I am taking a survey of people taking their certs.

What if there was a business that let you come in and do labs for a small fee or maybe some type of membership. Would you be interested?

The labs would be open to do whatever you wanted to do (Routers, ATM, Frame Relay, Sniffers, NT Servers/Workstations, Novell Servers, Sun Servers, Labs would only be limited to what equipment the lab had). No classes. Maybe an lab tech to help you with questions or problems.

This way individuals do not have to buy expensive equipment (Cisco Routers) to get the hands-on they need for their cert and/or technical development.

And for bussinesses, the IT dept could rent out the lab to build mock networks of their existing network, and implement new technologies to see if it is going to work in their network.

What would you pay for this type of service?

As mention above, there could be an hourly rate for "now and again", or for people going to the top of their cert a membership with a monthly fee.

I need your feed back
Clint Perry

Report this post to a moderator

Yes, I think it would be a viable option to buying all the hardware. And I would certainly be willing to pay for it, whether a user fee or on a membership basis. If it ever happens please post it here for all of us to see.

Report this post to a moderator

I think there's stuff like that out there already. Have you heard of the upcoming NSP and ASP market? Some experts are anticipating a move back to thin client computing where applications are provided by one entity (Application Service Providers) and now they're even planning on doing that with networks (Network Service Providers).

As if the competition for a good LAN/WAN admin wasn't fierce enough! A trend like that would decrease the amount of those jobs out there, theoretically.

But to answer your question, I'd pay for something only if it was a Cisco lab or something.

BrianC - Systems Administrator
MCSE, MCDBA, Master CNE, Network+, i-Net+, A+

Report this post to a moderator