While looking for a better job to secure my income (I already had a daughter and was about to finish college), I found a nice oportunity from another HP partner company, this time it was the place to be at. This dude (my boss) wanted me to be MCP as soon as possible, they did MS, Cisco, Avaya besides doing HP as their main business, it was great, they sent me for training (upstairs, the training center was in the same building) more than once to get me MS certified, I learned that I could become MCSE if I wanted to do the 7 exams and so my quest began, while I was doing server support I studied even on company time (when there were no projects of course) to advance through and get my certification done. With all I needed at hand (servers, software, company time) I finished the 7 exams in about 4 months, my experience helped me a lot to succeed on those days. Right that year (2001) I finished college and graduated as Engineer 🙂 a very happy time, very rewarding after so much sacrifice.
By the time I learned more about certifications and their value in the IT market, so I did some more certs just because they paid for the exams and encouraged everyone to get them, sometimes they needed me to be certified, other times I just wanted to become certified so the fun began and during my stay with them I got some certifications done:
  • CompTIA A+, Network+, I-Net+ and Server+
  • Cisco CCNA and CCNP (It was the first time I hear about CCIE, and the Security track was just made public, the company was interested in training a couple of us in it and I was all in, but they just didn’t have that much knowledge or commitment for the security field, we just ended up going for the old CSPFA course and wrapping it up)
  • HP/Compaq ASP in Laptops, Desktops, Servers and Workstations
  • CIW Associate ( I though it would be fun, but got really dissapointed, didn’t even care for doing another exam)
  • MCT (The training center where I got my first MCP exams done offerred to send me out for the TTT course and helped me out get a visa to go out to Miami and get the training done)

It was nice to work for this company, but the economy back home is not exactly the best to encourage professionals to stay employed, it is really hard to get a decent job and have a comfortable life for yourself and your family, it’s not very easy to get a good payrate, at least not one that can allow you to become financially stable in less than a decade or sometimes even more. Just the sad story of any poor developing country, so I wont bore you anymore with it, thing is I got an offer to come to live to Puerto Rico and work for a small consulting firm in the west coast of the island, it wasn’t big, but it got me here, and it seemed a good idea at the time.