Certification

I’m really happy to anounce that another course I’ve created for Pluralsight has gone live in their library today. This one has a wordy title, being Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect: Implement a Workload Management Strategy, and this is a part of the Azure AZ 303 Solutions Architect focused exam path. This year Pluralsight have been putting a very specific focus on creating Microsoft Azure content spificially targetted at helping learners learn exam objectives and pass the exam to achieve a certification, rather than going deep in to skill building of all of the solutions that are covered in an exam. These are being called “certification prep paths”. What this means is that each of the courses in the learning path for Microsoft Azure exams are hyper focused on the specific objectivies for that section of the exam being covered, so while you won’t necessarily get a deep dive of the product or technology in question, you will get the coverage you need if you have the certification in mind. ...

Introduction Towards the end of 2019, I made a decision to aim for a certification in one of the primary public clouds. The decision on which cloud to focus on was relatively simple for me for a couple of reasons: Microsoft certianly seem to be doing awesome things with Azure and it feels like there is a lot of hype around Azure in the circles I travel in, at least more so than GCP or AWS I work for a partner and while not specifically in the team that are delivering public cloud solutions and managed services, we are currently 100% focused on Azure and are a Microsoft triple gold partner. It makes sense for me to skill up in the public cloud that the company I work for is fully invested in I don’t want this to become a discussion around whether certifications are “worth it”, but specically on the second point above, when you work for a partner, almost all vendors still put requirements on partners to have ‘x’ amount of certified staff at different levels to achieve different partner statuses. The reality is, if you are a technical staff member working for a MSP / VAR, you should absolutely expect your employer will want to you become and remain certified with key partner vendors. ...

Last week I sat the VMware Certified Advanced Professional - Data Center Virtualisation Deploy ( VCAP6-DCV Deploy) exam in Auckland and I’m happy to say I passed the exam. I thought I would do a bit of a write up below of my experience. I’ve been reasonably heavily focused in the VMware space for about 2 years now. Prior to that I was a stock standard Windows Sys admin. 2 years ago I was working for a University and I ended up in a role change that saw me take on a bit more in the VMware and storage space, but nothing too advanced. I’ve never had any industry certifications and in 2016 I made it a bit of a personal goal to chase a few down. Towards the middle of the year I decided to pursue the VCP6-DCV certification. Because I was new to the certification track, I had to do the foundations and VCP exams. I passed both in June. From there I was looking at doing a Microsoft Exchange / Office365 certification because I worked a lot in this space at the University, but July was when I changed jobs and my focus shifted. ...