CCNA, RHCSA and AZ-104 for an IT Support graduate looking to broaden and specialize?
Hello everyone. I am 22 year old comp sci graduate and I work as a technical support assistant, providing 1st and 2nd line support for a relatively small company. I'm looking to stay in this job for a year, no more than 2.
I graduated 2 years ago, worked at Tesco for 8 months, went travelling for 3 months and had been unemployed since (for about 10 months). I don't want this to happen again and I'm incredibly grateful for the job I have but want to be able to broaden my paths in the current market to try and escape IT support as soon as I can.
I'm interested at the moment in the following 3 certs:
AZ-104 (Azure Administrator Associate)
CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate)
RHCSA (Red Hat Certified System Administrator)
I also have a project I'll be working on soon involving azure. Not sure whether taking the cert would enhance that or if a hands on project would be enough for the time being.
Essentially I was just wondering if anyone with any of these certs, or with good knowledge of their prevalence and respect in the current market, could give me some insight as to how useful they would be for my current position, whether there's any sort of overlap or obsolete nature to any of them etc.
In terms of jobs I'm looking to apply to, the cloud industry is my endgame but in this current market I'd take any way to get there. This could be sysadmin, junior network engineer/NOC engineer, straight to cloud engineer, maybe even back in support if I had no other choice.
As a side note, security isn't my specialty or interest whatsoever but I'm interested in hearing opinions on how much security knowledge is needed to pursue networking -> cloud. Would it be worth taking one of the azure security certs down the line? I've heard good things about CompTIA Security+ but it seems almost TOO foundational, but if I'm wrong on that I'd love to hear it.
Sorry for the huge block of text. I never normally use Reddit!