The 3 Most Important Skills Tested by CompTIA’s New A+

Employers don’t want robots, they want clever problem solvers who can think creatively in a number of different settings. But how do you prove that you’re a person like that? One approach to consider is the A+ certification from CompTIA. The A+ captures a lot of those hard-to-define soft skills and earning it can prove to an employer that you’re a safe bet.

Build a Strong Foundation With CompTIA Training

If you’re new to IT or need to diversify your existing skillset, CompTIA is a great starting point. Because CompTIA certifications are vendor-neutral, you can broadly apply the knowledge and skills they validate regardless of what products or services your organization uses. 

CBT Nuggets online CompTIA training can help you learn the fundamentals of areas such as networking, security, and the cloud. Once you’ve got the basics down, you can branch out to more specific vendors or specialized career paths. Our CompTIA training will help you build the foundation for a successful IT career.

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What is CompTIA?

CompTIA is a non-profit organization that maintains vendor-agnostic certifications for people in the IT industry to help them prove that they’ve reached a certain level of proficiency and skill. CompTIA has been around long enough (‘born’ in 1982, CompTIA is older than many IT professionals working today!) that they’re trusted not just by employers, but experts in the field who have turned around and joined up with CompTIA to help create tests and guidelines for what makes an IT employee valuable.

CompTIA offers about 14 different certifications, ranging from very basic to very advanced. For example, their introductory certification, IT Fundamentals+, tests you at a very basic level on all the different areas of IT to see if the career field would be a good fit. Meanwhile, the Cloud+ is a vendor-agnostic benchmark for cloud implementation and administration skills. And the CASP+ is an advanced cybersecurity certification that covers professional skills in administering cybersecurity in vendor-agnostic, complex environments.

What Does Vendor-Agnostic Mean for Certifications?

CompTIA’s teams of hundreds of contributors focus on making their tests and certifications vendor-agnostic. That emphasis on vendor-agnostic skills and knowledge is a huge difference between CompTIA and almost all other certification vendors. Most certifications come from companies like Microsoft, Cisco, or AWS – they’re created and issued to people who can prove mastery over one, specific piece of technology or technology stack.

The logic behind that is obvious: if a company relies on the AWS cloud, they want their staff to be trained and certified by AWS so they know there’s no part of its operation that can’t be implemented or fixed if it breaks. But what happens when that AWS-dependent company suddenly needs to use the Google Cloud, or implement an Azure solution?

CompTIA focuses on vendor-agnostic skills and knowledge because the alternative can be too restrictive. If someone spends four months and a hundred hours earning a specialized AWS certification, they’d barely be any better at working with an Azure tool than a brand-new hire. CompTIA focuses on the skills and knowledge that apply to someone who works in a certain position (like network administrator or junior security practitioner) and try to include as many different technologies as possible.

What is the New A+ Certification from CompTIA?

CompTIA’s A+ certification covers 9 basic skills of IT: hardware management, operating system installation and support, software troubleshooting, networking and connections, device and network troubleshooting, basic security concepts, mobile device administration, virtualization & cloud computing, and operational procedures around communication and professionalism.

The A+ is earned by IT professionals early in their careers to prove that they have a mastery of all the basics of working in IT. Whether you’re planning on moving your career into cybersecurity, networking, systems administration, data center planning, or something else, the A+ proves to an employer that you’ve got all your bases covered. Earning the A+ requires passing two exams and in April 2022, CompTIA issued new versions of both. In October 2022, they retired the older versions and 220-1101 (Core 1) and 220-1102 (Core 2) became the only valid exams for earning the A+.

Related: CompTIA A+ Core Series (1101 & 1102): What's New?

What Did CompTIA Change on the New A+?

The fundamentals of the A+ didn’t change very much. The exams still focus on core skills with managing and administering everything from mobile devices to software troubleshooting. But the new A+ exams 220-1101 and 220-1102 place a much greater emphasis on working in a hybrid environment and as a part of a partially work-from-home workforce.

CompTIA updated the A+ to focus on the challenges that arise when a company’s workforce is mostly working from home as well as relying on software as a service applications. Those two tend to go hand-in-hand, since the more people you have working remotely, the more attractive SaaS solutions for coordinating, staying productive, and delivering products become.

This new focus on remote work and SaaS familiarity means the new A+ emphasizes creative problem-solving in fast-moving and dynamic workplaces and on non-traditional networks. And that’s exactly what employers are hungry for.

Employers Rate Critical Thinking as One of the Most Important factors in Hiring

According to a national job outlook survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), 98.5% of employers rate critical thinking as “extremely important” in candidates. A survey of over 650 employers found that 70% of hiring managers called ‘Attention to Detail’ a top concern that was hard to find; ‘Effective Communication’ was at 69%; ‘Critical Thinking’ was at 67%.

Attention to detail, being able to communicate well, and being able to think clearly and effectively – these three factors are frequently placed higher than ‘technology proficiency’ or ‘applicable job skills’ in some employer surveys. That means if you’re in the market for a job or a promotion, finding a way to document and prove your ability to spot problems, think clearly, and communicate well would be a huge advantage.

The A+ Covers Three of the Most Important Skills Employers Want

The skills that CompTIA chose to highlight on the new A+ exams are directly related to those three factors that employers are most eager to find. For example, something the new A+ is focused on is SaaS models and apps as well as recognizing when to escalate issues to providers. There’s no exact right time to stop trying to fix a problem on your end and instead get the SaaS provider involved. But if you can find the sweet spot – before it becomes a waste of time, but after you know it’s not just a simple fix, you’ll save your company time and money. And the process of figuring out the right time to do that doesn’t fit on a checklist – it comes down to thinking critically, communicating effectively and having an eye for detail.

Another additional focus of the new A+ is troubleshooting remotely. IT employees who earn the A+ won’t just be fixing computers of remote workers, they’ll probably be doing it from a remote place themselves. That’s not just technically challenging, it also requires a clear thinker and clear communicator who can avoid frustration and isolate problems quickly. 

As a last example, the new A+ also focuses on changing core technologies like cloud solutions, IoT device security, and data management as well as all the major operating systems. But obviously, there’s no way to anticipate every possible permutation and combination of technologies that a person will ever encounter. So instead, the A+ focuses on IT employees’ ability to think clearly about the technologies they know and solve problems creatively when they’re in a new environment they weren’t explicitly trained for.

All of the changes that CompTIA made to the A+ make it a more useful tool for proving that you’re a critical thinker with an eye for detail who can communicate effectively – three of the most important skills that employers are looking for. And CompTIA made those changes without sacrificing any of the technical expertise or IT skills that have defined the A+ for so long.

Final Thoughts

The A+ is one of the IT industry’s most trusted certifications because it focuses on skills and knowledge that apply in as many situations as possible. IT employees who earn the A+ are technically proficient but also able to think outside the box and solve problems they never could have prepared for. Those soft skills that exist on the edges of technical proficiency are what more and more employers are seeking, and the A+ is how you can prove that you’ve got what it takes. If you’re ready to get started with earning the A+, online training from CBT Nuggets prepares you for the A+ with short videos and lots of opportunities to practice skills in real-world settings.