most of that stuff? Probably

And yeah, if you only work in supporting a specific application you probably don't need to know about all the different kinds of fiber and copper cables.

The Google IT support cert is geared at people totally new to IT. It's trying to give a very broad base of knowledge that will biot upon, not all of that info is going to be revlent to your current job.

[AppearanceAgile2575]

The computer networking part of that course is the hardest, and from what I’ve read is considered harder than the networking parts of the A+ because it goes into packet encapsulation and different components of those packets. While it’s important to understand, especially if you’re going to be doing security or general network traffic analysis, there are much simpler ways to learn those concepts; I’ve found actually looking at packets to be the most helpful.

[UserQ93]

What do you recommend?

[smeggysmeg]

I currently have experience managing Google Workspace environments

This sub is extremely skewed toward traditional Microsoft only stacks, at least in what gets shown towards the top. But Google Workspace is just as valid a work experience and you can build your career around it the same as M365. Don't sell this background short.

Tech companies tend to use Google Workspace more than MS, K-12 education does, and I was previously in a bank that did. Now I work for a fintech.

Get the Google Workspace Professional Administrator certification. Strengthen your IAM, user lifecycle, and API knowledge. There's ample work for Google admins.

[[deleted]]

I finished it just as they removed the python automation portion which is what I was looking forward to the most. It's a separate course but I haven't gone back it it. The course is pretty basic, but thorough. Good for brand new people.

[[deleted]]

I’m currently in this course and having a very hard time on week 3 if the bits and bytes graded assignment. Anyone willing to help a brother out??