I received my CompTIA Tech+ certificate today.
CompTIA Tech+ is a foundational IT certification covering a broad range of topics, including hardware, software, networking, databases, cybersecurity, cloud computing and basic programming concepts. For me, taking Tech+ was not about learning IT from scratch. I have been working with PC hardware for around 30 years, and over the years that interest has expanded far beyond individual computers. Today, my homelab consists of around 10 hypervisors running approximately 50 virtual machines. I use it to experiment with technologies such as virtualization, networking, Windows Server, Linux, firewalls, monitoring and other infrastructure technologies.
That made many of the subjects in the Tech+ curriculum familiar territory.
So why take the certification?
One reason was simply to validate the fundamentals. When you have learned technology over many years through work, personal projects and experimentation, your knowledge does not necessarily follow the structure of a certification curriculum. You can have considerable practical experience while still discovering small gaps in areas you rarely encounter.
Studying for Tech+ gave me an opportunity to revisit those fundamentals systematically and refresh topics that I do not use every day. It was also my introduction to the CompTIA certification ecosystem.
Tech+ is intentionally a foundational certification, so I see it primarily as a starting point rather than a destination. It gave me a chance to become familiar with the CompTIA approach, the exam process and the way the objectives are structured before moving further into the certification path.
The next challenge is CompTIA A+.