On-going training is something that anyone in IT needs. IT changes as fast as the clouds come and go! You need to keep up! There are several ways to easily keep your head in the clouds using Microsoft’s resources and social media.
The New Year is here and one of your new year resolutions or opportunities that you have is to take advantage of free training that is provided by Microsoft. It’s time to upgrade, it’s time to improve your skills, yearly performance plans and salary talks are coming. Be prepared! Get educated and get compensated for your knowledge and work! Everyone has some sort of cloud initiative, private, public, hybrid. Time to see what the industry is doing and how you can freely capitalize on that!
Planning your journey
IT is a huge umbrella with many technologies that fall under that. Microsoft is just one vendor, but again with hundreds of different products to choose from. To be effective, plan which path you want to go. Even if you do not write the certification exams, use Microsoft’s Learning site as a map or guide into where you could start and where you could end up.
Learning Site: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/learning/
Training Links:
Advancing your Azure Skills – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/skills/
Microsoft Virtual Academy MVA – https://mva.microsoft.com/
MVA, Windows – https://mva.microsoft.com/product-training/windows
MVA, Azure – https://mva.microsoft.com/product-training/microsoft-azure
If you’re not using Twitter, get it!! Yes it’s another social media app, but let me pitch it to you like this. Facebook, Google+, Instagram, yeah yeah, it’s social media nightmare of a lot of useless information. Let me try this social media program. LinkedIn. Chances are you have an account on of the previously stated sites for your personal use, and also a more professional one on LinkedIn. This is where Twitter can come in.
All major IT companies have their own Twitter tags that they post to and monitor. To stay up to date on say Azure, follow some of the Microsoft MVPs or the Microsoft Product teams such as @Azure, @AzureStack, @Windows, and you can even monitor tags such as #MVPHour, #CanITPro, #Azure. Since we’re not all tied to our phones, I like to have another browser window open to a Twitter aggregator site called http://www.tweetdeck.com. Here I can monitor many tags at the same time and easily tweet something without reaching from my phone.
Happy Learning!
