Many students have a career plan and invest in that without considering the knowledge and ability that the course and certification assumes you have. Assess the assumed course knowledge. This image provides an overview of the CompTIA Career Paths that develops your knowledge and ability in a logical and effective way.

• Identify the course and exam assumed knowledge and skill level.

Our industry evolves and develops at a frightening rate. New technology, risks and 

System updates are just three challenges facing today's system technicians. To meet these rapid changes, CompTIA (The Computing Technology Industry Association) updates their courses to meet the industries' current needs.

Unwary students can easily find that they have invested in old, out of date, dangerous and incomplete training.

• What is the current course & exam version?
• When does it retire?
• Is there a new course version imminent?
• Are the retiring course and the new course available at the same time?
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Failing to pass an exam before it retires leaves you in a tough situation. To pass the new exam you will need to invest in the new training materials and identify the changes that have been implemented. 

Before investing in training materials or courses, read CompTIA's official course content and the exam criteria PDFs. They are available to download from the Systems Master training kits and  course pages as well as a copy of the The CompTIA 12-Day SMART Success Plan.

• Know how long your course should officially take. Training that cuts a day or 2 off an official 5-day course, cuts out 20 - 40% of the content you need.
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• Courses labeled as 'certification' and 'bootcamp', assume you have already completed the Learning Phase of your training and become competent and capable with the all the course systems.

The time it will take to complete all labs once will range from 9 - 18 hours. Depending on the number of labs on your course, your previous experience, supporting knowledge and ability.

On certain CompTIA official, full-length courses, it is not possible to include all the labs in the time available and so you need access to the labs from home to complete your training.

Completing the labs once provides an introduction to the systems. Most students will need to complete the labs twice to start to become capable with the technology and exam ready.

The CompTIA 12-Day SMART Success Plan schedules completing each lab twice.

To help avoid the frustration of wasting time and effort when labs fail, or do not correspond to the theory, we suggest you only invest in the stable CompTIA CertMaster Labs. 

Whether or not you need to take the exam, you should master the CompTIA Performance Based Questions for your course. They bring together various technologies, business needs and restrictions, current best practice and more into a single complex question. These real life scenario questions where you need to juggle multiple considerations where some are listed and others are not and assumed knowledge, rapidly build advanced understanding and experience.

The CertMaster lesson tests are graded easy, moderate and hard. This grading system can loosely be linked to 1st, 2nd and 3rd line support roles. CompTIA PBQ tests assess your range of understanding to 3rd line support and beyond.

PBQ's are the toughest exam question type. Expect any number of PBQ's from 2 to 6 at the start of your actual exam. As they require extra time to read the scenarios, review the range of options and complete the various responses, make sure you assess the CompTIA Practice PBS's and invest time on mastering them.

A list of Performance Based Questions for your course can be viewed on the course training options page.U

The Official CompTIA Student Success Kit for your course enables you to study with confidence. You can study knowing that your training materials are accurate and complete, and that they are perfectly aligned to the CompTIA exam and the most pressing needs of the Computing Technology Industry.

Furthermore, you will have access to every system and network to make your mistakes and gain experience without the pain of being accountable for bringing down the systems.

The kit consists of three genuine CompTIA, Next Generation training systems:

• CompTIA CertMaster Learn to start mastering the theory.
• CompTIA CertMaster Labs to gain experience with the systems safely.
• CompTIA CertMaster Practice to upgrade your technical knowledge and diagnostic ability while preparing you well beyond the average for the exam.

Be exceptional, learn fast, retain well and certify soon, as you do not know who is catching you up or what oppertinites will pass you buy.

Check out the individual training systems, the complete CompTIA Student Success Kit and training course options on the web page for your training course.