Roberto - CCNA
My name is Robert Imparato. I was born in La Spezia in May 1977.
After graduating from the scientific secondary school in 1996 and serving the Navy, I had many jobs.
In 1999 I got one of my first jobs in the IT area. It was in an internet shop, where I run a small network of about thirty Windows PCs, and where I got to know the world of Cisco Systems.
In fact, the internet shop had a HDSL and a Cisco 2600 series router. At that time I happened to make for the first time a complex "password recovery" and had the first contact with the networking configurations. Although they were very simple, they were utterly incomprehensible to me.
After that brief experience, in the following 10 years I changed jobs a lot, but networking was always in the back of my mind because I found it very intriguing.
Then about a year ago, when I was working as PC installer, I decided to join the CCNA course. I had found the course and information on the Cisco Networking Academy in Bergamo on the Internet.
The beginning of the course had a very significant impact on me: because of my poor educational background and the difficulty to get back to study after so many years.
To make things worse, after one month of study, my father passed away, adding a new challenge to my life. It was a very hard time. I decided to leave work – I was going through a crisis - and I totally dedicated to the course.
I got to know excellent classmates (who are now my friends), as well as the Academy team, which has always recommended me to concentrate and commit to the study in order to overcome that difficult moment. And so I did: I spent whole days and nights between the online curriculum and Packet Tracer, and I managed to pass the exams of four modules of the course with a very good average. It was certainly beyond my expectations.
A few months after completing the CCNA course, sending resumes paid off as I got employed in a company that provides networking services to one of the biggest Italian banks. It was a “bank branch support services professional” in Milan, where my duties were making diagnosis related to data lines, troubleshooting, managing breakdowns and carrying out VOIP migration. I currently hold a similar position in the Parma area, but I work more with WAN.
Today I am very pleased about the choice that I made and I sometimes I feel nostalgia for the period when I took the course. I got a feeling of satisfaction specially after I overcame the first difficulties (one of them was the subnetting :-)
In my spare time I review the CCNA course materials in order to take the Cisco certification exam, which I hope to take as soon as possible.
Everything was certainly worthwhile!
Thank you, Europa Networking!