Gary Drumm – PMP, ITIL

Well, I finally did it.  After waiting for years for the “college from home” model to mature, I’ve decided to go back to school and finish my degree.  Part of the hold up has been finding a quality, affordable school that would allow me to do 100% of my course work online, since I’ve really have zero time for classes.  So I started looking about a month ago and finally settled on Western Governor’s University.

WGU has an excellent program that allows me to perform 100$ of the course work online.  It is also somewhat self-paced since they have rolling semesters beginning monthly.  So, on July 1st, I begin classes for my Bachelor of Science in Information Technology.  I’m pretty excited.  Once the program is complete, I’ll have the B.S. degree (though I’ve actually had a degree in “BS” for a while ) and 8 technology certifications, not counting my existing PMP and ITIL certifications.

So why have I decided to do this?  Several reasons actually.  My lack of a degree has stopped me from being “qualified” for some positions in the past, certainly, but it hasn’t been of great concern because I’ve managed to build a career without it, but my goals, frankly, have changed dramatically.

1 ) I want to have the education under my belt so that I am not passed over by some computer scanning my resume looking for reasons to exclude me as a candidate.

2 ) I want to go on and complete a MBA in Information Technology Management and before I can get the MBA, I have to get the Bachelor’s.

3 ) As far as my career is concerned, I’m working towards moving to a CIO position.  I’ve been a VP for several privately held, multi-million dollar outfits.  At some point, in the next 5-10 years, I’d like to move into the CIO’s office. Having an MBA in IT Management and 10-15 technical/managerial certifications is a good way to demonstrate my competence when it comes to running an IT department, aside from the fact that I will have been doing it for over 20 years, by the time I finish the MBA.

4 ) I just want to do it!  I mean, I’m a life-long learner, so I might as well learn on soe “official” level and get the credit for it.

So, classes begin July 1st and I’m ready to go!

P.S. What certifications will I have when I complete the coursework?:

• CIW Associate
• CIW Professional
• CIW Database Design Specialist
• CompTIA A+
• CompTIA Project+
• CompTIA Network+
• CompTIA Security+
• Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist

Add to that the PMP and ITIL cert, and the fact that I’ll probably go ahead and go for Six Sigma some time shortly after finishing school, and I should be good to go.

Tags: Education

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.