Introductions and suggestions on training

[The-Rat]

Well I wanted to start out by introducing myself and also talk about training options.  This is what lead me, and I suspect many of us to this community in the first place. 

I have been working in IT since I got started my senior year of high school back in late 90's.  I never had much of a mentor, and skipped the route of going to college and went straight into the work force by working at a local mom and pop computer shop.  From those days even, I have been enamored with Linux but it's only been in the past couple years that I've taken that from a slight curiosity to planning my career around it.  Fast forward 15+ years and I have been working at a prominent university for over 11 years and although my full time position is end user facing tech support, I have been working as a junior Linux server admin in a shadowing capacity for a couple years.  Soon there are likely to be a couple position open for full time work as an administrator and I want to make myself ready for one of them.  So, here I am!

I am currently attempting to obtain training paid for by my employer, and am hoping that I'll get them to swing for the standard level of self paced training for a year.  My hope is to get RHCSA and RHCE and maybe another certification around Ansible or some other technology that would apply directly to my work here.  Considering the training is fairly costly, I am not positive that I'll get it and if I do it will probably take a bit of time until it's paid for and ready for me to use.  To that end, I have begun the RHCSA track in Linux academy and am putting time into that.  I've never taken the Red Hat online courses, so I have no way to compare them to Linux Academy but I have been happy with this training site over the years.  I am curious to hear all of your opinions on this as well.  Also, if there are other suggestions that you all have please bring them forward.

Again, I look forward to getting to know all of you and work with you to learn more!

[Lemmons · Accepted solution]

@The-Ratit seems like you're pacing yourself and planning ahead, which is great! It's not feasible for most people on a very short time scale, but in your case I would advise that you practice on an entire learning environment. If you have one or better two pieces of hardware you can replicate all of the objectives of the RHCSA, and most from the RHCE, with moderate effort.

I'm not saying it's easy, but with your level of experience you might just find that you can completely set up all the objectives for the exams on a machine or two and come out ahead! Obviously stick to the Linux Academy course, and try to get the RHCSA training if you can, but the topics that Red Hat lists on the certificate description are exactly accurate, and they're all available through open source software. Good luck!