Brushing up skills after years of unemployment.

[wmcjr]

I hope I'm not redundant over my post. I read through RE: "What course to take?" thread by mariceljm17 and we're quite similar with her situation. I like the answer made by charibel and MacJordan. I just wanted to solicit some advice from forum masters about my situation. Here it goes.

I'm previously employed IT professional for 5 years and had experience over mainframes (CICS, COBOL and IBM backup devices and machine) , mid-range servers(TACL, Tandem) and open systems (SQL, SWIFT, OPICS). Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find same line of job after so many years that I once had so I opted out for non-IT work.

Right now I'm trying to make an assessment on what to do. The first thing I wanted to do was to take a certification exam. I did applied for a job vacancy for a couple of times but I was turned down because of my age. I was also trained to operate in Linux and Unix but I wasn't able to fully use it well.

Here's my certification plan: A+ > Server + > MCP or MCSE. Any suggestions?

Thanks.