SAM Learning IT Basics

scottalanmiller

Currently in the IT industry there is no broadly accepted baseline of knowledge, no standard curriculum of study and no certification or test to establish who has or has not obtained requisite knowledge for entering the field. This is an attempt to create a curriculum and corpus of knowledge that will allow someone interested in IT as a field to teach themselves a standard baseline of information to be prepared to begin work in any IT discipline, to have some understanding of the field and to be prepared for further study in a focus area. This is a living work and will continuously evolve, but will strive to represent a reasonable, vendor-agnostic, industry wide base of knowledge and is suitable for anyone of any age looking to enter the field. It must be noted that this curriculum assumes strong computer literacy and familiarity before beginning.

Computing and IT Basics

Computers, Computer Hardware and Software

Information Technology / Business Infrastructure is a cross-disciplinary field built primarily on top of two other fields: computing and business. IT/BI represents the intersection of these two area and cannot be separated from either. IT without computer and network technology is just "business", and IT without business is just "computers."

So as foundational knowledge, it is necessary before any further discussion to understand what a computer is, some of its history, the parts of a computer, standard terminology and so forth. This knowledge is not itself IT and applies to computer literacy in general and the "bench" field, for example.

The Canadian educational television series Bits & Bytes from 1983 does such an excellent job of explaining and demonstrating core computing concepts that it serves as an excellent fundamental baseline for technological understanding. The concepts presented in the series should be understood by students interested in IT before looking further into the field. And solidly understanding these concepts would resolve many misunderstandings by IT practitioners in the field today.

Networking Basics

Since modern networking was not widely available at the time that the education program Bits & Bytes was created, this one area of computational basics still requires further study. Thankfully this area has been thoroughly and excellently covered by the curriculum of The Computer Technology Industry Association, or CompTIA, in their Network+ certification process. It is recommended for all prospective IT practitioners to study the Network+ material extensively and to understand it before continuing on. Obtaining the Network+ certification itself is not necessary, but this would serve to demonstrate that the knowledge had been retained and would generally be useful in a career down the road.

https://certification.comptia.org/certifications/network

Numerous educational resources around the Network+ are available in the form of books, computer based training, videos and classroom training.

Business Basics

Sadly, it is unreasonably and beyond the potential scope of a curriculum such as this to address the fundamentals of business, finance, accounting, entrepreneurship and economics that would be, and should be, expected of someone entering the IT field. However, countless works on this subject are widely available and existing curriculum exist to address this need so while this is out of scope here, it is also unnecessary.