I spend my days in a hands-on IT and hardware role. It's good, grounding work, but it's the floor of where I want to be, not the ceiling. The direction I'm building toward is cloud and network engineering, and the last few months have been less about writing code and more about drawing the map that gets me there.
The first checkpoint is done. This spring I finished my Associate of Applied Science in Cloud Computing at Collin College: a stack of networking, Linux, Python scripting, cloud security, virtualization, and containerization coursework, capped off with IT project management and an advanced cloud concepts block. Twenty-odd courses over four semesters. The degree is in, pending formal conferral. That part feels real now in a way it didn't a year ago.
Where I'm headed
The next target is a bachelor's: WGU's B.S. in Cloud and Network Engineering. I picked the General specialization track over the Cisco one. My background and coursework are cloud-heavy and vendor-neutral, not Cisco-enterprise, and the General track bundles a CompTIA cert stack (A+, Network+, Security+, Cloud+) plus Linux Essentials and ITIL 4. That gives me Security+, which is the baseline credential a lot of federal and contractor roles screen for, and it keeps me off any single vendor's renewal treadmill. The trade I'm accepting is no CCNA line on the resume. For a cloud-leaning path, that's the right trade.
The lever that makes this affordable in time is the Collin-to-WGU Texas articulation agreement. Collin courses passed at a C or higher get auto-accepted for transfer review. The catch I had to learn: WGU is competency-based, so "accepted for review" isn't "applied as credit." A course only counts when it maps to a specific WGU competency. Realistically I'm looking at a chunk of my associate's transferring and the rest of the degree being two focused terms, not four years of starting over.
How I'm sequencing it
The whole strategy is to walk into WGU with as little left to do as possible.
- Summer 2026 — ACE credits. Knock out the remaining general-education gaps (intro IT, stats, a science, a couple others) through self-paced, non-proctored coursework before I ever enroll. A focused few weeks.
- Fall 2026 — quick-win certs. The fast ones first: ITIL 4 Foundation, Linux Essentials, AWS Cloud Practitioner, and finishing CompTIA A+. Each one I hold at enrollment waives the matching WGU course.
- Spring 2027 — the heavy hitters. Network+, then Security+, then Cloud+. These take real study time, so they get their own runway.
- July 2027 — enroll with the load already cut down, aiming for a clean two-term finish.
The logic is simple: WGU's courses are built around these exact exams, so earning the cert ahead of time buys back the course. Front-loading the work is cheaper, in both time and money, than doing it inside the degree.
What's still uncertain
The honest part. None of the transfer math is binding until WGU's official transcript and cert evaluation runs. My projection is a range, not a number, and a few of my weaker associate's courses almost certainly won't carry. Vendor-specific coursework tends to validate what I know without actually cutting my course count. So the plan is sequenced to be resilient to that: get the evaluation first, then only buy the ACE courses and certs I still need, and re-check every transfer table the week before I commit to it, because these lists move.
That's the map. The point of putting it here is the same reason I build anything in public: writing the plan down makes me accountable to it. Next checkpoint is the WGU evaluation. I'll report back when the real numbers land.