What is the course board? When I left school at 16 I went straight into college to do a City & Guilds Level 2 IT Practitioners System Support course which was full time (well 3 days a week but they still class it as full time).
They did also did the Level 1 course but from what I remember, the Level 1 course only covers very basic computing, working with MS Office and apparently it's the City & Guilds version to IT at GCSE level so it isn't worth a lot at all compared to the Level 2 course.
Level 2 was an excellent course which I thoroughly enjoyed and if I remember right it covered computer preventative & remedial maintenance, fault finding hardware & software troubleshooting, creating a small local network and also an extra module called ECDL which you do a lot of work with MS Office. I already knew most of the stuff on this course already but I needed proof on my CV that I have done this course and have background experience and I thoroughly enjoyed the amount of hands on work with computers that their was.
The Level 3 course which was the Advanced Diploma in IT Systems Support was simular to the Level 2 course but if I remember right it was a lot more networking based & customer support based too. We learned how to create and manage a SBS on Windows Server 2003 and learned about other networks i.e. Novell NetWare. The customer support part covers IT systems support in the workplace and how to deal with clients machine and learning in depth with SLA's (service level agreements). Overall the Level 3 course did drag and most of us did find it boring as it was less hands on hardware wise but the networking part was very intersting. I did learn a lot about customer support on this course too which is handy to have.
After finishing the Level 3 course I was instantly pre-accepted to go on to do a Level 4 HND course I think it was called, at my local uni and from what I remember reading, it covers a lot more in depth networking and even more customer support. In the end I decided not do go ahead onto this course as I wanted to try and go straight into work and in my opinion I thought that their was not much point in doing the course.
From what a few college mates of mine told me about the course who went on to do it, they really disliked the course a lot as it was painfully boring and a lot of it was irrelivent to what they were supposed to be studying and a lot of the course modules were missing. I remember them telling me as well that around 5 people dropped out of the course within a space of a year as it was that bad. Anyway luckily for me 4 months after finishing college I found an IT Technicians job working in a school.
Unfortunately though that was cut short as nearly a year in that job I was made redundant and I haven't worked in IT since due to the recession and lack of jobs
I keep looking for IT jobs to this day but they are virtually non existant!
Sorry if I have gone on a bit, but I thought I would give out some useful info.
Good luck with your college course
Liam
