Evaluating CompTIA A+ Certification: Worth or Waste?

CompTIA's A+ certification offers a baseline of technical knowledge but may not reflect current IT demands effectively.

### The CompTIA A+ Certification Experience: Worth It or Not?
* 🤔 The question of worthiness to pursue CompTIA's A+ certification is debated, with opinions split on its **relevance in today's IT landscape**.
* 💵 The certification, costing around **$500**, has been taken by **over a million people** since its inception in 1993, yet concrete information about the exam remains **elusive**.
* 🖥 CompTIA operates as a nonprofit organization, generating **over $140 million annually** through member dues and certification fees, while also providing training materials and courses.
* 👨 Exam security has evolved, allowing candidates to take the test from home under strict monitoring, but this has raised concerns about the **actual value of the certification** in a **rapidly changing IT environment**.
* 📉 The exam's relevance is questioned, as many feel that **practical experience is often more valuable** than the theoretical knowledge tested, especially with a passing grade set at **only 75%**.
* 🔄 CompTIA's recertification process requires renewal every three years, which critics argue may be **more about generating revenue than ensuring up-to-date knowledge**.
* 🏆 Despite the challenges and criticisms, passing the A+ exam can still serve as a **valuable credential for job seekers** looking to demonstrate a **baseline level of technical knowledge** to potential employers.
* 💼 Ultimately, while the certification may help land interviews, **personal experience and attitude** are likely to have a **greater impact on career advancement** in the IT field.

Am I worthy to join your ranks? Or maybe the more important question is, should he bother to join their ranks? Depending on who you ask, CompTIA's A+ certification is either an essential early milestone in your IT career or it's an antiquated remnant from before YouTube made learning about technology both easy and free. But until you fork over $500, there's no way to know for sure. It is almost impossible to find concrete information about the exam itself. But how can that be? The certification has been around since 1993 and has been passed by more than a million people worldwide, and yet nothing has slipped out yet. I've been dabbling in tech for as long as A+ has been around, and I've always kind of wondered, am I worthy to find out? I decided to put my money where my mouth is. If I pass, I'm certified, but if I fail, there's no free retakes. They don't even offer a discount. My money is just gone along with my reputation. So come along with me and let's find out together. 20 plus years of

figuring it out as I go has qualified me to do any more than just drop things and segue to our sponsor SE Sonic. Their Prime TX 1000 W power supply features an 80 plus titanium rating, hybrid fan control, and a 12-year warranty. Yep, 12 years. I just wanted to say it twice. Learn more or pick one up using our link in the description. CompTIA is a nonprofit lobby and trade organization whose members include pretty much every hardware, software, and services company that you've ever heard of, plus a metric banana load of ones that you haven't. And if their 90 disclosure form is anything to go by, running a nonprofit like this can be pretty lucrative. They bring in over $ 140 million a year between member dues and certifications. But not all the cert money is from test fees. They also sell training materials, study guides, and even complete online courses that will help you prepare for your tests. The only thing they won't sell to you or to anyone is the actual questions, which makes it a little bit

tricky to evaluate whether the test is even valuable in today's fast-changing IT landscape. Now, in the past, maintaining this level of secrecy was relatively easy. CompTIA would run their exams on locked-down workstations in carefully controlled rooms patrolled by humorless human proctors. Nothing went in or out without permission, and if you were foolish enough to share what you'd seen on the test, or heaven forbid, use the bathroom in the middle, you could kiss your CTS goodbye. But like everyone else, they've had to evolve with the times, and these days you can take the exam in the comfort of your very own carefully controlled room, monitored by the exam software they put on your computer, and a team of both human and AI proctors that will watch your every physical and digital move. That means no alt-tabbing to your study guide, no gum chewing, and absolutely no screen sharing or recording. Let's take a look at our setup. Well, it's exam time, and how do I feel? I'm a little nervous, actually. I don't think

I've taken a test in 20 years. Well, here's your phone. Uh, okay, you can't use your actual phone. There's just too much crap on it. Oh, this is just a like one to put away. This is one to put away, so don't worry about that. Makes sense. I mean, surely you know second phone couldn't be a thing or third phone. L would never cheat. Yeah, well, no, no, I don't want to cheat on the exam. I genuinely want to know, so I didn't do any prep going into this because what I want to know is does the School of Hard Knocks work. Depends on your experience. Well, that's the thing. I might be very experienced, but what I've heard about the test is that it can have stuff that's kind of archaic or niche, so you could actually have a ton of experience but still not score well on it. I'll go to do CPU registers. Wow, this is quite the setup, and for good reason. They require you to take pictures of your test environment to ensure that you will

have absolutely no aids available to you. That means no paper, no pencil, no touchscreen devices of any sort unless they are out of arm's reach. And depending on which documentation you look at, you may or may not even be allowed to have a vessel filled with water. I'm going to hope for the best here. They use an exam-taking software that includes a human proctor who watches to make sure you do not leave the view of the webcam, and they monitor for any software running on your PC to ensure that you are not recording the session, which of course I took as a challenge. Now, we don't want to invite another battle with a large tech organization, so we won't be showing you any of Compass copyrighted materials directly. But with that said, in order to make sure that any examples we come up with are representative, we might have figured out a pretty clever, not to mention nearly undetectable, way of recording the entire exam session. Maybe Jordan could give you guys a run-through of what we could have done to do that at LMG G/F Flowplane.

the check-in process was pretty straightforward. I verified my identity, gave the human Proctor a little tour of the room with my webcam so that they could confirm that I was all by my lonesome and didn't have a stack of A+ study guides just out of frame. Then, once they were satisfied, my crew very quietly slipped some cameras into the space so that you could all watch [Music] this. Yeah, in spite of our editor's best efforts, really solid showing by the way though. Um, that's pretty boring, so why don't we do this a different way? Right out of the gate, I was freaking out. I don't remember the last time I touched an office-style multiloader tray printer like this. My problem with this was the parts you're supposed to talk about could be in either of these locations depending on who makes the printer, which I didn't know because I don't know where those parts are anyway. I was off to a really bad start than I have so many problems with this.

diagram. There's no motherboard in this computer. Also, what is the box in the bottom of the case? That's the box that the not motherboard goes on. I would have thought maybe it's supposed to be a power supply, but there's clearly a power supply up in the top. In fairness to them, this was a pretty fair question, and the potential causes and answers did make sense. It's probably a thermal issue. Okay, this one was actually pretty easy. I thought I struggled with this one. Really? Yeah, error requesting A4 paper. Um, so what I figured was happening is your user is accidentally printing A4 instead of letter, so you just changed the default to letter. I'm going to confess I thought A4 was letter. That's different. Oh, four is metric, letter is Imperial. I almost certainly got this wrong then. Unless you studied their materials and you know what their prescribed order of operations is for diagnosis, you are not going to get this answer correct. No, this is a have you paid for the training materials check. Yeah, I think I did get

it right though, and we should give them some bones. Some of the questions really did test if you know your stuff. That's true, like this one. It wants you to try to figure out how you would get internet to a remote location, the most likely way, and there are valid and more valid answers. I think this is a question where it's you don't have enough information. That's true, 'cause like how remote are we talking? Cellular could be pretty good for remote, but if it's really remote, it's probably going to be satellite. I actually like this question. Okay, a lot of people forget what factors mean in this context. Factors are different things. A factor is something you have, something you are, something you know. Each of those is a factor. So password and pin, those are both something you know, one factor. Password and thumbprint, that's two different factors. Did I get it right? We'll never know. What do you mean we'll never know? I thought you screen recorded the exam. Allegedly doesn't matter. Uh, yeah, no, this is a good question. This is something

people should know what constitutes a redundant internet connection to ensure that the connection doesn't drop. NFC can't show 70 questions in our video; he's not wrong. So while you're over at float plane for Jordan's alleged video, maybe you can check out the extra test commentary. And after that, for now, let's take a break and move on to part two of the exam. Okay, uh, for I think so, but I don't know what it is. You said that it's a little different. Yeah, this time you're going to be talking about operating systems, about security, uh, some software troubleshooting, okay, and the very vague operational procedures. Okay, there was one software troubleshooting thing on the last one, but it didn't tell me what operating system I was using, so that was really confusing. It was for pointer trails, and I was like, where to find that setting is going to vary depending on what OS I'm running, not a version of the OS even. So let's see how this goes. So how do you think he's going to

do in round two. He's not passing it. You underestimate him. He's had the Twitter account hacked three times before. We get to part two of the exam. I was barely even able to take the. She was going to boot you out, man. Dude, she did boot me out. The Proctor wouldn't allow me to take the exam because the aspect ratio of my webcam view wasn't right. And I kept trying to tell her on my interface, There's no black bar. The problem's on your side. And she was like, You need to uncover. You need to uncover. You need to uncover. I'm like, Just tell me what you want to see in the view. This is clearly a software bug on your side. I think I saw what she was talking about because the next time I went on, it briefly showed my 16 by 9 with like a black bar in a square box and then like corrected. And then the next Proctor, no issue. Oh yeah, this was interesting. The like, Can you email good timing for this one? Yeah, a question on identifying.

fishing emails. You could use this a couple of months ago. Yeah, if I had done this test a couple of months prior, I actually probably wouldn't have fallen for that. Yeah, just the refresher never hurts. How can you prevent fishing? Oh, user training, user training. Yeah, back to back on how to prevent fishing attacks. They saw you coming. Any Mac question? I basically went like this. Fair enough. This one made me so mad. They say botnet attack. A botnet attack is not having an infection on your computer that makes you part of a bot swarm. No, a botnet attack is using many to attack a target, which is probably a DS. This is a malware infection. Yeah, you're part of a botnet, probably. Yeah, or maybe it's a crypto miner, which they don't even know about. Actually, they've never touched on crypto on this at all. Interesting. And this is an up-to-date test. This was a flawed question. Anyway, next question. I really liked this question because even though it's super basic, it's the kind of thing you're going to run into all the time. My

facial recognition isn't working. What do I do? And you just guide them through it from the help desk. Yeah, that's fair. All right. Okay. This made me extremely angry. What do you mean by least additional expenses and impact on users? It doesn't even say buy it. It says use it. So, I don't know if they already have it. Why not use a third-party licensed backup software that could be the least additional expense? If I want it done in a good way, I suspect they want an external drive, but it says Tech. Just because you're not putting load on your drive or as much load on your drive, then I don't think they want an external drive because that's not the least additional expense. I said D, but that's not what I would recommend. Good backup if it's not a different device. It really isn't. You know what? You're probably right. The answer probably is external storage because that's technically a backup, and it doesn't say what I'm backing up. Do I have two drives in the system already? I don't know. I don't know enough.

information you're backing up Colin's collections. Central stuff, so you know, so I'm going to need more than just one external storage device, a big one. Can you recall exactly what you were thinking? High data usage on a smartphone that reaches its monthly limit. Customer uses it primarily for calls and SMS. Did they tell you the user lies? I was. We were going the exact same place. That should totally be a response. This is way above your pay grade, both as an entry-level guy. Oh yeah, that's true. You just wouldn't be making this de. This is whatever the hell your boss tells you to do. That's your next step. That's fair. Yeah, you guys got to remember Jordan actually comes from like this space, so I'm speculating a lot of the time. Yeah, no, this is the junior guy does not get to decide this. But hey, I passed baby. With all of that out of the way, now that I've taken and passed the test, what do I feel this is worth other than the shiny penny worth of dead trees and toner? Well

I think that depends on who you're talking about for the average consumer looking to learn about fixing computers. And honestly, it's a hard no from me compared to back in 1996. These days, there are nearly unlimited resources right at the tip of your fingers, all for the low, low price of an internet connection. Hi, it's James with LTDstore.com. You'll be saying LT we every time you use our new Precision driver. Are you getting this, cameraman? And check out this nut driver bit. These nuts are going to love it. Watch this. A regular driver doesn't store bits, but you can fit one, two, three bits in here. And if you go to the site right now within the next 20 minutes, 'cause we don't have all day, we'll give you a good deal and a few seconds of your time here and there. As for on the profession side of things, well, I do question the relevance of actually a lot of the questions. And if I was in charge, I would want to see a lot more questions that

Force the subject to demonstrate real tech problem-solving skills, but with that said, it's not like my sister would have passed the test, and I definitely see the value in having some kind of certification that demonstrates an above-average level of technical knowledge. I mean, put yourself in the shoes of a hiring manager. You're expected to interview candidates for everything from sales to marketing to IT. You can't be expected to be intimately familiar with everything, and A+ and other certifications guarantee at least some baseline level of knowledge, allowing you to focus more on evaluating a candidate's references or cultural fit. So, with that in mind then, if you're a working nerd with a bit of XP but you're looking to pad the old resume, it could help you land the interview, but you should know that your experience and your attitude are probably going to have a bigger impact once you're past that point. Of course, all of this kind of assumes that somebody who has an A+ certification actually knows the material that's covered by the exam. Well, here's the thing, these are my

scores, and while they don't tell you exactly which questions you got wrong or what the correct solutions should have been, they do provide a summary of the subjects that require further study, and uh boy is that ever a list. Now, as I mentioned before, I absolutely disagree with the structure and even expected answers of some of the questions. There were clear cases where they wanted a particular answer, but if you have enough experience, you'll know that you need way more information before you choose that as a solution. But with that said, they obviously think that their approach is representative of your knowledge, so then why are they playing things so loose when it comes to grading? With any amount of study, guys, this was not a hard exam. A passing grade is only around 75%. Would you hire a techie who only knows how to build 3/4 of a computer? Though I guess food handling CTS are no better, and if anything, the stakes pun very much intended are a lot higher. Then leaving one last group of people to talk.

about the ones who already have A+ now. CompTIA, even though they don't offer a discount on retesting if you fail, they do offer a lower cost path to recertification, and it's kind of cool. You only need to renew your highest level comp to assert if you have more than one. But I'd be curious to know how many people out there are regularly renewing their A+ now that it expires after 3 years. The argument for expiry is that it ensures that a technician's skills keep up with the rapid changes in the Information Technology field, and you can renew at a reduced cost with an 8 to 10 hour e-learning course. But guys, I can't help feeling like it's less about keeping people up to date and more about the extra revenue. My test didn't acknowledge Windows 11 than even once, which coincidentally turned 3 years old this month. So, it seems to me that it's the test itself that's having trouble keeping up with rapid changes in the IT field. As for our last last group me well

I guess I'm glad I did it. I'm kind of stoked that I passed. I've heard A+ described as easy and common sense, but I don't mind being an easy, common-sense kind of guy. So, I'm going to enjoy being certified while it lasts, and the last bit is key because now that this video is out, I am sure that they're going to revoke my CT, causing significant harm to my future job prospects. If only there was some other way I could make money, maybe by wearing these shoes from Vessie. But I love my sandals. Vessie is not going to sponsor us if he keeps wearing those sandals, so I'm going to steal them. There must be a reason why Lus is so obsessed with sandals. I got to find out. Maybe they're actually better than Vessie. I spend 20 seconds putting that on, and I just slip right into Vessie, 1 second with ability at all. I give a five-star, but I don't want to show off my ugly toes. Maybe it's waterproof of

course not. You think I'm vessie? How about the look? Vessie strikes again. The ugly sandal are nearly 20% heavier. Mission complete. I replace all of his sandal with vessie. Check out their coret Classics at v.com Linus techtips. Wait, he has more sendos. If you guys liked this video, why not watch me put these skills to the test in a head-to-head tech support challenge against Jake.

I took the #1 Tech Exam and it was BRUTAL

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Evaluating the Worth of CompTIA's A+ Certification

CompTIA's A+ certification is debated as either essential for an IT career or outdated due to the rise of free online learning.

The organization's lucrative model includes over $140 million a year from member dues and certifications, along with selling training materials.

The exam's secrecy has evolved, now using AI and human proctors to monitor candidates in their own controlled environments.

The exam has strict rules, with no aids allowed and constant monitoring by a human proctor.

The narrator finds the check-in process straightforward but struggles with the exam questions and diagrams.

Despite the challenges, they attempt to record the session and provide a clever workaround to capture the exam experience.

The exam included questions on providing internet to remote locations, with valid answers depending on the level of remoteness.

Factors in security, such as passwords and thumbprints, were discussed, highlighting the importance of having different types of factors.

The proctoring experience was challenging, with issues related to the webcam's aspect ratio causing confusion and frustration.

The test covered various topics, including phishing prevention and botnet attacks, with some flawed questions.

User training was emphasized as a key method to prevent phishing attacks.

The test also included basic troubleshooting questions, such as facial recognition issues and high data usage on smartphones, highlighting the challenges faced by entry-level IT personnel.

The Relevance of Computer Repair Certifications

There are now abundant resources for learning computer repair, making certifications less critical than in the past.

The A+ certification can help candidates demonstrate a baseline level of technical knowledge, aiding hiring managers in the interview process.

However, the effectiveness of the certification is questioned, as the exam's structure and grading seem inconsistent with truly assessing a candidate's knowledge and skills.

CompTIA offers a lower-cost path to recertification for the A+ certification, which expires after three years.

The renewal process includes an 8 to 10 hour e-learning course, but the author questions the motive behind the expiry policy.

The author's test did not acknowledge Windows 11, raising concerns about the certification's relevance in keeping up with rapid changes in the IT field.