2/20/2008 -- Cisco's Networking Academy, the company's collaboration with secondary and post-secondary schools, recently marked its 10-year anniversary with the commonwealth of Virginia. During that time, over 16,000 students have gone through the program, with 3,000 students in Virginia currently in the Academy classroom.

Since its inception, 2,300 Academies have been created in the United States, 8,700 worldwide. There are more than 125,000 students now taking classes in the United States, while worldwide over 2 million students have gone through the program.

More information on the anniversary can be found here.

LPI Now Accepted for HP Certification
LPIC-2, the second level of certification from the Linux Professional Institute, is now being accepted as one of the prerequisites for HP's Accredited System Engineer (ASE) BladeSystem and Proliant ML/DL server certification.

To become LPIC-2-certified, you must pass a total of four vendor-neutral Linux exams -- two to become certified at the first level, and two more to get to the second level. According to LPI, those certified at this level should be able to:

• administer a small to medium-sized site.
• plan, implement, maintain, keep consistent, secure and troubleshot a small, mixed (MS/Linux) network, including a LAN server (samba), Internet gateway (firewall, proxy, mail, news) and Internet server (Web server, FTP server).
• supervise assistants.
• advise management on automation and purchases.

LPIC-2 isn't the only certification that can meet ASE prerequisite requirements; it shares this distinction with other certifications like Novell's Certified Linux Engineer (CLE), Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) and SAIR.

More information on this development can be found here.

Last Chance for PDI+ Discount
Since going live at the beginning of the year, CompTIA's PDI+ certification exam has been available for $199. But after Feb. 29, the price will change to match that of most other CompTIA exams: $232.

To qualify for the introductory price, you must purchase an exam voucher from CompTIA. Further information on the offer can be found here.

Some Monster Career Advice
Monster.com isn't just a massive repository of job listings. Probing around the site, you'll find a great many IT- and career-related articles that are well worth the read. For example, Allan Hoffman, Monster's tech jobs expert, writes regularly about job skills and the IT world. I highly recommend starting with his "Certification Tests: What to Expect."

Another article I highly recommend is Margot Carmichael Lester's "Admins Must Have the Write Stuff." Both of these articles are short and to the point, and the time spent reading them is time well-spent.

Book of the Week: 'The Big Switch'
Nicholas Carr attracted a great deal of attention several years ago when he wrote that (to paraphrase) technology had matured to the point where it can no longer give one company a sustainable competitive advantage over another. In other words, not having the latest technology may serve as a disadvantage, but having it doesn't necessarily give one an advantage.

As difficult as that idea can be to face, Carr's logic is sound. I've been a fan of his writing since then and was delighted when his latest book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, came out earlier this year.

In The Big Switch, Carr goes back in time in search of an analogy for what today's technology is facing, especially as we move from the PC being our primary storage medium to the Web grid housing everything for us (think Salesforce.com). The analogy he finally comes up with is from the turn of the last century, when individual companies stopped producing their own power (steam, water, etc.) and plugged into the electric grid.

The book's 10 chapters do an excellent job of pulling in examples and making what could easily be a dry topic entertaining and meaningful.