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The Google IT Support Professional Certificate is one of the most popular entry-level Google Career Certifications to pursue and start a career in the IT industry.
In this review, you’ll learn everything you need to know about this Google Certification. We’ve gone through the lessons and exams and we’ll show you exactly what to expect when you Enroll Now For Free.
You’ll learn how the learning environment works, details about the course contents and exam format, and much more information to help you decide if this is the right Google professional certificate for you.
What is Google IT Support Professional Certificate?
The Google IT Support Professional Certificate will help you build the skills required to get an entry-level IT job. The training program is developed by Google and it’s part of the Google Career Certificates program.
This certificate is suitable for anyone wishing to start a career in IT without having any prior experience or background knowledge.
Upon completion of this course, you’ll have the basic IT skills needed to work as a help desk technician, junior database administrator, IT specialist, and system analyst.
IT support jobs are high in demand with the average annual salary for entry-level IT support professionals being around $50K in the US.
This certification is also approved by the American Council on Education (ACE), which means that you can earn credits toward an IT university degree.
What You’ll Learn?
By completing this Google certification, you’ll learn:
- How to perform day-to-day IT support tasks including building computers from scratch, working with operating systems, and setting up networks.
- How to provide customer support and solve computer-related problems with hardware and software.
- How computers and operating systems work and how to perform basic troubleshooting tasks.
Time Investment and Certification
The time to complete the Google IT Support Professional certificate is six months and it’s 100% online.
To get the Google IT Support professional certificate you need to register for the course, complete all five courses, and pass all graded exams.
How Much Does Google IT Support Professional Certificate Cost?
The total cost to get the Google IT Support certificate is $234. The course is offered by Coursera through the Coursera Plus subscription which costs $39 per month. On average it takes 6 months for students to complete the course and get certified.
Coursera offers a 7-day free trial to review the course material before committing to a paid plan.
Google IT Support Professional Certificate Contents
This certificate includes 5 online courses. Although you can take the courses in any order you want, it is highly recommended to do them in the order specified below.
- Technical Support Fundamentals
- Computer Networking
- Operating Systems
- System Administration
- IT Security
Course 1: Technical Support Fundamentals
The Technical Support Fundamentals course will give you an overview of how the information technology world works. It’s the introductory course for this certificate program and it’s the first course to take if you’re a complete beginner.
By the end of this course, you’ll have a good understanding of how a computer works, how to build a computer using the various components, how to install and administer operating systems, and how networks and the Internet works.
The course material is broken down into 6 weeks. In total, you’ll need to allocate at least 10-15 hours to go through all topics.
Here is a detailed breakdown of all the topics covered in the course.
| Topic | Video Time | Reading Time | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Introduction to IT | 50 minutes | 1 hour |
| Week 2 | Hardware | 1hr 20 minutes | 1.10 hours |
| Week 3 | Operating System | 1hr 10 minutes | 1 hour |
| Week 4 | Networking | 44 minutes | 10 minutes |
| Week 5 | Software | 24 minutes | 10 minutes |
| Week 6 | Troubleshooting | 1hr 10 minutes | 20 minutes |
Each week’s lesson is broken down into small easily digestible chunks of 5-10 minutes each.
At the end of each week, you need to take one or more graded assessments (more on this below) to successfully finish the course and get the certification. In total, you need to pass 9 assessments.
Course 2: Computer Networking
The Computer Network course is the first technical course in the series covering some of the most “difficult” concepts in computing.
Upon completion of this course, you’ll have a very good understanding of how computer networks work. You’ll know how to connect a computer to the Internet and how to troubleshoot connection errors.
Towards the end of the course, you’ll also get an introduction to Cloud computing.
The total time investment for this course is around 10 hours.
| Topic | Video Time | Reading Time | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Introduction to Networking | 46 minutes | 1.11 hours |
| Week 2 | The Network Layer | 1hr 7 minutes | 30 minutes |
| Week 3 | The Transport and Application Layers | 44 minutes | 10 minutes |
| Week 4 | Networking Services | 1hr 10 minutes | 20 minutes |
| Week 5 | Connecting to the Internet | 49 minutes | 50 minutes |
| Week 6 | Troubleshooting and the future of networking | 58 minutes | 30 minutes |
To complete the course, you also have to pass 12 graded assessments.
Course 3: Operating Systems
The third course in your journey to pursue the Google IT Support Professional Certification is the Operating Systems course.
As the name implies, in this course you’ll learn about operating systems. It’s a highly practical course with 13 lab-based assessments.
By the end of this course, you’ll know what an operating system is and how it works. You’ll also learn how to install software (on both Windows and Linux), how to set up users and groups, and perform basic troubleshooting tasks.
In terms of time investment, you’ll need 15 hours to go through the material and another 15 hours (or more) to go through the labs. If you’re a complete beginner to computers, you’ll have to do the labs a couple of times to get them right.
| Topic | Video Time | Reading Time | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Navigating the System | 1hr 33 minutes | 1hr 40 minutes |
| Week 2 | Users and Permissions | 1hr 6 minutes | 40 minutes |
| Week 3 | Package and Software Management | 58 minutes | 2hr 20 minutes |
| Week 4 | Filesystems | 51 minutes | 1hr 30 minutes |
| Week 5 | Process Management | 43 minutes | 1hr 30 minutes |
| Week 6 | Operating Systems in Practice | 52 minutes | 1hr |
Course 4: System Administration
The System Administration and IT Infrastructure Services course will teach you how to perform basic and intermediate system administration tasks. You’ll learn how to maintain reliable computer systems in a multi-user environment. You’ll also go deeper into cloud computing and how cloud infrastructure is maintained.
This is also a highly practical course that is delivered in five weeks instead of six. The last week is dedicated exclusively to a final project related to system administration tasks.
The goal of this project is to demonstrate your skills and ability to solve typical problems that a sysadmin has to deal with in everyday life.
Here is a detailed breakdown of this course’s contents.
| Topic | Video Time | Reading Time | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | What is System Administration | 43 minutes | 1hr |
| Week 2 | Network and Infrastructure Services | 1hr 14 minutes | 1hr |
| Week 3 | Software and Platform Services | 45 minutes | 1hr 55 minutes |
| Week 4 | Directory Services | 1hr 39 minutes | 1hr 50 minutes |
| Week 5 | Data Recovery & Backups | 42 minutes | 30 minutes |
| Week 6 | Final Project | – | – |
Course 5: IT Security
The IT Security: Defense against the digital dark arts course is the last course in the Google IT Support Specialization.
The main focus of this course is IT security and covers a wide variety of security-related concepts like authentication, authorization, and encryption algorithms.
By the end of this course, you’ll have a good understanding of how IT security works and what measures you can take to protect a computer system from security threats and attacks.
Overall, this is a very interesting and useful course since everything you’ll learn can be applied in real-life scenarios.
The time investment required to go through the course material is approximately 12 hours.
| Topic | Video Time | Reading Time | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Understanding Security Threats | 35 minutes | 1hr 10 minutes |
| Week 2 | Cryptology | 1hr 22 minutes | 1hr 30 minutes |
| Week 3 | AAA Security | 54 minutes | 20 minutes |
| Week 4 | Securing Your Networks | 1hr 09 minutes | 1hr 10 minutes |
| Week 5 | Defense in Depth | 44 minutes | 30 minutes |
| Week 6 | Creating a Security Culture | 59 minutes | 1hr 30 minutes |
Google IT Support Professional Certificate Exams
To get certified, besides completing all courses and lessons, you also need to pass all graded exams.
In total there are 54 assignments you’ll have to complete.
Graded assessments come in different forms. Some are simple question-answer format, others are lab-based and some are multiple-choice questions.
You can see below samples of what the exam environment looks like. All exams are taken online without having to go to a dedicated test center.
In case you fail to pass an exam, you can retake it again.
In general, if you study the course material, you’ll have no problem passing an exam. Most of the questions come directly from the course and for others, you need to apply some simple problem-solving techniques to perform a specific task.
How Hard is the Google IT Support Professional Certificate?
The Google IT Support Professional Certificate is not hard to get. It’s an entry-level certification that introduces students to the world of computing. Nevertheless, you’ll need to put in the required effort to finish the certification in a reasonable amount of time (6 months) and pass all the graded assignments.
As explained above, many of the quizzes and assignments are practical and this means that besides the theory, you’ll also need to have the necessary practical skills to successfully carry out all tasks.
Beginners may find some topics like networks and operating systems a bit confusing at the beginning but with practice, everything will start to make sense.
An alternative career to follow if you don’t want to work with hardware and customer support is digital marketing.
Digital marketing is suitable for everyone with basic computer knowledge and can open up new career opportunities with a higher salary compared to IT support specialists.
There are plenty of digital marketing certifications to pursue to get started even if you have no prior experience or marketing knowledge.
Is the Google IT Support Professional Certificate Worth it?
The Google IT Support Professional Certificate is certainly worth it. It will help you build job-ready skills that can open doors for starting a career in the IT industry.
The certificate is offered by Google and recognized in the industry as a valid credential for securing an entry-level job.
In addition, it is approved by ACE (American Council of Education) and can give you up to 12 college credits (the equivalent of 4 degree-level courses), if you decide to continue your education and pursue a Bachelor’s degree.
This certificate also prepares you for the CompTIA A+ certification exams, which is the industry standard certification for IT. So, by passing an additional exam, you’ll have two recognized certifications on your CV.
The cost to get certified is reasonable (less than $300) and the time investment is approx six months (a couple of hours per day) which is also reasonable for a globally recognized accreditation.
Finally, there is high demand for certified IT specialists globally and you should have no problem finding a job. The average salary for entry-level IT jobs is around $50,800 per year which is a good salary to start with.
According to independent student reviews by Indeed, 42% of students said that this certification helped them make more money.
My recommendation is to register for the certificate and take advantage of the 7-day free trial to go through the material and decide if this is the right certification for you.
Other Google Career Certifications
As part of the Google Career program, Google offers four more professional certifications that cover other areas of computing including UX design, coding with python, data analysis, and project management.
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